‘Elizabeth … Duerden,’ he said, ‘has brought us together here today by virtue of the fact that she has recently died. I need not tell you that the death of someone we love, or even the death of any human being, is the most serious and important event with which this life can confront us. I want for a short time, if I may, to look into this business of death, to suggest a little of what it is, and of what it is not. I believe that the loss which her … family has suffered is not absolute, that that thing exists which we so frequently name and seek and offer, so rarely define and obtain and give, that there is consolation, if only we know where to look for it. Where, then, are we to look?’
By now the man sounded as if he had been going on for hours and had more hours ahead of him. Some of the thickness, however, had left his voice when he continued: ‘In another age than ours, we should find it natural to look in the first place to the thought that to be separated from the ones we love by the death of the body is not final. We should derive our consolation from knowing that no parting is for ever, that all losses will, in God’s good time, be restored. But that would hardly do today, would it, thinking along those lines? It wouldn’t do much for most of us today.’
Something so close to vigour had entered the speaker’s tone in the last couple of sentences that they were like an interruption, from which he himself took a moment to recover. Then he went on as thickly as ever: ‘But God’s mercy has seen to it that we need not depend for our consolation upon any such belief. We find this out as soon as we can put aside something of our agony and shock and begin to ask ourselves what has happened. What has happened is manifestly that somebody has been taken from us and nothing will ever be the same again. But what has not happened? That person has not been eradicated from our hearts and minds, that person’s life has not been cancelled out like a row of figures in a sum, that person’s identity is not lost, and can never be lost … Elizabeth Duerden lives in those who knew her and loved her. The fact that she lived, and was Elizabeth Duerden and no one else, had a profound effect upon a number of people, a considerable effect upon many more people, a slight but never imperceptible effect upon innumerable people. There is nobody, there never has been anybody, of whom it can be said that the world would have been the same if they had never lived.’
He can string words together, Alec thought. Or whoever had written the stuff could. He looked round the church, anxious to impress on his memory this part, at least, of today. But it was a modern building, thirty years old at the most, with bright stained glass, a tiled floor, and woodwork that reminded him of the dining-room suites he saw in suburban shop windows: none of the air of antiquity that had always appealed to Betty.
The Gioberti family occupied the pew in front. The farthest away from him was Annette Gioberti, who turned her head now and gave him a faint smile. The bearer of this exotic name looked like a soberly but becomingly dressed English housewife in her middle thirties, which, as the daughter of Jim and Betty, was much what might have been expected of her. Jim had been against the marriage at first, saying among other things that, while he had no objection to Italians or half-Italians as such, he did not fancy having his grandchildren brought up as Roman Catholics. But Betty had soon laughed him out of that by asking him when he had last had anything to do with the Church of England, and had added that Frank Gioberti was a decent, hard-working lad who was obviously going to do everything in his power to make Annette happy – what more could they ask?
Alec had never known Betty to err in her judgements of people, and in this case she had turned out to be almost too literally accurate. From what she told Alec, whose direct contacts with the Giobertis were rare, there was plenty of money around in that household, and no shortage of affection, especially if you counted the more obvious kind of show of it – expensive presents on anniversaries as well as birthdays, and bunches of flowers being delivered unexpectedly. But as regards the finer things of life (Alec always wanted to smile at this favourite phrase of Betty’s, so characteristic of her in its naïve sincerity) there was a complete gap: no books apart from trashy thrillers, no music except what the wireless and gramophone churned out, and no pictures at all; in fact Betty had given them a Medici print of a medieval Virgin and Child one Christmas, thinking it would appeal to Frank, and had come across it months later in a drawer in one of the children’s bedrooms.
