by J M Gregson
She felt sorry for the clergyman here, as she had done at her last three funerals. He was a portly, balding man who could have modelled as a medieval monk. He would have fitted in better as a figure of fun than as the person in charge of this solemn procedure. He hadn’t known Frank, but he had studied his brief from the family and was emphatically doing his best. The poor man was on a hiding to nothing, in Enid’s view. If he spoke convincingly, people would say he had never known Frank and accuse him of hypocrisy. If he was less effusive about the man whose remains lay in the coffin behind him, he would be accused of shallowness and insensitivity to the grief around him.
Enid listened and tried to recognize in the vicar’s description the man she had known. It was all a little too bland for her, but that was the way with funerals. You remembered the best in people, and that was probably how it should be. There was enough nastiness in the world, so let a man’s life be remembered for half an hour here without bitterness. Good husband and father, good grandfather, ready now to be received into the Kingdom of Heaven, the vicar told them. Amen to that. But there were so few churchgoers among his audience that the vicar had to conclude his prayers with his own ‘Amens’.
Ms Frott tried hard to be charitable. The vicar’s pious account wasn’t describing the man she had known, but this might be just another side of Frank. One man in his life plays many parts, as someone with greater insights than her had remarked. The vicar’s version might well be the Frank Burgess that his family had seen and wanted to remember today. And this was their day, above all. Funerals were for those who were still here and living on, not for the man beneath the flowers in the box. The man who had gone before them and was being welcomed by God, as the vicar kept insisting.
They were into the Lord’s Prayer now, and Enid voiced it with the vigour which would have been appropriate in a genuine believer. The joy of the familiar, she thought, as the words came ringing back to her from her youth, and with them came the vision of the high stone vaults of the church that she had found so awesome and forbidding as a child. It was curious how things you thought you had forgotten and laid aside many years ago came singing back to you at moments like this.
And then ‘Jerusalem’ and they were out into the relief of the open air. Frank Burgess would have liked that last hymn. Frank had known a thing or two about dark, Satanic mills and a thing or two about William Blake. And about the mills of God which ground exceeding small. Enid shook hands with the vicar and thanked him for his efforts, even as she decided that Frank Burgess would have given the clergyman short shrift. Which wouldn’t have been deserved, because the poor man had been doing his best.
She went and conveyed her sympathy to the widow, who looked older, as was inevitable, but elegant and dignified in black. She’d been younger than Frank: fourteen years younger, if Enid remembered right, which she invariably did. That would make her sixty-seven, and wearing well. A small, illogical piece of Enid Frott’s brain resented that.
Other people were giving the widow sympathetic hugs before they moved on to their own conversations and their own cars in the crowded park. Enid decided not to hug. She shook hands with Sharon Burgess and pressed her hand for a couple of seconds. They smiled guardedly at each other and the widow thanked her.
Neither was quite sure of the protocol for widow and former mistress at the conclusion of a funeral service.
Jamie Norris was not pleased with life. His girlfriend had stood him up last night, for the second time in a month.
He wasn’t having that. When you were eighteen, you put up with anything, if you wanted a girl enough. It wasn’t sensible, because it did you no good and you always came off worst in the end. But you hadn’t the sense and the experience to see that, whatever other people told you. You were driven by your urges: you thought about what you had done in bed, and then everything else disappeared into some sort of sexual mist.
But when you were twenty-six and experienced, it was different. You could still be a bit stupid where women were concerned, but you were conscious of the danger. You put up with a certain amount if you really liked a girl, but you knew where to draw the line. And he was drawing the line after last night. Well, he was unless Annie came up with a really good explanation.
He’d been writing a poem for her, too. She’d never know what she’d missed. He’d worked her name into a couple of the lines, to make it personal. The sonnet wasn’t complete, but he thought it would really have been quite good if he’d been allowed to finish it. And it wouldn’t do for another girl later: Annie was quite a difficult name to work into verse, and sonnets weren’t things you could mess about with. ‘With which you could mess about, Jamie,’ his teacher would have said, years ago. He could hear her voice in his head now, silly old bat.
They weren’t especially busy in the supermarket today. Tuesday was a quiet day, and it had been raining earlier. Bigarse would have him, though, if he caught him slacking. Bigarse despised poetry, and Jamie despised Bigarse. It didn’t help that it was Jamie who’d christened him that, and that Bigarse suspected it. He was just looking for an excuse to sack him, and Jamie Norris knew it. He knew also that he hadn’t been here long enough to give himself any protection against instant dismissal.
He stacked his trolley with tins of baked beans, sighed the sigh of a much older man, and trundled towards the shelves. Baked beans always sold steadily and they were on special offer this week. Packs of four tins for £1.30: you couldn’t go far wrong at that price. Beans might mean Heinz, but they also meant back-breaking work re-stacking the shelves, as far as Jamie was concerned. Try making that into an advertising slogan, you copywriters who sold your souls for money.
