by Tim Parks
It was the funeral march. I turned and there she was. The wooden box was swaying on the shoulders of six coffin-bearers, six men I didn’t know from Adam to carry my mother, who was dead, embalmed against her will, but also conducting the service that brought us all together. I had failed to view her, failed to make up my mind. Indeed, no sooner had the coffin been lowered on its trestles than a dog-collared lady with a breathy voice began reading out Mother’s welcome. ‘The God who has been my shepherd all my life to this day, the Angel who has delivered me from all harm, bless the boys.’ I had failed to understand how I should behave towards my mother’s embalmed body. Over the yellow roses heaped on the polished wood, I saw my children in the front pew on the other side of the nave. My daughter was trying to catch my eye.
Pink and blond, the Reverend Pip or Paddy or Pete now popped up from his seat in the chancel and announced the hymn. Thine be the glory, risen, conquering Son. As in the Claygate Hospice, this incongruous man was there to execute my mother’s wishes, to confirm her version of events 100 per cent. She was in Paradise; she was sitting at God’s right hand. As at the Claygate Hospice, I was electrified in pure opposition, but could do nothing, say nothing, bound and gagged by the person who refused to be grieved.
On our feet now, my brother turned to share my programme. He had contrived to lose his. The hymn was printed over a faded close-up of Mother singing from a hymn sheet. She was singing with us. As the organ launched into the tune, I opened my mouth to sing, but nothing came. I couldn’t. My brother, on the contrary, immediately found a strong, even fruity voice. Endless is the victory, he sang, Thou o’er death hast won. He was enouncing the words with great energy and apparent satisfaction. I opened my mouth again, but again nothing came out. Dad’s tie was choking me. Angels in bright raiment, my brother sang, rolled the stone away. I was surprised by his polished performance. I had expected my brother to remain silent – he had never wanted to come to the funeral, had he? he was a declared atheist – and here he was, projecting his hymn-singing voice like a pro, even vying with the Reverend Pat, who stood immediately above us on the chancel steps, in voluminous robes, his ruddy complexion glowing with complacency. Kept the folded grave clothes where thy body lay, my brother sang. Was it participation, I wondered, moving the programme a little closer for him to read, or irony? He was pronouncing his t’s and d’s with exaggerated emphasis. Or is irony the only participation possible in certain situations? If one isn’t to walk out. Husbands and wives. Doctors exploring anuses. I don’t want to be here, but if I have to, I’ll ironise. Lo! Jesus meets us, my brother sang, risen from the tomb. Was it my impression, or had he really pronounced the b? The hymn was a clutter of crazy archaisms, as the twee church was an agglomeration of tired architectural gestures from centuries before, Norman arches, stone crosses, stained windows. Lovingly He greets us, my brother sang, scatters fear and gloom. Did gloom have a b too? Not a trace of a smile crossed my brother’s chiselled face. I should do as he does, I thought. I should join in and enjoy the awfulness, the awfulness Mother loved. I opened my mouth, but still no sound would come. Then my hand was shaking so much my brother had to raise his, to steady the programme between us. His voice rose even louder: Let the Church with gladness, hymns of triumph sing.
Suddenly I was aware that someone in the crowd behind was watching me, watching intently, observing my posture, spying on my emotional state, my failure to join in the singing. Was that possible? Had Elsa come, without saying a word? Or more likely my wife. Or Charlie even. How had Charlie reacted to David’s waking? Or Mother from her coffin; Mother still willing me to change my mind, reaching for a Triple Word Score. If only, Thomas. Instinctively, I turned towards her. The coffin was huge. She had swelled in death. And over the gleaming wood, in the pew beyond, I once again met my daughter’s steady eyes.
Unsettled, I turned back to the programme. To my left my sister was singing softly and deliberately. It wasn’t in her plans to cry. Beyond her, her husband’s voice was powerful and full of faith. He was so solid. To my right my brother soldiered on. Death hath lost its sting, he sang. Safe through Jordan to thy home above. Then all at once he was struggling. Suddenly, my brother’s voice wavered. It was getting to him. Mother was dead in her box and we were rhyming tomb and gloom.
