When my turn came I spoke for ten minutes. I spoke about the love that I felt for my father, about how he had always let me know that I was loved, about how unusual that was for a man of his generation. I wanted, I said, to take the best of him, and pass it on to my own son.
Perhaps I should have spoken about my father’s war record. There were old men there in uniform, comrades-in-arms. But I didn’t know what to say about his time in Korea, didn’t want to think about that version of my father, didn’t want the image of the dead Korean soldier anywhere near me and my memories – much less the beatings.
The chapel was full, far more friends than family, and people listened closely, nodded in recognition as I spoke about his ambition, his honesty, and the oddness of his sense of humour.
I began to tell my father’s favourite joke: a Scotsman, an Englishman and an Irishman; a bee-keeping competition and a television presenter. The joke built slowly towards its obscene punchline; my father would leave the longest of pauses after the feed line: ‘Isn’t that a very small hive for such a large number of bees?’ He would look around the room from face to face, giddy with the anticipation of what was to come, take a theatrical heave on his pipe, start coughing and have to lay it on the table beside him.
I could feel my mother tensing as she recognised the joke, stiff of back in her spare wooden pew, mortified by what I was going to say.
I stopped speaking, sought her eye. My mother looked away, said something to Max.
‘Mum,’ I said aloud.
‘Aye,’ she said, very quietly.
She looked at me very directly then, and for a moment I knew the truth, that losing my father was unbearable to her, that she would give anything not to be sitting here, in front of these people; I could feel for a moment the anxiety and the grief that she buried beneath her implacable surface. Sandwiches at ten fifteen. The catering girl has a key. My father was gone, and with it her world.
The chapel was silent. No one so much as coughed. I tried to send her a thought: This will be OK, Mum. Trust me.
I could see my mother biting back tears. Max leaned into her, put his arm on her back. She nodded, looked down at her hands for a moment, then looked up again and half-smiled. I continued the joke, but cut out before the punchline.
‘My mother and I would like you to join us for coffee and a light lunch after the service. And by the way, and I’m sorry, padre, but …’ I nodded in the minister’s direction, then mouthed the words ‘… Fuck the bees.’
The minister looked discomfited. Here and there people suppressed laughs.
‘You heard me, ladies and gentlemen. Fight the bees.’
It wasn’t funny, but it broke the ice. People laughed far more than the joke deserved. Even my mother laughed a little.
Everyone in the chapel had heard my father tell the bee joke. Even Max. No one ever found it remotely funny, but my father would sit in his smoking chair, his pipe upturned on the occasional table, crying with laughter for minutes on end until eventually you would start laughing too. (‘It’s the bees, you see, son. He just doesn’t care. Fuck them! He just wants to win the competition.’)
I spoke then about regret, about how sorry I was that I had not always shown my father the love that he deserved, about how sorry my wife Millicent was that she could not be there. My voice faltered slightly as I explained that Millicent had been detained by a pressing personal issue; I implied, without lying, that it was medical, said we were all hoping for a positive outcome.
Max, I said, had asked me to talk about fishing. I had many happy memories of fishing with my father, I said, and I would forever miss sitting with a rod and line and talking about not very much. I hoped to create many more memories fishing with my son. I spoke about how fishing linked my father and the family’s past with my son and the family’s future.
It wasn’t strictly true: my father and I had not fished together. But it was a funeral, and it seemed like the right thing to say, and when my voice caught and it seemed for a moment as if I could not go on, I looked up and discovered that people were crying. It contained a truth, of sorts.
The minister asked Max to come to the front, and he stood beside me at the lectern and looked at the expectant faces.
‘Love suffers long and is kind love …’ he read, his voice loud and clear.
He stopped for a moment. ‘Is that slow enough, Dad?’
I bent down beside him, whispered, ‘That’s brilliant, Max. You’re doing brilliantly.’
‘Does not envy love does not …’ he said, ‘… parade itself is not puffed up.’
