He groped in his back pocket for two crumpled well-thumbed letters. Penny had invited him to stay, poured out every comfort and support. And he’d utterly rejected her: turned down all her offers of help the week his mother died; refused even to see her before she returned to England. She had gone back almost straight away, as if, deprived of his help and company, she couldn’t survive in alien Paris. He traced the outline of the smudgy Streatham postmark, recalling all she’d told him about her life – more snippets of news in these letters, which he hadn’t even answered. He’d wanted to reply, but somehow couldn’t trust himself to pen her a single word. He scanned the untidy sheets, scrawled in her exuberant hand, each page ending with a lopsided row of kisses. She was begging him to keep in touch, saying she thought of him each day, and that even Pippa had been asking where he was.
Would it really hurt to ring her? There was a pay-phone in the hall. He could at least apologize, make her understand that he hadn’t intended to be cruel. Of course he wouldn’t sleep with her – they didn’t even have to meet – but it seemed heartless to ignore her altogether; leave her thinking he was an ungrateful callous sod.
He took the stairs two at a time, dialled her number, and stood waiting with a clutch of coins. He’d explain his state of shock, the overwhelming need he’d felt to be totally alone. ‘Answer!’ he implored her, as the ringing tone shrilled vainly on and on. Was she merely out at work, or had she dashed off somewhere else – to Kuwait this time, in pursuit of Phil and his Arab girl? Or worse: were she and Phil lying on some bed together indulging in a second lecherous honeymoon, the mistress abandoned in favour of the wife?
He slammed down the receiver, stomped back to his room. This was idiotic – he was overreacting to everything. He flopped down on the bed and closed his eyes, no longer seeing rose-sprigged wallpaper, but peeling paint and burn-holes. Even the smell of the Hotel Manchester was insinuating itself beneath the door: the whiff of musty bedclothes; the dank smell in the bathroom. His hand moved to his flies. His erection was uncomfortable, needed Penny to take care of it. He could feel his penis sliding into her mouth, her warm lips clamping tight; her tongue making frantic little forays, flicking up and down and round.
Suddenly another mouth irrupted into his mind: his mother’s greasy crimsoned lips as she lay in the embalmers’ parlour – lips parted in an unnatural smirk.
He dragged himself up from the bed, now completely limp. It was not a long indulgent soak he needed, but a short sharp walk in the raw October air. He would go on foot to the undertakers’, instead of taking the car; try to clear his head.
He banged the hotel door behind him, turned out of the residential avenue into the first straggle of the town. More strangers on all sides – unreal and wooden people doing extraordinarily ordinary things: buying food or clothes, queuing at the post office, stopping to chat in the street. He kept his own pace brisk, only slowing down to glance in a shop window at a display of expensive leather goods: briefcases and handbags, purses, wallets, belts. He was about to hurry on, then changed his mind and stepped into the shop.
‘May I help you, sir?’
Politely, he declined. The assistant wouldn’t know what he was looking for. She was completely the wrong type – too chic, too overdressed. He hunted through the shelves himself, searching for something restrained and serviceable, but still luxurious enough to compensate for those years and years of thrift. He ignored the price tags, concerned only with the size and shape, the softness of the leather, its suppleness and grain. Many of the styles on show he dismissed out of hand. She wouldn’t want glittery gold fastenings, or fancy decorations on the front, just a simple sturdy handbag which would last a lifetime, never need first-aiding with her cross-stitch.
At last, he found a classic style in an attractive chestnut brown, and a matching zippered purse; took them to the assistant, watched while they were lovingly wrapped in layers and layers of tissue.
He wandered on along the street with the bag beneath his arm. He shouldn’t really give it to her empty – it would only end up stuffed with conkers again. He stopped at the next large chemist, touring the whole shop, selecting various items from the shelves: a tortoiseshell comb, a jar of nourishing cream, a twist-up stick of eau de Cologne. He examined a small red manicure set, wondering whether his mother would regard it as a frippery. He had never bought her anything personal before. It was nearly always books, high-minded tomes related to her work. The last time he’d bought presents, they’d been P-things. Should he pick something out for Penny too – a p–p–powder puff?