Jamie Norris thought sometimes that he should try selling his soul for money. But he didn’t seem to be presented with many opportunities for merchandising his soul. And his soul probably wouldn’t be worth very much, as he hadn’t given it much attention lately. He decided that he definitely wouldn’t rework that sonnet entitled ‘Annie Combing her Hair at the Mirror’ for anyone else, because that would be selling his soul, even without money changing hands.
There was a sudden scream from the next aisle, out of his view. Then a woman’s voice shouted in anger, and provoked the repeated screams of a child in tears. He was there in a moment, taking in what was becoming a familiar scene to him, even after only three weeks here. A child who was no more than a toddler had taken a jar out of her mother’s trolley and waved it in her small chubby hand. It had slipped from those weak, unreliable fingers and crashed to pieces on the floor. Jamie shepherded mother and child away from the scene, gave them the routine ‘These things happen’ and went to fetch brush, mop and bucket.
He cleared the glass carefully, mindful of the health and safety briefing he had been given when he got the job, then slopped plenty of hot water and detergent around to make sure he cleaned the floor thoroughly. Too much water, as it turned out. His mop was too soaked to clear up all the water and he had to seal off the end of the aisle whilst he went for a dry one to complete the job.
He was almost back when there was a roared expletive and a bump which set cans shivering on the shelves around him. An impressive descent, in its own way. Jamie Norris found it even more so when he saw who sat splay-footed on the floor with his head in his hands and his back against the coffee jars on the bottom shelves.
Bigarse. And it was that eponymous section of his anatomy which had hit the floor with such a crash. Nothing was broken – well, there wouldn’t be, with upholstery like that to cushion the blow. But a great loss of dignity, and a thunderous expression at the top end to balance the indignity at the bottom. Jamie waved his dry mop apologetically with a sense of impending doom. He strove heroically to control the grin which threatened to spread like warm syrup across his face.
‘Oh dear! Are you hurt, sir?’
‘Of course I’m bloody hurt, you fu— You young idiot!’ Bigarse looked at the rapidly growing ranks of spectators at the end of the aisle and flung out
a demanding arm towards his hapless employee. ‘Help me up, you damned fool! And then try to explain yourself, if you can!’
There were irreverent titters from the children among his audience as he struggled painfully towards the vertical and clutched with a grimace the place which had borne the impact of the unyielding surface beneath him. The mirth was only ineffectively quelled by the adults who held small hands: modern parents do not share the strong disciplinary tastes of their forbears.
The customers’ scarcely concealed amusement did not help Jamie. Bigarse sent him on his way with a torrent of abuse ringing in his ears and an injunction that he should never return. The manager then locked himself in his office to towel down his bruised rear and his bruised ego.
Jamie Norris went back to his bedsit and nursed a sense of grievance far into the evening. Perhaps it was this which prevented him from adding more than two paragraphs to the pages of the novel which had already defied him for almost a year.
At the very moment when the manager of the supermarket was damaging the most notable part of his anatomy, Enid Frott was taking a fateful decision. She had no idea that this had been going to happen. It took her as much by surprise as it did the other person involved.
The reception which followed the funeral service at the crematorium was held at the North Lancashire Golf Club. As was to be expected, the atmosphere was much lighter here than at the crematorium. Too light, Enid thought after a while. There was a buffet ready for the mourners, and most people helped themselves to the attractive selection of sandwiches, savouries and small cakes. They sat with friends, agreed that the earlier ceremony had been conducted with appropriate dignity, commented on the attractiveness of the golf course in the winter sunlight, and relaxed after the seriousness of the earlier part of the day.
People exchanged anecdotes about Frank’s exploits on the golf course, where he had apparently been a competitor who gave little quarter but knew how to relax at the nineteenth hole after the game. To Ms Frott, who knew little of golf, the tales grew quickly boring. She smiled as politely as she could and downed rather more wine than she had intended to consume. She noted Frank Burgess’s name a couple of times on the honours boards on the walls which recorded successes in various tournaments, but the other names there meant nothing to her.
She had meant to keep well away from Frank’s family. That, she was sure, was the tactful policy for an ex-mistress at a funeral. But in an assembly where golf and golfing reminiscence seemed to dominate the conversation, she found herself chatting to two of Frank’s grandchildren, the girl who had read a poem at the crematorium and a boy who was plainly more afflicted by his grandfather’s death than most people in the room. They were both at university, and both felt that they owed much to Frank’s encouragement and support in the last ten years.
‘He was a good man, your granddad,’ said Enid conventionally. She’d had to make herself use that word and she had to work on her face to deliver it properly. She’d never thought of Frank as a grandfather, not even after their affair was over and she knew she wasn’t going to see him again. Unwelcome images of the younger man she had known and of the times they had enjoyed together intruded on her mind now, when she least required them to be there.
As soon as she could, she moved away from these pleasant, vital young people. She couldn’t trust herself to deliver anything but the most anodyne sentiments to them, and that would bore them and irritate her. But, turning away from the increasingly noisy groups of golfing men, she found herself instead with the dead man’s widow. Out of the frying pan into the fire: this unique day seemed to be a time when only second-hand thoughts and clichés were safe.