I pulled myself together. It seemed important that my brother not cave in, not lose his caustic poise. I opened my mouth for the final lines, and this time the words came loud and clear. No more we doubt Thee, I sang, glorious Prince of life. Immediately his voice grew stronger too. We even gave the last refrain some real oomph. Thine be the glory. Endless is the vict’rrry. The ghost of a smile crossed my brother’s lips and we both sat down, exhausted. I needed to go to the bathroom. In my pocket a text buzzed. I had forgotten to turn off the phone.
My brother-in-law now read about Lazarus raised from the dead. In the programme Mother had titled the lesson DO YOU BELIEVE THIS? (John 11, 12–27). ‘Do you believe this?’ the big man boomed. He dropped his voice and smiled. ‘Actually, I should apologise to Mum, our dear Martha, because I’m going to read from the Contemporary English Version. She preferred King James, of course. But I’m not a boffin, and what matters most is understanding.’
So, after all that had been said about obeying Mother’s wishes, I thought, my brother-in-law was doing as he saw fit. He was being himself. As my sister had seen fit to have her embalmed. If you believed strongly enough, you could allow yourself a certain latitude. If your faith was rock-solid, you didn’t need the archaisms. I felt a sniff of envy for my brother-in-law. He had replaced my brother and myself as the legitimate son, the executor of Mother’s will, and I realised that whenever I hear the question, Do you believe?, I automatically answer, No. No, I really don’t.
Do you believe in your love for Elsa?
A man by the name of Lazarus was sick in the village of Bethany. He had two sisters, Mary and Martha. This was the same Mary who later poured perfume on the Lord’s head and wiped his feet with her hair.
How odd, I thought, that Mother was called Martha and I had so recently met a woman called Mary. Had she poured perfume on David’s head, to wake him from his coma? Or wiped his feet with her hair?
The sisters sent a message to the Lord and told him that his good friend Lazarus was sick. When Jesus heard this, he said, ‘His sickness won’t end in death. It will bring glory to God and his Son.’
Glory again. This constant repetition of words with no concrete referent. What could omnipotence care, in the end, what impotence happened to think of it?
Jesus loved Martha and her sister and brother. But he stayed where he was for two more days. Then he said to his disciples, ‘Now we will go back to Judea.’
‘Teacher,’ they said, ‘the people there want to stone you to death! Why do you want to go back?’
This had to be the right question. Why go looking for trouble after you’ve deliberately let slip the chance to say goodbye to your friend?
Jesus answered, ‘Aren’t there twelve hours in each day? If you walk during the day, you will have light from the sun, and you won’t stumble. But if you walk during the night, you will stumble, because you don’t have any light.’
I must have missed a few lines here, trying to fathom what on earth this was about. What did it mean, walking in the light, walking in the dark? Mother is dead, I thought then, and you are trying to work out what day and night have to do with the dangers of being stoned to death. But now I heard my name.
Thomas, whose nickname was ‘Twin,’ said to the other disciples, ‘Come on. Let’s go, so we can die with him.’
Thomas. Mother had chosen a passage with Martha and Thomas. Why was he called twin? Because he was double in some way? My brother leaned to me and whispered. ‘Ever the catastrophist.’
When Jesus got to Bethany, he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb four days. When Martha heard that Jesus had arrived, she went out to meet him. ‘Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not h
ave died. Yet even now I know that God will do anything you ask.’
Jesus told her, ‘Your brother will live again!’
Martha answered, ‘I know that he will be raised to life on the last day, when all the dead are raised.’
Jesus then said, ‘I am the one who raises the dead to life! Everyone who has faith in me will live, even if they die. And everyone who lives because of faith in me will never really die. Do you believe this?’
‘Yes, Lord!’ she replied. ‘I believe that you are Christ, the Son of God. You are the one we hoped would come into the world.’
My brother-in-law stopped. That was it! He closed the book. Just when I had begun to relax and enjoy the story, begun to look forward to the moment where Jesus tells the family to roll away the stone and Martha protests, Lord, he stinketh. I remembered that line from my choirboy days. Though no doubt it would be ‘smells bad’ or something similarly lame in this modern version. ‘I’m not afraid of the dying,’ Mother had said, ‘but cancer just smells so bad.’
‘Do you believe this?’
