He’d married a religious woman, and so, he claimed, he didn’t need God. But he’d found God in sounded words – and I supposed in hers more than any others. His sense of the greater truth of things had found its best moments in music, the artform he trusted: whoever you were, he said, would come out in the voice.
I thought I could hear it now, a melodic line that rose alongside or deeper inside his stated wishes – a question about himself and my mother that he hadn’t been able to answer in Australia. He didn’t want to go back to Whitby. But something was waiting for us there.
28
My father’s last love was the Russian soprano Anna Netrebko. The morning after we walked along the estuary wall at Nambucca Heads, he put on one of her recitals. He was showing off a set of new speakers, and had the volume up. He chose ‘Qui la voce sua soave’ – ‘Here, his sweet voice’ – from Bellini’s last opera, I Puritani. It ended with the imploration, ‘Give me back hope or let me die’. In the moment it was his pathos and autobiography, neither of which he would usually think good reasons for listening to music, or proper points of encounter. He thought the meaning of music lay behind these things, behind the threshold of direct appeals.
But after he played it, he said, ‘Did you listen to me yesterday?’
‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘I did.’
‘Good. Because I’ve told you what I want.’
And yet, as though in the sleeve of the record, there was still something else – a second request, from my mother, that his voice seemed also to carry. The photograph, and how it had for so long stayed in my father’s desk drawer. I had the strongest feeling that he wanted to put it back. But I couldn’t.
We were waiting for Claire to arrive. We talked about the weeks ahead, and what the doctors were telling him. He said he wanted to stay at home, not go up to the hospital, even if the illness got worse. He was feeling well enough to take care of himself.
I suspected he didn’t want to leave his record collection, or his cigars. ‘You should stay at home, then,’ I said. ‘I’m sure you’ll feel better here.’
Claire had finally agreed to visit me in Sydney. She stayed at Dad’s place overnight, and he said I could take his car instead of catching the train; he wasn’t using it. Early the next day, while it was still dark, we stepped into a windy darkness, with sand in the air, and lit up the bends as we wound towards the highway. It was too early to talk. I thought Claire might be sleeping, but when I stopped for fuel she jumped out and said she’d do it. ‘I feel like a stretch. Do you want a coffee?’
‘I’ll get the coffees, you do the fuel,’ I answered.
When we were back on the road, Claire said, ‘Your dad wants me to go over the arrangements for the funeral.’
‘What’s happened?’
‘Nothing. It’s not that.’ She took my coffee to hold. ‘Last night after you went to bed he said there were things he wanted to go over. He thinks you won’t follow his instructions.’
‘He said that?’
‘He thinks you’ve decided to take his ashes to Whitby.’
‘We’d talked about going back. He wanted to. That’s why it’s come up.’
‘I told him you wouldn’t do anything he didn’t ask.’
‘Right.’
I wasn’t sure what to say next, but something held me back from giving her the promise she wanted – assuring her that I would follow his wishes. She waited for a response. But the further we drove the less sure I was.
By the time we reached Sydney the drive had turned into a very long one to Central Station. She was going to get the next service back. It was a mistake to come to Sydney like this.
‘I don’t want you to go back to the farm. Stay a few days.’
Again, she waited for the promise that I wouldn’t ever take his ashes to Whitby. I didn’t say anything.
‘I don’t want to be part of this,’ she said. We were stopped outside the station. ‘I just can’t.’
‘I’m not asking you to go to Whitby,’ I shouted.
She opened the car door. ‘You don’t yell at me,’ she said. She stepped out and slammed the door. ‘Don’t yell at me,’ she repeated, and walked up to the station.
The phone call came at work, during a meeting. I answered my phone in front of the others in the office. It was Dad’s GP. My father had been taken to hospital. Most probably a heart attack. I replied I was four or five hours’ drive away. Would I be there in time? The doctor hesitated. He wasn’t sure; he wasn’t with Dad at the moment.
He said to get to the hospital. That was the main thing now.
He’s dead. Was that what the GP wanted to say? I wanted to reply, Stop him then. Call him back.
I drove and my chest ached – a strange pain, a burning that replaces the warmth that the body has known. The knowledge was there, in that heat, located as a kind of despairing certainty. But also as impossibility – he had died, but that couldn’t be. I drove through the high rock walls that had been carved out for the highway, and there again a wave of knowledge that he was gone, before we could really say anything. Before I could tell him for certain that I’d listened. That I knew there was more to his story and Mum’s.
I phoned ahead, and demanded to know. I upset the nurse who answered. Yes, he’d died shortly after arriving. They’d been trying to reach me on my mobile.
I hadn’t heard the phone. ‘Did he say anything?’ I asked.
‘I’m sorry, no.’ A silence. Then, ‘You should come in. I’ll put the doctor on.’
‘Are you driving?’ the doctor said when he picked up.
‘Yes.’
‘You should pull over.’
‘Okay, I will,’ I said. ‘Is he dead?’
‘Your father died when he got to the hospital. Can you come in?’
