Aftershocks

by A. N. Wilson

  —I wondered if you’d . . . whether my idea of the choir coming . . .

  —That would be so wonderful, said Pamela. We should both like that so very much.

  —Derek Marsh could come down and talk to you about music, Pamela. I don’t know what you think of this, but you could choose . . . music that he . . . that Joshie . . . had especially sung . . . Oh, dear, I’m so sorry. I am meant to be here to bring comfort to you.

  Her voice had cracked, and her eyes welled.

  —We have thought, said Charles.

  —We thought of hymns, said Pamela, but not so much of the music. Fauré’s Pie Jesu? You both know so much more about music than I do.

  The silence seemed to acknowledge, and if not to condone, to place behind them, the follies of the previous months. Nellie so respected Pamela for this.

  —I think you should choose the music together, she said. But Derek is very experienced, and he is a wonderful musician, and he adored Josh.

  When she rose to go, she had recovered her composure, and became a chip off the old block. She thought of the professionalism of her dad and of Uncle Lesley. She held both their hands and said the Anima Christi. Then the Lord’s Prayer, in which they joined.

  A week later, she accompanied the choir, Abel, the sacristan, and a couple of the retired clergy who helped out at the Cathedral to the Nicolsons’ large parish church in Kensington. They all drove there in a Macnaughton’s bus. Bob, who was being ‘marvellous’, had been down to see the Nicolsons most days, prayed with them, been with them the previous evening, when they received the boy’s body into the church. (He’d asked if they wanted a requiem after the coffin was laid on the altar steps but they had not wanted this.)

  The Nicolsons were not in church when the Macnaughton’s bus pulled up, but most of the seats, half an hour before the service began, had filled up. It was one of the first post-Quake funerals, and maybe people attended, partly in awestruck horror at the loss of a life so young, partly to touch base, to recognize that the Quake had meant death on an enormous scale. (Altogether, Nellie attended over twenty funerals in the following weeks, on one day alone going to four, two of which she conducted.)

  There’s no doubt they helped all of us, in one way, to recognize the terrible realities which we had lived through. In other ways, they were simply unbearable, a repetition of the inevitable rites, the inevitable clichés and untruisms. Nellie found herself longing for the simple Prayer Book service – perhaps with appropriate adaptations. Instead, most of the funerals she attended were a mishmash of bad poems, read out in choking voices, or of badly constructed ‘memories’ of the dead person. She grew especially tired of a poem by an Edwardian clergyman called Henry Scott Holland:

  Death is nothing at all.

  It does not count

  I have only slipped away into the next room,

  Nothing has happened.

  Everything remains exactly as it was . . .

  It was so palpably and obviously untrue. At all the funerals where it was read out, it was clear that everything did NOT remain exactly as it was. Without the presence of the one they loved, people were desolated. True, time heals the wound of bereavement, but to say that it does not count or that it is nothing at all was simply stupid. Nellie still missed her mum, though it was eight years since she had died; and she knew of her father’s patient loneliness, and the wretchedness of life in that little modern flat where he now lived eating his ready-prepared meals for one, purchased at a supermarket. None of the day to day companionship which the presence of another brought. None of the affection, none of the irritation, none of the sheer physical comfort. Even supposing there was life after death (and Dad surely DID suppose that he and Mum would meet again?) . . . it could not be like slipping away into the next room. For one thing, there is nothing to stop us going into the next room any time we like, and the thing which really enraged Nellie about Canon Scott Holland’s poem was its callousness – it ignored the heartbreak of knowing you couldn’t see the person you loved, couldn’t reach out to them, or hold their hand, or see their smile. Hoping that you would meet in Heaven was not, and could not, be the same thing as believing they had slipped out into the next room. And in her present frame of mind she found it rather hard to hope for anything.

  The formality of Joshie’s funeral, and the music, enabled her to get through the next hour. The choir, in their scarlet cassocks, ruffs and surplices, followed the crucifer into the church. Nellie, wearing her choir robes, sat in the sanctuary with the Cathedral clergy. Bob and the incumbent of the church, a nice clergyman called Timmy Mills, stood beside the shockingly small coffin.