The part of Frank that could be seen above the back of the pew seemed to Alec to offer a good deal of information. The thick black hair was heavily greased; the neck bulged in a way that promised a roll of fat there in due course; the snowily white shirt-collar and the charcoal-grey suit material did somehow or other manage to suggest, not lack of taste exactly, but the attitude that money was more interesting. Still, one had to be tolerant. A man who owned however many laundries it was in the Deptford area could hardly be expected to have the time or the inclination to take up the French horn. It was only the children who might be the losers, especially since, in a materialistic age like the present one, the parent had a special responsibility for suggesting that there were some worthwhile things which nobody could be seen eating or drinking or smoking or wearing or driving or washing dishes in on TV commercials. And then people wondered why there was all this …
Alec pulled himself physically upright in his seat. It was almost frightening, the way the mind could so easily follow its well-worn tracks, even at times of unique stress. Habit again: nature’s protection. He turned cold at the thought that today might pass him by altogether, that he might in some way miss experiencing it or beginning to understand it. The most abject and revealing loss of composure would be better than that. He started doing what he could never have predicted: trying to feel. ‘A human being,’ the clergyman was saying, ‘is the sum of many qualities, and it is from what we see of these that we form our ideas of what everything in life is, of what life itself is.’ No help there. Alec glanced over to the front pew across the aisle, where Jim and Bob sat together. With the Giobertis, this was all the family there was. Jim’s brother, who had emigrated to Canada getting on for thirty years ago, had not received Jim’s cable, or had not answered it, and it was now nearly twenty years – yes, twenty next April – since young Charlie, Annette’s brother, had been killed in a motor-cycle accident in Alexandria, three weeks after getting his commission in the Royal Armoured Corps. Well, he had been spared all this.
Jim’s face, half-turned towards the clergyman, looked quite relaxed, and he had seemed so in the brief moment at the church door when Alec had just had time to grasp his hand and murmur a few words, though his movements and reactions had been a little slower than usual. It had been the same, Alec remembered, the night the telegram about Charlie arrived. He had got there in the small hours – he had left his digs within a minute of getting Jim’s phone call but the train had been held up by an air alert – to find Betty in a state of collapse, naturally, and Jim simply being Jim, only more so: calm, solid, desperately hurt but not defeated, saying little as always, showing a degree of strength that even Alec, who admired him more than any other man he had ever met, had not expected. Thank God that Jim, at least, was still here. Now that he was alone, Jim might well consider throwing in his lot with him, sharing some sort of household, even perhaps (Alec put this part of his thought aside for future reference) coming into the small glass-merchandising firm of Keith Mackenzie and Company in which Alec, upon his retirement next year, was planning to join his brother Iain. If that appealed to Jim, it would be a kind of continuation of the Trio – the name Alec used in his own mind for the unit the Duerdens and he had comprised for over thirty years. And it would be a fine memorial to Betty.
‘And so to have lived in vain,’ Alec heard the clergyman say, ‘is inconceivable.’ Even the thickest and most preternaturally apathetic voices have a directional component, and Alec became half-aware that this one was being beamed towards him. When a pause followed, he looked up and saw that the clergyman was indeed staring
angrily into his face. After another second or two of ocular reprimand, the man spoke again. He was plainly drawing to a close, and now the hint of a new tone was heard, the detached disgust of a schoolmaster reading out to his class some shameful confidential document he has snatched from the hot hand of one of their number.
‘Whence do we derive our ideas of what is most precious and admirable and lovable in human nature? Not from any inborn knowledge, but from what we see in those around us. To know somebody, and even more to know them with love, is constantly to be made aware of what human nature is and can be. To have known somebody with love is to be permanently illuminated with the human capacity for tenderness, for generosity, for gaiety, for disregard of self, for courage, for forgiveness, for intelligence, for compassion, for loyalty, for humility – and nobody has ever lived who has been unable to offer his fellow-creatures some one or other of these. And is this illumination an aspect of life, a side of life, a part of life? No, it is life itself, this learning what we are. And can death diminish that? No, death can do nothing with it, death even throws it into prominence, death is cheated. As death will always be cheated. Let us pray. Will you kneel, please.’