I pulled off the freeway. I was shaking. I put the phone down and picked it back up.
‘Can you come in?’ the doctor asked again.
‘Yes, I’m coming,’ I answered at last.
When I got there, I was shown into a room that hummed cold, a room of steel furniture and white panels where he lay.
And then I drove to the house. Only as I pulled into the lane did I realise I was home. I went inside quickly, to check on things, even if there was no reason to.
There were no signs of a fall. There was only the sense that the furniture had been moved and tidied. By Eric, I thought. A cigar box beside the speaker. I opened it and closed it. And next to the cigar box, the letter from Lillie that Dad had said I could read later.
18 May
My dear brother,
I wonder whether you will think it strange of me to write after all this time. It’s not so much for my own sake, but because I think you would want to know. We have had our fights, but I am sure you would be angry with me if I didn’t tell you that I was unwell and that there isn’t much time left. My doctor knows that I have a brother in Australia. He suggested I write to you now.
I have asked you to come before, when you drove me to the airport to catch the flight home. I believed then, as I do now, that there are some things that can only be mended by you coming home. And by that I want to say that I still believe something can be mended. It isn’t too late, because I know you still love her and always did love her.
Bring Ted. Show him where you and Isabel lived and where he was born. Let me see the two of you again.
I am still at the old house. I don’t reply when they write to move me. The nearest place that will have me is Doncaster. I won’t go. I have decided to live out my days here, by the sea. Like you, Theodore. So they’ve given me some care. Angela is a sort of nurse who calls in two or three times each week. Apart from that, I’m alone with my thoughts. Often, I wish I would lose my mind, like some of my friends have.
You will remember what you said, that you would come back if I asked you to. Wr
ite back now and tell me that you’ll be here soon.
Your loving sister,
Lillie
‘He can’t,’ I said out loud.
I wanted him with me, the man I’d followed as he trailed cigar smoke, knowing that I breathed it in.
29
The funeral was held on a cold, blue day in June. The chapel was lined on either wall with sliding glass doors that seemed closed off by the throng of people who couldn’t fit inside. The sun came in over their heads, and lit the front row with the full brightness of a winter afternoon. My father lay before us, his face quieted.
I thought about Dad and Anthony, and the conversations they’d had when Anthony had stayed with us – about the law and the possibility of change. Mostly, the people there knew my father as a lawyer, and in the main that’s how I felt he should be remembered. I explained to the congregation that I’d thought I was going to be a diplomat – and that was why I’d once become interested in the UN and spent a year studying in Copenhagen with students much brighter than I was.
‘When I told this to my father, though, he replied that diplomacy was still an artform practised almost exclusively by the privileged. He wasn’t sure it would suit the grandson of a Yorkshire fisherman. He thought salt water and fish scales were harder to clean off than that.’
There was a murmur of appreciation. I went on, ‘In his study at home, my father built his own wooden bookshelves when we first moved here nearly twenty years ago. Upon them, Dad collected three thousand books and a thousand records. He was a fisherman, yes, but in every sense the fisherman who’d come in from the sea, and was happy on land.’
I spoke a little longer, and then finished the eulogy with a quote from Dag Hammarskjöld, the man whose beliefs my father had shared:
When the sense of the earth unites with the sense of one’s body, one becomes earth of the earth, a plant among plants, an animal born from the soil and fertilising it.
Then I stood to the side of the coffin while the procession of mourners approached. For a moment, I rather resented them. But Claire had left out a wide bowl of frangipani petals for people to place beside him. I thought he would have liked that she’d put them there, and it changed the day and my vague sense of resentment, my hostility towards those who’d come that was really just my hostility to the fact that it was happening at all. I still wasn’t able to look at him, and struggled to contain a feeling that others shouldn’t, either. But after placing their flowers, many pressed a kiss on their fingers and then on his ash-grey temple, and then touched my hand or put their arms around me. I found I wanted them there, after all.
There was a dark comedy to the day, as I suppose there often is at funerals. Some spoke to him. People he didn’t drink with promised to have a round in his honour. Those he’d unpicked from endless boundary disputes promised him a peaceful journey to the hereafter. Women he’d fled promised him that he was about to be reunited with his wife; he was a widower no longer. Miss Weston stood longer than most, but I didn’t hear her speak.
Meanwhile, I tried to stand as still as I could, as though once again watching them pause in front of our house, looking along the line of posts from the beach to the road. A moment of good-willed gossip; an imploration to a lonely man to let go of the past and fall in love again, connect to a woman as a way of reconnecting to the world. I saw that their sadness today was that they had failed. Yes. For no matter where he was buried, he was on his way back, and I still believed in helping him there. He was still mine to help.
Claire caught my eye. She shook her head and smiled. It meant, Don’t listen. She sat at the front row with Eric and her parents. As her mother’s hand rested on her forearm, it seemed Claire’s age had halved, entirely the young daughter again, the world contracted to those afternoons when we came back to Lion’s Head and the days ended on the cusp of the dune, when we’d find each other’s backs to lean against and each other’s hands to hold.