Sharon Burgess seemed happier than Enid was to be chatting like this. Could she really be as relaxed as she seemed to be, in these circumstances? For a moment, Enid Frott toyed with the idea that Sharon didn’t know about her and Frank. But that was silly. They had both known all about each other when things had come to a head ten years ago. Could she be one of those women who knew that there were other women in her husband’s life but chose not to acknowledge the fact? But then Enid noticed that her conversation was all about the trials and rewards of modern life and that Frank was never mentioned. This woman knew how close her marriage had come to being shattered by the woman with whom she was now making civilized conversation.
Sharon seemed genuinely anxious to know how Enid was coping with retirement and what her life was like now as a woman alone in the world. She drew parallels with her own situation as a widow, but Enid knew she was just being kind. Sharon might have lost a husband, but she still had children and grandchildren to occupy her, stretch her, and occasionally spoil her. Maybe Sharon was just being kind to her in suggesting that their lives had many things in common. That thought was surely more bizarre than anything else which had cropped up on this strangest of days.
They looked up the fairway towards distant figures, swinging stiffly as puppets in the early winter twilight. ‘You’ve never taken up golf,’ said Sharon.
Enid wasn’t sure whether it was a question or a statement. ‘No. I didn’t feel I had the time when I was working. And to be honest, I’ve never seen the point.’
‘Is there a point to any game, unless you’re a professional? Aren’t they just there to give us fun and pass the time?’
‘Frank was a decent player,’ said Enid. She’d ventured at last on to dangerous ground with the mention of that name. She gestured towards the honours boards in mitigation. ‘Are you a good player yourself? Do you enjoy golf?’
Sharon smiled. ‘I don’t play. I had a go at it for a month or two many years ago, but I suppose like you I never really saw the point of it.’ She paused to watch one of the figures on the course make elaborate preparations and then dump a short shot into the bunker beside the eighteenth green. ‘Frank said something to me once about you and golf. He said that if you couldn’t do anything well, you wouldn’t be interested in doing it at all.’
‘I don’t know about that. I’ve never really thought about it.’ Enid gave a short laugh, anxious now to be away from the subject and from the mention of Frank. ‘Have you any plans for the future yourself?’
She’d almost said ‘as a widow’ and that was obviously what she’d meant. Crass of her: she’d never been crass, in her working days.
But Sharon Burgess seemed quite willing to talk about her plans. Perhaps like Enid she wanted to get away from the dangerous subject of Frank. She talked about her bridge and her work with University of the Third Age and how she was helping to run the local library on a voluntary basis to save it from closure during the latest cuts.
‘Do you read much yourself?’ asked Enid.
‘Yes. But like most people, not as much as I intend to do. I’ve always enjoyed reading and books. But I need to be more organized, really. I don’t read half the books I mean to read.’
‘I think we’re all like that,’ said Enid sympathetically.
And then she said something she could not explain to herself when she reviewed it later, as she did many times. ‘I’m thinking of starting a book club. You know the kind of thing. We all read the same book and then talk about it together. Perhaps once a month. Would you be interested in joining?’
THREE
Dick Fosdyke didn’t have many friends in Brunton. His marriage had broken up three years ago, and a lot of the people around here seemed to blame him for that.
It didn’t greatly worry him. He’d always been a bit of a loner, he supposed. He didn’t need many friends, and he would choose them for himself. Most of the people he was close to nowadays were people he had worked with. One or two of them were in London, but most of them were in Manchester. Modern technology meant that he didn’t have to be in the newsroom every day, as he had in the past. In any case, he was freelance now and much more dependent on his own efforts than the team ethic. It wasn’t altogether a bad thing that he didn’t see his colleagues as much as he once had. Journalists tended to drink a lot, and w
hen you are with them you drink too much yourself.
Dick was a cartoonist, and a surprisingly good one. It had surprised him, anyway. He had drawn ever since he was a boy, but he’d never been to art college and never thought that he would make a living from it. He’d been freelance for seven years now, after a dispute with one of the national dailies, and it had worked quite well. He knew who had got him sacked, but so far he hadn’t been able to do much in the way of revenge. But he was a patient man. Freelancing made his financial situation more precarious, but it gave him independence. And money hadn’t been a problem, so far. Dick was versatile. He did sporting and even occasionally music drawings now, but his main work had always been political cartoons. He had a sharp eye for not only the characteristics in a face which could be exaggerated to make it immediately recognizable, but for the contradictory statements from public figures which provided openings for the satirist.
He also selected items from the daily news which offered him opportunities for the lighter humour he underlined with sharp one-liners. His efforts featured increasingly on television when people reviewed the papers and he now had a national reputation for pithy comment on political events. In an era when the reputation of politicians was at an all-time low, people were eager to welcome even the most cynical comments on their leaders, and Fosdyke’s capacity to add humour to acid made his efforts even more welcome. Twice in the last month his work had been cited in the hourly review of the morning papers on Radio Four’s Today programme, when one would have thought that radio was not the natural medium to discuss the work of cartoonists.