Alec knelt and tried to pray, but could not decide what to pray to. The principle for good he sometimes thought of as existing above and beyond everything, and which he had expected (wrongly) to become more real to him as he grew older, seemed to involve a way of looking at things that included a belief in Betty’s having a future, and he could not see how she could have any. So he made some wishes about the past instead, that Betty had had a happy life and had not suffered when she was dying. He felt his mind slowing down and becoming a blank, and would have begun to forget where he was if it had not been for the diminishing footfalls that told him he was about to be left alone. He got quickly to his feet and hurried outside.
Jim was shaking hands with the last group of local people under the eye of the clergyman, whose manner now implied that he had been forced into his vestments as part of a practical joke and could see, for the moment, no dignified way of extricating himself. He looked bigger, too.
Alec felt impelled to speak to him: ‘Thank you for your address, Vicar, I thought it was most—’
‘Rector,’ the other said, moving off.
‘Right, let’s get on, Mac,’ Jim said. ‘Who are you going up with?’
There were only two cars to be seen, one with Bob in it, the other full of Giobertis. ‘Oh, don’t worry about me,’ Alec said rather wildly. ‘I can walk. How do I get to the—?’
‘Nonsense, hop in with me and Bob.’
‘No, that’s for the … I wouldn’t want to—’
‘Well then, go with Annette and Frank and the kids. These buses take five easily.’
‘In here, Uncle Mac,’ Annette called, and began making a place for him between herself and her husband. The two Gioberti girls occupied the folding seats: Sonia, a bespectacled blonde child of seven or eight with, so far as could be made out, a perfectly spherical head, and Elizabeth, a somewhat darker fourteen-year-old with a figure which, Alec supposed, many grown women would envy. As they moved off, she asked: ‘Where did you leave the car, Pop?’
Frank answered in his strong cockney accent: ‘Outside that hotel where we’re going to have lunch, the King’s Head or whatever it’s called. Tumbledown-looking joint.’
‘Why couldn’t we have gone up to the cemetery in our car?’
‘Because we’re going up in this one.’
‘Why? Ours is much more comfortable.’
‘I dare say it is, but we’re going up in this one and that’s an end of it, see?’
‘What are we going up to the cemetery for?’ Sonia asked.
‘To see Gran being buried.’
‘It won’t hurt her,’ Sonia stated.
‘Of course it won’t hurt her, she’s dead.’
‘What are we going up to see her being buried for?’
‘Because that’s what we do.’
‘Sonia, take your shoes off there,’ Annette said.
‘And shut up,’ Frank added.
‘How’s Christopher?’ Alec asked. ‘Let’s see, he must be nearly—’
‘He was four in June.’
‘Really? It seems only the other—’
‘Auntie Gina’s looking after him today,’ Elizabeth said with a hint of triumph. ‘Over at Camberwell.’
To forestall another invitation to silence from Frank, Alec looked out of the window. His eyes immediately fell on the little coffee shop with green check curtains where, whenever he came down for the weekend, he and Betty would spend an hour or so on the Saturday morning before strolling along to the King’s Head to meet Jim after his morning of local activities – work for the Ratepayers’ Association or the Golf Club committee – and relaxing over a couple of pink gins in the saloon bar, followed by lunch under the low beamed ceiling of the dining-room. It was at times like that that the Trio had really come into its own again, and for days and weeks afterwards there would be a lifting of the shadow that had fallen over Alec’s life since 1945. With the war over, the Duerdens had decided to stay on in this part of Buckinghamshire, where they had come in 1941 as a temporary measure to avoid the bombing, and not return after all to their house in Clapham. Since he could not reciprocate their hospitality, Alec had had to confine himself to staying with them only half a dozen times a year at the outside, and had seen them hardly more often for a meal or a theatre in London. He supposed he ought to be thankful that the Trio had survived as well as it had, that it had ever been able to recapture the spirit of its heyday, those twelve happiest years of his life between 1929 and 1941 when the Duerdens and he had occupied houses facing the Common, not four hundred yards apart.