I hadn’t seen her since our argument in Sydney. Outside the chapel, her eyes were bright, but also stern, as they’d so often been since we first met – the girl at the hospital who wanted the stranger sorted out before she let him in. She stayed close to me during the wake, which was held at the funeral home.
‘What are you going to do now?’ she asked later, as we got into Dad’s car together. That was her defence against the sadness of the day, just as it had been in the hospital when we first met.
‘Do you mean, the ashes?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘They said to collect them the next time I’m home.’ Dad hadn’t arranged a plot for the interment. Most of all, I wanted to let her know that I was glad she’d come to the funeral, and that I’d wanted her here for my sake, not just for Dad’s.
‘Can I put some music on?’ I asked.
‘Yes.’
I chose Bellini, and I Puritani, because it was the one opera that Claire liked as much as my father had; it was always at the top of the stack in the car.
‘Did you know this opera was Queen Victoria’s favourite?’ she said.
‘I’m sure Dad did. I hadn’t realised he shared a favourite with her. I must admit I like the idea of them together in some way.’
‘I looked it up on Wikipedia for you.’
‘Are you starting to like opera?’
‘Probably not. But I dislike it less when I know what’s going on.’
Neither of us really knew what was going on. Still, we followed the overture as it took us out of the traffic. The curtain rose to the ocean, and to Pavarotti and Sutherland exchanging familiar blows: ‘A te, o cara’ – ‘To you, dear one’.
‘Do you know how to get through this?’ she asked.
‘I don’t.’
‘You’re the same as your father.’ I thought we were about to start fighting again, but her voice was conciliatory, faint. ‘And you’re still getting over what happened to Anthony.’
‘I’m going to Whitby.’
‘Wait a year,’ she said. But I saw no reason to wait. She went on, ‘You need some time before you decide what to do next.’
‘I can’t. Lillie’s unwell.’
‘Come to the farm for a bit.’
‘Claire.’
She turned away. ‘Alright, I’ll stop.’
She stayed that night with me in Lion’s Head, at the house. I gave her the spare room, while I had mine. For most of the evening we were like housemates. Claire cooked, as though it were her turn. I did the dishes, as though it were mine.
After dinner, I showed her a copy of deeds that lay among a collection of yellowed papers. Dad had brought them from England when we first moved. They showed that he and Lillie had been joint owners of a terrace house in Whitby, and that, upon Dad’s death, Lillie owned the property in full. The other papers revealed that he had made regular payments to Lillie, it seemed both for her living costs and for the upkeep of the house.
In the days before the funeral, I’d phoned to tell her that Dad had died. I also wanted her to know that the contributions would continue, and that Dad had left money for this in the will. I offered to buy a plane ticket so that she could come to the funeral. She couldn’t travel that far. Then I asked whether the amounts Dad had sent were enough to cover her costs. She answered yes, and that she’d write soon.
‘She’ll still be there in a year,’ Claire said.
‘Come with me now,’ I asked.
‘No. I don’t want you to go to England right now.’
‘Come with me,’ I said again.
‘No.’
In the morning, Claire’s dad picked her up and she went back to the farm. I drove to Sydney. She called the next day, and asked whether I was eating properly. Then she offered to come to the city, but I said I was fine. I started the mornings with a croissant and an espresso at the museum, as a way of placing myself in the
world, a table to the side and an open view of the morning. In Sydney, you smell the ocean; in the enclosure of tables you feel the shadow of the trees.
But while I sat in the company of strangers and commuters, my thoughts followed the paths that I’m sure Claire knew they would, to her and my father. Claire was leaving me; I could feel myself pushing her away, and part of me wanted to push harder, so that I wouldn’t have to consider the happiness that might lie on the other side. I could be my father, if I wished, waiting in the study, watching the water.
On my last day at the firm, I followed the gardens down to Farm Cove. It had been one of the places Anthony would come when he needed to get away from art college. He’d stand at the water’s edge. If you were standing on the shore, he said, then you were halfway there. To wherever you wanted to go. Tomorrow you could be in New York. Or Lion’s Head.
The next morning, I headed out of Sydney. It was an awkward drive. I was out of sync with the traffic and the road, and misjudged the distance of the bends as they approached. It began to rain heavily, but the traffic didn’t slow. My thoughts wandered constantly to Claire, as I listened to Bellini like we had on the drive from the funeral. Then I drove past the turnoff to Lion’s Head to the funeral home and collected Dad’s ashes.
I placed the urn on a bookshelf in Dad’s study. A few minutes later, Eric arrived with a letter from Lillie, along with a collection of subscriptions: the Law Society newsletter, a London Review of Books, a new recording of The Magic Flute.
‘Do I keep looking out for all this junk?’ he asked.
‘Yes. I don’t think I’ll cancel them.’
‘I was surprised to see the car,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know you’d be up so soon.’
The Ash Burner Page 17