Hell! He could no more escape his mistress than his mother. The two women were like different counters in a store – one selling frivolous fancy-goods, the other basic durables. He walked determin edly past the powder puffs, paid for his other purchases and left the shop with his loose change in his hand. There was a phone-box directly opposite, which he had noticed earlier. He crossed the road, and dialled Penny’s number again, jingling the coins impatiently. He hung on a full five minutes, watching luckier couples conversing with each other as they strolled past him arm in arm. Still no reply. Was this another sort of punishment? Because he had snubbed her and neglected her, she had decided to have Phil back, and was sitting over lunch with him – a luxurious, expensive lunch, which would linger on till bedtime.
He was only yards now from the undertakers’. He trailed down to their door, scrutinized the window display: a miniature marble headstone, tastefully engraved, with a vase of artificial lilacs standing stiffly to attention at the back. What flowers should he choose for his mother? Lilacs were out of season, and he had always hated lilies. All he could come up with were Penny’s pieds d’alouette. She’d been charmed by the name – lark’s feet – and had poked a gentle finger into each of the blue flower-heads, expressing her surprise that you could buy them on a market stall. Actually, delphiniums would be right for his mother, if he could only lay his hands on some. D for Dorothy. He had written that name so many times on all those black-edged forms: Dorothy Alice Hughson. It always sounded odd, though – impersonal and cold. Her important name was Mother.
He pushed the heavy door, running through all the other flowers beginning with a D: daffodils, daisies, dahlias, dianthus … None of them would do. They all suggested spring and hope, or at least a warmer season.
‘D for death,’ he murmured, as he stepped into death’s lair.
Chapter Eight
‘Goodbye then, Daniel. It was a great pleasure to meet you.’
Daniel shook the pale plump hand, wishing he could return the vicar’s compliment. Hell! He couldn’t even bring himself to use the fellow’s name. ‘Do call me Basil,’ he had been urged at their first meeting, but ‘Basil’ sounded faintly comic, and anyway Christian names suggested a degree of intimacy which was entirely spurious. At the service half an hour ago, it had been Dorothy this, Dorothy that, as if the vicar was her bosom friend. In fact, they’d never met.
‘Are you going straight back to Paris, or staying over here a while?’
‘I’m booked to leave tomorrow – one-thirty from Heathrow.’
‘Well, have a good flight.’ The vicar pumped his hand again, then strode along the path to his canary-coloured Beetle.
Daniel turned away. It would hardly be a good flight with the memories of the outward journey still chafing in his mind. He had taken an instant dislike to breezy Basil, but the minister his parents had known had recently retired, so the undertakers had come up with this substitute. As far as he could fathom, the choice of vicar for a non-churchgoer’s burial was very much a random thing: whoever happened to be available was roped in to officiate, and some ministers could notch up four a day. Was Basil dashing off to preside at one more matey send-off, Daniel wondered resentfully as the car snorted into raucous yellow life.
Everyone else had left already, save for an old schoolfriend of his mother’s who was standing by the open grave, leaning on her stick. She was the only one he knew by name – the
score of other people who had turned up for the funeral must have all been close to Dorothy, yet were total strangers to him. It made his mother’s life seem still more of a closed book, more cut off from his own. They didn’t even look alike. He had inherited neither her steel-blue eyes nor her tall and angular figure, so that no one ever said, ‘Oh yes, I see a likeness,’ or ‘He’s the image of his mother.’
He approached the white-haired lady at the graveside, offered her a lift. She looked far too frail to cope with unreliable trains or long bus journeys in the dark. Dusk was already falling, a dank and clammy mist beginning to shroud the graves.
‘It’s kind of you, my dear, but my son brought me in the car. He’s over there, waiting to take me home.’