  Charlie and Pamela came in at the very last moment, with Ella and some older people, presumably one set of grandparents. Ella, paper-pale, stared at her brother’s coffin. Pamela was wearing dark glasses. Both Pamela and Charles looked as if they might be on some kind of tranquillizer, they were zonked, stunned. The choir were in wonderful voice. ‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills’; ‘Jerusalem the Golden’; the Pie Jesu; and one verse of a beautiful motet by Johann Christian Bach which Derek had suggested to them. No one, however, had been prepared for the ending. Six of the senior choristers came forward and lifted the coffin on to their shoulders. They turned with such poise and slowness and delicacy that they must have been rehearsing it for days – there was none of that wobble which even professional undertakers usually make, before they get the coffin straight. It appeared that they were going to walk out in silence, because at first, there was no organ music. Pamela, who had now crumpled, and was leaning against Charles’s shoulder, led the way, and they followed immediately behind the coffin. Charles had one hand round her waist, and with the other he held Ella’s hand. The little girl, behind her pallor and her specs, was still impossible to read. And then, when the procession had begun, one of the boy choristers, Jason McCann, suddenly burst forth with Geoffrey Burgon’s solo Nunc Dimittis. Most of us only know it, if we have heard it at all, as the title music for the BBC TV version of Le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Hearing it in church, so surprising, so familiar, so pure in its sound, was both thrilling and almost eerie, for it did seem, as this one child’s unbroken voice filled the church with unaccompanied sound followed by the almost sobbing of organ music, as if the voice had come from Josh himself.

  To be a light – to lighten the Gentiles – and to be the GLORY of thy people Israel.

  —I think that’s JUST RIGHT, Cavan. Just right. We don’t need histrionics at this point. Everything has gone wrong that could go wrong. Troy is destroyed. The city is in ruins. It’s an ex-city. You remember that devastating phrase at the very end of the play spoken by the Chorus – Megalopolis, Apolis – Great City, Non-city – you, the great women of Troy, are all about to be taken into slavery, to be the enforced concubines of your conquerors, and in case that isn’t enough, the Greeks have just taken Andromache’s little son, Astyanax, and killed him, thrown him from the city walls, and here he is, lying dead on his father’s shield. The situation is what speaks here, louder than the words. So – right – go ahead again, please.

  Cavan, who was playing Hecuba, said the unbearably pitiable lines:

  Poor boy, how horribly your own home’s walls, the ramparts of Apollo, crushed your head and ripped the curls your mother doted on: she often used to kiss you, there where blood laughs out between the broken bits of skull . . .

  There was no connection between the gratuitous murder of Astyanax in the old play and the almost capricious accidental nature of Josh Nicolson’s death. But we were all thinking about him, and about the other kids who’d been killed.

  But I’ll set out an answer to the charges

  That I anticipate you’ll make against me.

  When the first rumble of the Quake had occurred, the other St Augustine’s boys, out practising in the nets, had stayed out of doors. He had gone into the pavilion – perhaps to use the lavatory, perhaps in search of some more gloves or another cricket ball. No on
e seemed clear. He was the only person killed when the pavilion came down.

  Two hundred and fifty-three people died in the Quake – remarkably few, given the extent of the devastation, the more or less obliteration of the centre of our city. Thousands of our houses became uninhabitable. Rex Tone’s City Hall came down within seconds of the Quake and the majority of deaths were in this building, though Rex himself was not there. He was in a meeting on the other side of town, but many of his staff – the local planning officers, about twenty-five secretaries and other office workers, cleaners and odd-job people – were killed. The other major area of casualty was in Opportunity One. The name now seemed so grotesquely inappropriate that there were strong moves to give the school its old name, St Michael’s Primary. Twenty children died when a concrete ceiling collapsed and the whole of the first floor fell through to the ground. Had the Year Ones not been on the zoo expedition, the death toll would have been much, much higher.