My brother-in-law raised his head to repeat Mother’s challenge, before returning to his seat. It was obvious she had meant the question for her sons. She had trapped us in church one last time for the final confrontation. Do you believe, Tom? ‘Yes, Lord!’ The affirmation was Martha’s, my mother’s. She imagined the words ringing out as she went to meet her Maker. Meantime, Lazarus would have to live and die again, as David would have to choose between his wife and mistress and suicide. Happy as Larry, I had told my sister in their stinking van. After the funeral, I thought, I must rush to the West Middlesex and confront David. That was the way forward. Neither Edinburgh nor Madrid, but my old friend, David.
Choose Mary, I would tell him.
No, choose Deborah.
We were on our feet for the next hymn. ‘An old favourite,’ the Reverend Pip announced, ‘Just as I am, without one plea. Composed,’ he informed the congregation, ‘in 1835 by Charlotte Elliot, but with a last verse’ – here the Reverend paused and smiled indulgently – ‘with a last verse written by Martha herself.’
Mum was rewriting the hymns. And only now did I realise there was a choir. How had I contrived not to notice? A dozen or so men and women, none under fifty, standing in the stalls, holding their hymnbooks on opened palms.
Just as I am, and waiting not
To rid my soul of one dark blot
To thee, whose blood can cleanse each spot
O Lamb of God, I come, I come.
I was singing together with my brother now. I was smiling at the inanity of it. Perhaps this was the verse I should have used for my address to the European linguists. It was too stupid. And I was wild with frustration. When was I ever going to grieve? To get my teeth into grief? First I had missed the moment beside my mother’s breathless body, then the viewing at the undertaker’s, now even the funeral was to be turned into farce, grief bottled up in rhyming babble because Mother needed to believe there was no cause for grief. Like someone who will not blow their nose because they cannot concede the existence of colds. Grief was thickening in me like catarrh. Even Jesus wept, didn’t he? Wept for Lazarus, before raising him from the dead. Jesus wept. But Mother had stopped her son-in-law before we got to that verse.
Here for a season, then above,
O Lamb of God, I come, I come.
My son, I remembered, had once asked me for a CD by the heavy-metal band Lamb of God, for a birthday present. Burn the Priest, it was called. But now we had arrived at the verse Mother wrote:
Just as I am, old, tired and frail,
To see Thy face beyond the veil,
I climb on still, though steep the hill
O Lamb of God, I come, I come.
I stopped singing and wept. How near, how very near Mother had come to saying the truth. That she was in trouble. That faith was weak and victory lost. But this dangerous truth had to be quarantined in the safe house of dogma and doggerel. My shoulders shook. Mother lived all her life imprisoned in the stanzas of Ancient & Modern. They were the veil that prevented us from meeting face to face.
We sat while my nephew read a poem. One stands and sits like a marionette in church. Up down, up down. Moved by wires. My sister’s son, this was. I couldn’t follow his words. He’s a handsome young man. Blond again. I was aware of the pink face of the priest, watching me with sublime condescension, pitying the breakdown of the unbeliever. I was aware that my nephew read well, but clearly felt a certain embarrassment with what he was reading. Another text message arrived in my pocket. Trustfully treading Your path, my nephew wound up. The only one that leads to life – to You.
Now that I had started weeping, I couldn’t stop. I saw no cause to stop. I wept for Mother and I wept against her. My sister leaned her lips to my ear.
‘Everything will be all right, Tommy,’ she said.
My brother gave no sign of having noticed. He seemed more rigid than ever, frozen in a trance of irony. And as yet another message arrived in my pocket, I thought that my brother and sister had put me in a position where I would have to weep for all three of us. I would have to howl.
‘Dear Martha didn’t want a eulogy,’ the Reverend Pip or Pat began his sermon. ‘But she’s jolly well going to get one.’ He chuckled. ‘She will just have to listen up in heaven and grit her saintly teeth.’
There were titters, from the pews behind. I sobbed.
Since when was ‘listen up’ standard English?
‘It’s understandable,’ the Reverend Pat conceded, ‘that members of Martha’s family will lament her passing, but essentially, for our Christian family, this is a happy day, a day of celebration.’