Alec’s face was still turned towards the window, but he saw nothing of the neat residential area, its pavements decorated with a staked lime sapling every fifty feet, through which they were now passing. He was thinking of the moment when he had first named the Trio to himself. He and two or three other people (he forgot who) had taken their music round to the Duerdens’ one Sunday evening and, after the coffee and tomato sandwiches, Jim had asked him to have a shot at the accompaniment of a duet they had bought recently. He had sat down at the piano, which had an excellent tone for an upright, and played the thing for them at sight, something of a feat with such bold, dramatic writing, full of shifting trills in both hands. It was ‘Onaway, Awake, Beloved’, a far more interesting setting than that in Coleridge-Taylor’s Hiawatha, which he had always thought – secretly, for Betty delighted in it, and had met the composer once at a wedding in Croydon – a bit of a bore. Out of the corners of his eyes Alec had been able to see both Betty and Jim as they sang, and when, with his support, the two voices swept into
Does not all the blood within me
Leap to meet thee, leap to meet thee,
As the springs to meet the sunshine,
In the moon when nights are brightest?
he had felt his own blood leaping through him in a strange, painful rhythm, as if he had stumbled on a mysterious secret. And so he had; he had discovered that there could be a relationship between three people for which none of the ordinary words – friendship, love, understanding, intimacy – would quite do. When the song finished there had been enthusiastic applause from the others, even from ten-year-old Charlie, who was staying up late as a special treat, and Alec’s excitement had passed unnoticed.
The car stopped outside the cemetery. Although Alec had walked along most of the roads in the area many times in the last twenty years, the exterior of this place, and its whole location, were totally unfamiliar to him.
‘Here we are,’ Frank said. ‘Want any help, Uncle Mac?’
‘No thank you.’
He got out and began walking towards the graveside, remembering that, outside his family and their circle, Betty was the only person who had ever called him �
��Alec’, and she only for a brief period, perhaps a year after their first meeting. Then she had slipped into calling him ‘Mac’ as everyone else did, or rather as Jim in particular did. With that fine tact of hers, the finer for being unselfconscious, she had made it clear that there was not to be even the slightest and most nominal acknowledgement of what she felt for Alec, just as he had never by a single word acknowledged what he felt for her. The idea that two people could fall in love instantly and irrevocably and never mention it, let alone do anything about it, would have seemed incomprehensible or lunatic to anybody but themselves, or rather, again, to anybody but themselves and Jim. For Jim had somehow made it clear to Alec that he knew, but without hurt or resentment; he knew, but he understood and forgave, and so made it possible for Alec to go on seeing them without losing his self-respect. It was silently agreed between the three of them that while she loved Jim no less, she loved Alec too with a different – he recoiled from the mental impertinence of wondering if it were a deeper – kind of love. Few women would have been capable of that, but love had been Betty’s gift.
Alec answered an imaginary question about what he had done with his life by saying to himself that he had loved a fine woman and known a true friend. The love came first, as love must. By repeating this slowly he succeeded for a time in shutting out the presence of those standing near him and all but the first phrase of the dreadful words the clergyman was saying. Then Alec started noticing the coffin lying in the grave. It had been lowered by means of green straps that recalled to him, in their colour and texture, the webbing belt Charlie Duerden had worn with his uniform when they lunched at Simpson’s together during one of the boy’s leaves. A handful of earth was thrown on to the coffin. Alec realized that he had been very afraid of the hollow noise this might make, but it was all right, the soil was dry and chalky, without noticeable clods, and when the spades got to work it could, from the sound, have been anything at all being buried. There were the beginnings of movement away from the graveside; Alec sighed and raised his head, and the whole scene shone brightly in his eyes: the people with their varied complexions and hair, the grass, the privet hedges, the vases of red and blue flowers on the graves, the great pair of cypresses by the entrance, all slightly over-coloured like a picture postcard. In the middle of it all Alec saw the clergyman, looked squarely at him for the first time since leaving the church, and saw that the clergyman, as earlier, was looking at him.
Complete Stories Page 14