He turned to me.
‘Dad,’ he whispered, ‘everyone’s looking.’
‘I know, love,’ I whispered. ‘Just look back over the tops of their heads. That way they think you’re looking at them, but you don’t get distracted by their eyes. They’re all on your side. Everyone’s on your side.’
‘OK.’ He turned back towards the ranked pews. ‘Love does not behave rudely love does not seek its own is not … provoked love thinks no evil.’ He paused again. ‘Is that what you mean, Dad?’
‘Yes,’ I whispered, ‘no one can tell.’
‘OK. Does not … rejoice in … in-iqu-ity but … rejoices in the truth bears all things … believes all things hopes all things … end-ures all things.’
My mother was mouthing the words under her breath as Max read them; she was composed now, regal almost. Wasn’t this a passage you normally heard at weddings? Still, it made sense at a funeral.
‘Love never fails but whether … there are … pro-phe-cies … they will fail whether there are tongues … they will cease; whether there is knowledge … it will vanish away.’
We went back to our pew. Someone – an army comrade of my father’s, I think – said, ‘Good boy, Max.’ I wondered if he, too, had suffered from untreated trauma. How many more were there like my father?
We stood to sing the twenty-third psalm. The Lord’s my shepherd, I’ll not want. Max didn’t know the words, but my mother handed him a hymn book turned to the correct page. I thought about school assembly, and laughed inwardly. Our bald head teacher in his black suit and umbrella, his compensatory moustache and his sadistic punishments. He liked to belt seven-year-old boys found snickering during the service. By the age of eight I was a confirmed atheist. The Lord was not my shepherd.
It had been easier to hate our head teacher than my father. My father had not been a sadist. He had not enjoyed hurting me. And he had stopped: he deserved credit for that.
Max sang sweetly, if a little loudly; my mother gave him an approving little smile and patted his hand. Two women in the row behind were singing a descant, high above the main melody. Max looked around, then mimed putting his fingers in his ears. I realised suddenly that I was struggling, that I had started the song too low; I tried to go up an octave, missed several notes, then finally found the key again.
The organ cut out for the third verse, leaving our voices starkly exposed, reflecting back at us from the white-painted stone.
Yea, though I walk through death’s dark vale
Yet will I fear none ill
I don’t know why the tears came then. Perhaps it was the defiance of the words, the idea of a soul, unbearably alone, refusing to be afraid. Perhaps it was the chapel full of people. We were thinking one thought, it seemed to me then.
My father was gone.
I managed to sing as I cried, the other voices bearing me along as I struggled to get the words out. When I looked round my mother was weeping into her cotton handkerchief. I pulled her tightly to me, held Max close with my other arm, forced myself to keep forming the words.
For thou art with me, and thy rod
And staff me comfort still
I felt only the lack of my father. He was gone.
25
When the guests had left my mother drove Max and me to Blackford Hill. We walked up past the observatory, stood looking out at the city below us, none of us saying much. We watche
d handsome women throw plastic balls with fearsome efficiency, saw lurchers and deerhounds launch themselves down the hill in pursuit, tumbling as their teeth made contact with their quarry, giddy with the chase.
Max found a tennis ball in the gorse and offered it to a sun-dazed retriever. The dog nuzzled his hand, sat at his feet panting, eager and exhausted in the heat.
‘Well then, laddie,’ said my mother. ‘Throw it.’
‘Won’t the owner mind?’
‘Throw the ball, son.’
The ball arced high, took a bad bounce and landed again in the gorse at the side of the path. The retriever stood up, looked down the hill after it, then ambled off in another direction, tail high.
The catering girl had tidied up while we were out. My mother set out the rest of my father’s fishing equipment on a bed in the spare room so that Max could choose the pieces that he liked, while she and I sat in the kitchen and ate chocolate cake with silver forks. I offered to stay, but she shook her head, helped herself to another slice of cake.