Lucky man, thought Daniel, to possess a real live mother – not to have just consigned her to the ground. The service had been a travesty, conducted in a hideous modern chapel with taped music and purple nylon drapes. The cemetery was modern, too – no ancient spreading yew trees or weeping marble angels, but stark and ugly gravestones in regimented rows. Even the sad plants in the geometric flowerbeds were graded by size and height, and the severely pruned rose bushes looked little more than stumps.
He escorted Mrs Clifford up the path, spoke briefly to her son, feeling a new surge of guilt that he hadn’t organized any funeral tea. Some of the guests had travelled miles, and must have judged him most inhospitable not to have offered them so much as a sandwich. But he couldn’t face prolonging the ordeal, playing dutiful host to a crowd of elderly strangers. And anyway, he could hardly invite them to tea in his hotel room.
He waved off mother and son, then unlocked his car, took the package from the passenger seat and walked back to the grave with it. He surveyed the mass of flowers: huge bouquets more suited to a prima donna; solid cushions of decapitated flower-heads which his mother would have loathed. His own red roses seemed equally inappropriate; that hateful rustling cellophane choking life and colour from the blooms – an ugly see-through coffin in itself.
He shifted several wreaths, so that he could slip his second offering underneath. He unwrapped the layers of tissue first, then slowly ran his fingers across the supple calfskin, sniffing its rich leather smell. Along with the bits and pieces from the chemist, he had wanted to include something of himself, so he had written a long letter; tried to put on paper the things he’d never had the time or courage to say to her in person. He had placed it in the bag with a photo of himself (taken at the age of four on his father’s ancient Kodak), but it still hadn’t seemed enough. He’d been tempted to add a lock of his hair, but that would be too mawkish, and more fitting for a lover than a son. Yet if there’d only been a way to squeeze his soul into one of the zip compartments of the handbag, he would have done so willingly.
He knelt on the wet turf, lowered the bag deep into the hole, then rearranged the flowers on top. He remained on his knees, unhappy at the thought that he had somehow short-changed his mother in failing to provide the proper ritual. If this were an African funeral, he could wail and shriek and tear his clothes, even throw himself on the coffin, beating on it with his hands to wake her from sleep, as mourners did in Zambia. But in undemonstrative England you contained your grief in one flimsy cotton handkerchief.
He yanked out a clump of dandelions which had sprouted on the path, removed a trampled paper bag. He wished he had a remit to clear every speck of litter from this place; to landscape the whole cemetery – replant it with majestic trees, add statues, bronzes, shaded walks. As it was, the plot looked raw and crude, bereft even of its headstone. The polished slab of granite would not be replaced for another six months, to allow time for the ground to settle. Would he have ‘settled’ by then, he wondered, or still be prey to this despair? What upset him most was that once again his parents were together, while he himself was left out in the cold. There was no room for a third coffin, nor even for another grave – the cemetery was full. In another forty years or so, where would he land up? Miles from them, as usual, he supposed.
He got up from his knees, glanced along the rows of tombs, his mother’s silent neighbours. Only the dead in sight now – no one living left; even the birds flying home to roost. The mist was getting thicker, obscuring all the landmarks, blanking out the graves. Yet still he hung on, reluctant to leave his parents, unsure when he’d return. With nobody to tend it, weeds would choke the grave; stray dogs even shit on it. When they’d been processing from the chapel, he had noticed a scruffy mongrel squatting near a tombstone, its body trembling with the strain, its entire attention focused on its bowels. ‘Get out!’ he’d shouted wordlessly as he followed the four pall-bearers, resenting them as well. He would have preferred to carry his mother on his own.
He stretched out his hands, as if to push away the darkness. The trees were semi-bare, the year dying into winter. It was almost November, the furthest point from spring. He paced up and down, up and down, remembering last spring. He’d been in Paris with his mother, yet had hardly managed to see her – so absorbed in his incessant work he’d allowed it to encroach even on his evenings and weekends.