  Inevitably, though, those of us who were even casually acquainted with the Nicolsons responded to Hecuba as if it was the Nicolsons’ tragedy. Perhaps what gives the piece its wrenching power to move us two thousand four hundred years after it was written is precisely the fact that it individualizes the general devastation. And, as Nellie had said to us before the first read-through, this play is so unlike most Greek tragedies. It is not about weird people, such as Phaedra or Medea or Oedipus or Ajax or Philoctetes. It is about essentially normal people. And it isn’t about heroes. It is about women. And most of the main characters, except the Greek herald, who comes and goes to tell them what hideous punishment has been assigned to each, and Menelaus, are female.

  It had been Nellie’s idea to approach Cavan and ask her to consider playing Hecuba, the most demanding role in the play, who is on stage throughout.

  One of the good things to come out of the Quake – and there have not been many good things to date – is that all sorts of initiatives were formed to bring us together. In the vast warehouse spaces on the Carmichael Highway, two and a half miles out of town, the Aberdeen Choral Society, accompanied by the Philharmonic, put on a concert just a week after the major Quake. They did a rerun of Haydn’s Creation which they had performed in happier days, only two months before at the Albert Hall. There was a big aftershock which trembled through the entire warehouse while they sang The Heavens are telling . . . It was remarkable that, although some people called out swear words – Holy shit and the like – everyone stayed in place. No one ran. It was as if we were all determined to sit it out, to defy the fates and whatever calamity they decided to throw at us.

  Since that first brave concert, there have been performances of one sort or another almost every week in Aberdeen since the disaster. Brass bands and silver bands have played at the many spots in town where food banks and temporary shelters have been set up. Schools have staged revivals of old standbys such as Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat and The Wizard of Oz. The Aberdeen G and S society had a two-week run of Ruddigore, which was wildly successful, attracting far bigger audiences than they ever did in the opera house.

  Nellie suggested the idea of doing Trojan Women to me in the hospital, in the week that Mum turned the corner and we all knew there was, after all, going to be a future. I’d been in the hospital day and night, sitting by Mum’s bed. Because Cavan Cliffe is not just my mum but an Aberdeen Institution, there had been a lot of media attention. Of all the two hundred and fifty-three deaths, the TV news and The Press had concentrated, in too much detail, on the deaths of the kids, and on Mum’s ten hours trapped under the rubble of the Island Radio building. Her remark to the fireman who eventually, with immense skill, lifted the iron girder and concrete slab beneath which she lay passed into Aberdeen legend – ‘Mine’s no milk, but make it strong’. People even had it printed on tee-shirts. That’s how legends are made. Actually, the very first thing she said to the firemen was, ‘I’d kill for a ciggy’, but such is the mania against smoking nowadays that you’d probably be prosecuted for printing that on a tee-shirt. She had eventually said the thing about coffee, but it was smoking that was the first thing on her mind – and the fireman had, in fact, got a pack of fags in his pocket and shared one with Cavan.

  As they lifted her on to a stretcher, she had winced, but not cried out. It was Mum all over, of course, to give an example of simple, unshowy heroism. It made it harder for me, having to cope with all the publicity. Journalists and photographers were banned from the wards, but they were waiting for me every time I stepped out into the car park. And because I am, not well known, but an actress who has appeared on the stage of the Garrick, they felt justified in accosting me all the time, asking for pictures and so on. It was hard. I did not want to share with them all the distressing details of her injuries, especially when it really looked as if we were going to lose her.

  Nellie, who had been in hospital for so much shorter a time with the broken arm, was soon up and running, as Mum put it. She returned often to the hospital to visit the wounded, and to offer comfort to the bereaved.

  Cavan was hoping to learn to walk with the prosthetic leg, but it was going to take a long time. While we were rehearsing, we all agreed it was totally appropriate for Hecuba, the mother of Troy, to be in a wheelchair. Nellie said there were some lines in which Hecuba threw herself on the ground, but we could rewrite or omit these. No one was surprised that Cavan, almost from the time she came out of hospital, had learnt to manipulate the chariot with particular vim. Her rower’s arms and shoulders saw to that. There was an electronic device which put her on automatic, but more often than not, she resorted to manual, turning her chair this way and that with conversational jolts and confrontational energy. A jolly Boudicca, usually with smoke coming out of her nostrils. She was so full of life, and so happy to be alive, that I think these weeks were ones of happiness for her, even though none of us could be completely happy; felt, indeed, that with some parts of ourselves, we would never be completely happy again. Happiness seemed a cheap need, one which, for the time being, it was more tasteful to be without.