‘What is it, Mum?’
She waved the question away.
‘Mum?’
‘When your father and I had problems, we overcame them, Alexander.’
‘You did well for yourselves, Mum.’
‘Jesus Christ.’ She said it very quietly, and for a moment I thought I had misheard. But she said it again, and I realised I had not misheard. ‘Jesus Christ, give me strength.’ It was louder this time, half-prayer, half-curse.
‘Alexander,’ she said, with great deliberation, ‘son, where is your wife?’
Had the police broken Millicent yet? Had she confessed to killing the neighbour? You need to know, Alex.
‘Alexander?’ said my mother again. ‘She’s not written for weeks. I know you are having difficulties. You’re not yourself. Neither’s Max. Will you not speak to me about what’s wrong?’
A second breakdown, I thought. My mother knew about the first, because Millicent had told her. (‘Although,’ she had said, ‘it was not technically a breakdown.’) My mother might believe a second breakdown.
‘I can’t really say, Mum.’
My mother poured tea, sat eyeing me sceptically. Then she took a forkful of cake, chewed it slowly, swallowed it carefully down. She dabbed at the edges of her mouth with a napkin. She put the fork on the tablecloth beside her plate, took a sip of tea, and dabbed again at her mouth with the napkin.
‘Whatever may have happened, son, your wife is the glue that holds what’s left of this family together.’
‘I don’t know, Mum. I don’t think I know who she is any more. She has never – never, Mum – taken Max and me to meet her parents. I mean, I know it’s a ten-hour flight, but come on. What does that say to you?’
‘People break with their past for all kinds of reasons, son. Look at your father.’
It was true. I had never met my father’s parents.
‘Alexander,’ said my mother, ‘you know how you were before you met her. You were a wretch. All those English girls, and never content.’
‘I wasn’t a wretch, Mum.’
‘Aye, well.’ A slight tilt of the head. ‘You and your wife make each other happy. I’ve seen it, son.’
‘We don’t, Mum,’ I said as quietly as I could. ‘Not any more.’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘you must see to it that you do.’
Max filled a grey metal tool box with fishing equipment. Then he selected a long canvas bag with two rods in it.
My father had made the rods from tank aerials. He had spent hours in his workshop retooling them, cutting them down, fitting locking joints, binding ceramic eyelets on to the metal with industrial adhesive. They were heavy and old-fashioned, but Max liked them.
While my mother made sandwiches in the kitchen I found a roll of tape in a drawer in the hall. I taped up the side of the envelope that Millicent had addressed to Rose, and as we walked to the station I slipped the card into a post box.
Leave my husband alone.
I rang the custody sergeant from the train corridor and told him I wanted to withdraw the assault charge against Millicent. June rang me shortly after, asked me to reconsider.
‘We need a little more time, Alex.’
‘If you haven’t charged her with murder, you’re going to have to let her go.’
‘We’re not there yet.’
‘Good,’ I said. ‘Because she has nothing to confess. She didn’t do it. It’s a suicide.’
Of course Millicent wouldn’t have confessed. She was no killer. Why had I let them persuade me to press charges? What’s wrong with me? What would I be without Millicent?
‘Alex, don’t you want to know the truth?’
‘It’s bullshit, you know, June,’ I said, ‘using an assault charge to try to get Millicent to confess to murder. I should never have gone with it.’
The line went dead.
I rang Millicent’s lawyer and told her I was dropping charges. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘oh, they really should have rung and told me that by now.’
I told her about the conversation with the detective.
‘Alex,’ she said, ‘you do know that that woman is not your friend? Anyway, Millicent’s basically OK. Or she was last time I checked in. June’s colleagues have been very professional, at least.’
‘Do you think she did it?’ I said. ‘I mean, no one could really believe that, could they?’
‘Alex,’ she said, ‘I’m your wife’s lawyer. You pressed charges against Millicent. That puts you and me on opposite sides of the table. I’m sorry.’