The man had no idea of the anger he was stirring. I bowed my head, always with the feeling I was being observed. Someone was pitying, criticising, someone who knew I had failed to view my mother’s body, or failed to decide whether to view it. But I had no intention of stopping my tears now. I needed to pee. The Reverend Pete was explaining how Mother helped him with his sermons. ‘“The Lord has laid out so many rich foods,’’ she would tell me. “All you have to do is choose which you are going to serve up each day.”’
I kept my eyes closed, my face in my hands. No doubt this was how Mum felt about guests who came to lunch. What should she serve them? Macaroni cheese, or lamb cutlet, or chicken salad. In the end she had a pretty limited repertoire. And what would I serve up, I suddenly asked myself, if by some miracle they were to let me say a word here, or if I had the courage to vault the pew and wrestle the microphone from Reverend Pip. This is a funeral, I would shout. Mother is dead. That’s how I would begin. Then I would say, Mother was always generous. Which was true. I would say she always remembered birthdays. I would say she never complained if you didn’t phone for a while. Which is a special form of generosity. I would say that when Mother finally learned to stop preaching to her children, it had actually been pretty good to sit down and have a sherry with her or polish off a rhubarb crumble together, very likely discussing the latest follies of the Church of England Synod. Women clergymen, gay bishops. Of course it was Mother who taught me how to lie; it was Mother’s need to believe I was good that taught me all my shiftiness. But I would have spared the good folks that. If my sister and brother-in-law, in league with the Reverend Pete of course, or Puck perhaps, had given me a fraction of the credit they afforded to this son of God, who let a friend die so that He could impress the world by bringing him back to life, I would not have troubled the congregation with my personal gripes on this solemn occasion. I wouldn’t have mentioned Mother’s invariably dismissive opinions of my girlfriends. Or the fact that she thought yoga the work of the devil, and AIDS a scourge from God to prick gay pride. Skip that. We learned to enjoy a few good times together, I would have told the good Christian souls, without insisting on our differences. We learned, almost, to be mother and son. And on her headstone, if she had chosen to have a headstone, I would have put: Her Christmas cards always arrived early.
It was over. My eulogy had more or less matched the Reverend’s in time. I had shut him out. We were jerked to our feet for the last hymn. Tell out my soul, the greatness of the Lord! I wouldn’t even try to sing. Unnumbered blessings give my spirit voice. My brother sang it. I didn’t. Enough irony. Irony is corrosive, of the ironist more than the target. I must tell my brother that. Unnumbered was awful. Irony was a way of living with a situation you really should refuse to live with. Unnumbered inanities. Back to the Trouble and Strife, David would sigh, after discussing mistresses over three or four pints. Back to the Queen of Unreason. I must tell my brother to stop getting through with irony, before the irony gets through him. Proud hearts and stubborn wills are put to flight, he sang. From a proud heart, I thought, from a stubborn will.
Suddenly I took his hand. I switched the programme to my left hand and took my brother’s left in my right. At once he squeezed it with intense warmth. His grip was firm and manly. After a moment I switched the programme back and took my sister’s right hand with my left. She was singing steadily, guardedly. She too seized my hand with great warmth. She too squeezed it, affectionately, immediately. And now it occurred to me I could drop Mother’s programme and take both my brother’s hand and my sister’s, one on each side, all three siblings holding hands in grief. But it was impossible. I couldn’t just let Mother’s programme fall to the floor while we were still singing her last hymn. Tell out, my soul, the greatness of the Lord, to children’s children and for evermore!
It was over. The moment was gone. As we filed out of the pew, the coffin was triumphant under its pile of flowers. Invulnerable. Mother was safe inside. I turned away. Walking down the aisle, I searched the congregation. Who had been watching me? There wasn’t a face I knew. Not Mary or Deborah or Charles. Why on earth would they have come, with all they had on their plate today? Not my wife, or Elsa. Everybody was staring at the one tearful face, the one person who had made an exhibition of himself. I knew none of them. In the drizzle outside the porch I took the phone from my pocket and called my shrink. The screen told me there were four messages. I had only registered receiving three. I ignored them and called Madrid. Not Elsa, but the shrink. The phone rang and rang. People milled around in the drizzle: Ha llamado el número seis ocho cinco … began the answering service. I closed the call and texted: ‘Estoy en dificultades, doctora, necesito consejos inmediatos.’