A firework suddenly exploded through the silence: someone celebrating Guy Fawkes in advance. A few more bangs reverberated, like warning shots driving him away. It was time he left, in any case – the grave-diggers must be waiting for him to go. They still had work to do: filling in that hole, tucking up his mother for the night. He had a sudden choking vision of wet and heavy earth falling on her open eyes, damming up her mouth.
He broke into a run towards his car, wrenched it into gear and drove too fast out of the cemetery gates and along the road that led back to his hotel. He approached the crossroads, juddered to a stop. The signpost pointing to the right said ‘Dover, 13 miles’. He was barely any distance from the Channel ferries; could be back in his own flat tonight if he went by boat instead of air. He’d been dreading the thought of the plane journey; the prospect of another night in that anonymous hotel. Yesterday had been bad enough – killing time in the deserted bar, ordering drinks he didn’t want; then driving aimlessly round the side-streets to escape his gloomy thoughts. If he left this evening, he could be back at work tomorrow, sitting in the refuge of his office, catching up on everything he’d missed. And his mother would most certainly approve. He’d spent far too long wallowing in self-pity, fixating almost morbidly on his loss.
He lit a cigarette – the first since lunchtime – inhaled luxuriously, gulping down a lungful of relief. His ordeal was almost over: a brief trip to the hotel to pack his things and pay the bill, a short drive to the coast, and then a strong restorative sea-wind to blast away his grief.
He stood on the top deck, leaning on the rail, waiting for the ferry to pull out. The fog had changed to rain: a cleansing, healing rain which spattered against his face, relieved his deep fatigue. Everything had gone without a hitch: the hotel had waived all charges for tonight; Hertz had agreed to collect the car from Dover, and he’d arrived to find a ferry due to leave in half an hour. An express from Calais would whisk him into the Gare du Nord just before eleven. A taxi to his flat, a nightcap to relax him, and with any luck he’d be in bed by midnight.
A hooter sounded through the darkness, signalling the boat’s departure. Most of the passengers were sheltering from the rain, relaxing in the restaurant or the bars. But he was quite content to commune with the night sky; the brooding clouds above more in keeping with his mood than the noise and glare below. He picked up his case and moved towards the prow of the boat, dodging the large puddles on the deck. He could suddenly see Pippa squatting on that deck – carrot hair and fuchsia-pink shorts – as Penny’s voice came back to him. ‘That’s how she got cystitis. The ferry was delayed, you see, and all the seats were taken, so she spent half the night sitting on the wet wood.’
He stood stock-still a moment, then wheeled abruptly round and dashed back the way he’d come, searching for an exit sign. He had to say goodbye, couldn’t leave for France without knowing how she was
. He’d phone her from the terminal, tell her that he’d tried before, hadn’t simply forgotten her existence. He could always catch the next boat – they went every couple of hours.
He dived towards a flight of steps, half-ran, half-stumbled down them, clunking his case awkwardly behind him. He strode on along the deck and through the door into the lounge, taken aback by the noisy scrum of drinkers jostling round the bar. He tried to squeeze between them, zigzagging his way through the obstacle course of baggage; his own bulky case banging at his side.
‘Watch it, mate!’ snapped a student with a rucksack, trying to protect his overflowing beer-glass.
Daniel cursed him under his breath, shaking lager off his sleeve as he blundered on past another group of students clustered round their camping gear: bedrolls, backpacks, sleeping bags, piled up on the floor. He reached the other side at last, and emerged into a corridor. He sprinted down it, but came to a dead end – a locked door marked ‘NO ENTRY’. He swung back the other way and out on to the deck again, flinching at the shock of cold after the stifling heat inside. How the hell did he get off this boat? It was departing any moment and he’d completely lost his bearings. He peered over the rail to orientate himself – saw the gangplank just below, but already roped off and about to be winched up.
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