‘Please,’ I said, ‘please, I’m all at sea here.’
‘You did the right thing, Alex.’ She ended the conversation.
Millicent was sleeping when we got home. Max didn’t ask to see her. He went willingly upstairs to bed, and by eleven he was asleep too.
Arla and I ate a tomato salad and shared a pork pie from the delicatessen. Something in Arla’s demeanour told me she knew, that Millicent had told her I had pressed charges.
We made careful, precise smalltalk about things that didn’t matter: we spoke of Israel and of Palestine; we spoke of racism, and homophobia, and we spoke of the Russian Federation; we spoke of the impoverishment of Britain, and we spoke of the national debt. On any other day these subjects would have mattered. But today we made other people’s suffering the subject of our smalltalk. The most important thing was not to disagree.
I spent some time wondering whether I should give my side of the story, explain to Arla how I had come to press charges against her sister. In the end I decided not to. I could read in her eyes exactly what she thought of me.
Then Arla asked me why Millicent and I seemed to have so few friends these days.
‘Do we?’ I said.
‘Yeah, remember your wedding? It was a cumulonimbus of awesome. You guys were stratospherically popular. So question: where are all your friends these days, Alex?’
I explained that life seemed to have become largely about survival since Sarah’s death.
‘Are you saying that’s some sort of trigger, Alex?’ she said.
‘No,’ I said, ‘but it makes you more discerning about your friendship.’
‘So, Millicent has – who, Alex?’
‘Me,’ I said. ‘Millicent has me. And Max.’
‘Sounds like she’s kind of lonely. Max is lonely, which has to be the only reason he hangs out with his aunt. And you have?’
‘Fab5.’
‘About that,’ she said. ‘He came round. Asked me out.’
‘Really?’ I said. ‘Wow.’
‘Hope that won’t be a problem,’ said Arla.
‘No, Arla. No, it’s not a problem.’
‘You know,’ she said, ‘two promiscuous people in a big city, finding each other.’
On any other day that might have stung. But right now it didn’t matter at all. Right now it was smalltalk.
26
Arla went to bed at two. At three I went upstairs
. I found Millicent lying on top of the covers, her fingers curled around Max’s book. He must have put it there before he had gone to bed. What was he trying to achieve?
I tried to pull the book from Millicent’s hand, but her fingers clung to it stiffly and instead she woke. She looked at me, then looked down at the book.
‘Yep,’ she said, ‘well, my son still hates me. Hello, Alex.’
‘Hello, Millicent.’
‘How was it?’
‘How was what?’
Cold disbelief in her eyes. ‘Your father’s funeral, Alex?’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘It was OK.’
She was shaking her head now, her eyes fixed on mine. ‘I guess really I’m asking you about Max, and not whether you thought the funeral was OK.’
‘Max is fine,’ I said. ‘He did well. He read, and it was very moving. I think it helped him. You would have been proud.’
She smiled, and for a moment her coldness lifted. I could take you in my arms, I thought. I could hold you and talk to you about our beautiful son. Then the coldness descended again, and I knew that I could not.
‘Here’s where you ask me about my last two days, Alex.’
‘Millicent,’ I said, ‘Millicent, I’m so sorry.’
‘Really?’ she said. ‘You’re sorry? Not a problem, Alex.’
‘I did a terrible thing.’
At this she looked almost amused.
‘Let me condense the experience for you, Alex. Four main questions. Did I have an affair with the neighbour? Did I have a business relationship with the neighbour? Did I kill the neighbour? Why did I withhold information? To which my answers were, consistently, yes, no, no, and I’m sorry I withheld information, detective, but I did a stupid thing and was scared of what everyone would think. Over and over and over again, till they ran out of time and had to release me.’
‘Millicent, I was out of my mind. I believe you. I know you didn’t kill the neighbour.’
A Line of Blood Page 29