  It’s difficult, knowing how to frame this narrative. I’m not tricksing you, people, really! It is just hard to know how to tell the story I want to tell, without too many extraneous details. As I said at the beginning, we are all post-Quake and post-just-about-everything-else here in Aberdeen. The things which I think are important – in the story of the city, in my own personal story – are much clearer to me now, eight years – my God, eight years, it is unbelievable! – after the Quake, than they were at the time.

  Anyhow, back to the rehearsal. We were rehearsing in St Luke’s Church Hall, near us in Harrow. Mum was home now, after a couple of months in the Rutherford Orthopaedic, learning to use the prosthetic leg, and so on. She was even going in once a week to compere Island Breakfast and life was – not going back to normal, it felt like it was never going to do that – but developing its own level, its own routines and momentum. And, obviously, although she said she was fine, did not need help, bla bla bla, she definitely needed me. Those weeks, when I helped her into bed at night, and made hot milk, were truly beautiful. Her bedtimes felt like my bedtimes as a kid, and we, who had always been close, drew closer. The hot chocolate now had whisky poured into it, but otherwise the routines were remarkably similar, ending always with a lovely hug. We were all just so inexpressibly grateful for being alive, all the more because it was Love among the Ruins.

  The rehearsals lasted a bit over an hour. Nellie was fantastic, a natural as a theatre director. But each rehearsal also felt like the most instructive seminar. We were all really coming to grips with the play. When we’d done the scene with dead Astyanax on the shield, we all broke up for the evening. It was during the next rehearsal, with just me, Mum and a professional actor called Lewis Compton, that the Moment occurred.

  Lewis was playing Menelaus, the wronged husband of Helen – that was me. As everybody in the world knows, the Trojan War started because I left my husband, Menelaus, and
ran off to Troy with Paris – known by his other name as Alexander in this play. After many a long year, Troy has been defeated by the Greeks. Menelaus comes to claim his bride back. He is so angry that he intends to have me put to death. Ritually, of course. My big scene is the one where I plead for my life. It was not my fault I ran off with Alexander. It woz the gods wot done it. Love could not be resisted, because Aphrodite the Goddess of Love put it into Alexander’s mind to carry me off, and into my mind to yield to him. But the minute he had been killed and Troy was destroyed, I’d tried to go back to the Greeks and to my lawful husband, honest. And Hecuba, meanwhile, is going, like, Menelaus, don’t believe this hussy, she’s no better than she oughta be.

  Anyhow, it’s a great scene and a fantastic part. Hecuba warns Menelaus not to take me back to Greece on the same ship as himself. Why not? he asks. Because she’ll seduce you on the way home, and then you won’t have the heart to sacrifice her, is Hecuba’s callous reply. ‘Once a lover, always a lover.’ It’s one of the passages which make people think Euripides was a complete atheist, ’cause Hecuba says all that stuff about me being in the grip of Aphrodite is a load of total horseshit and there’s no such person as Aphrodite, I’m just a slag – but Euripides puts it much better than that, you won’t be surprised to hear.

  The way Nellie was staging the scene was this. Hecuba, in her wheelchair, with her prosthetic leg sticking out like a walking stick (she was always forgetting to bend its artificial knee!), was dead centre stage. Menelaus was front-stage left, not with his back to the audience, but with one shoulder turned in that direction, so you had this sense of him really staring at the furious Hecuba. And then I’m a bit back-stage right, cowering, terrified by both of them, but I come forward as I make the very long speech in my defence. I’m the only woman who is decently dressed, by the way. Hecuba, the former Queen of Troy, is in rags, preparing to be a maid to Odysseus, and I’m in this, like, really swanky Greek dress.