The Thoughts and Happenings of Wilfred Price, Purveyor of Superior Funerals

by Wendy Jones

  ‘I thought we would grow old together,’ her mother confided plaintively to the quiet room.

  ‘Don’t fret, Mam.’

  ‘I didn’t think it would come to this.’

  The mantelpiece clock chimed half past the hour. At the sound of the car’s tyres approaching the house, Flora and her mother went through the porch. A moment before she left the house Flora pulled her veil from her hat and placed it across her face. All I have to do, she thought to herself, is get through this day.

  Wilfred opened the back doors of the car for the two women who were waiting on the doorstep.

  ‘Good afternoon, mam. Good afternoon, miss,’ he intoned, doffing his top hat. His apprentice-master, Mr Auden, had taught him that, drummed into him the importance of good manners. ‘A funeral director is always polite,’ he’d state. ‘No effing and blinding around a corpse, Wilfred.’ Mr Auden would say it like an aphorism every time he settled into the driving seat and revved the hearse engine, the coffin in the back, before they pulled out of the garage and drove to another funeral. ‘No damn and bloody blasting around the dead, Wilfred.’

  He waited, standing to his full height while the two ladies quietly came forward. Mrs Edwards and a younger woman – that must be her daughter – stepped into the motorcar. His eyes were drawn towards her. Wilfred noticed the younger woman’s well-shaped ankles in delicate stockings. Her head was slightly lowered and Wilfred couldn’t see her face clearly because she was wearing a black veil and, besides, he could only glance as it would be unkind to look closely into the face of someone who was so newly bereaved. Nevertheless, Wilfred noticed beneath the fine netting of her veil the elegant lines of her profile: her graceful brow and her delicate neck. Her hand was to her throat, touching her jet beads, and he saw her slender golden arm. The young woman had the straitened air of someone in great shock, and beneath her veil her face glistened with the wet of recent tears. Wilfred was used to this, but it never failed to move him.

  At Mrs Edwards’s request, Wilfred was to drive the chief mourners to the funeral and, as Wilfred didn’t have a car – apart from the motorized hearse – Mrs Edwards had offered the use of her late husband’s motorcar. Though unfamiliar with the car, Wilfred deftly swung the vehicle in a wide arc so it was facing the opposite direction then he peered in his driving mirror to check that the two ladies were settled before embarking on the slow drive to the funeral. The younger woman was beautiful, arrestingly so – and looked familiar to him. He felt as if he had seen the softness of her face before, but couldn’t think where. That abundant pile of brown hair, her quietude … was he acquainted with her? He tried to think. Surely he would have remembered. He could not ask her now, of course, that would be the greatest impropriety, but he felt he knew her.

  Wilfred glanced in the mirror again. He saw that the young woman looked pink and hot from the heat and an inner anguish. These people, he thought as he drove, this endless parade of people journeying to the newly dug grave of the person they loved. Sometimes Wilfred wanted to stop the car and turn around and reach out to his passengers, to this young woman here, and touch them very lightly on the wrist, that place above the wrist where a person’s forearm tapers and which Wilfred thought seemed a vulnerable part on a human body. Wilfred imagined stretching out his hand and gently touching the narrowness in the forearm and looking into his passengers’ eyes. Usually they had red, swollen eyes. He imagined saying something. What would he say, though? It would be a difficult moment for the speaker and the listener. He could say, ‘It will be all right.’ But that would be audacious. If Wilfred spoke, the person might be offended, might not believe what Wilfred said. But it would be all right in a way, Wilfred knew.

  He had, of course, never reached out to any of his broken passengers.

  Flora was feverish beneath her lace veil. She knew her cheeks were red and she needed to blow her nose. She removed her gloves to look in her beaded handbag for a handkerchief. Her mam was bearing up well, sitting upright and looking straight ahead. Her mam was older though, forty-seven. Middle-aged people, Flora had learned, knew death happened, were calmer around it, less shocked, unlike the young who didn’t believe in its existence until they experienced it for themselves.

  They drove majestically past Saundersfoot railway station. Flora felt impatient to get to St Andrew’s Church. I want to go and I don’t want to go, all at the same time, she realized. This restlessness was grief. She couldn’t keep her hands still, kept reaching for the beads of her French jet glass necklace. Really, there was nowhere in the world she wanted to be, if it was a world without her father. And Albert.

  The car turned regally around the corner and the Pembrokeshire coast came swinging into view. She had often photographed this vista. And there was the cove. Flora had come here with her father many times when she was a small girl. He had shown her how to build a dam and block the stream. Together they would place flattish pebbles one on top of the other, making several rows until a small pond grew. They watched and waited until the pebbles were eventually dislodged and the wall broken by the force of the water. For a long time, building a dam in the stream had been Flora’s favourite game. On Sundays after St Issell’s Chapel and before Sunday dinner she would ask her father to take her to the cove and, if the weather was clement and he thought the stream wouldn’t be too icy, they would walk down the hill together and spend an hour or so splashing in the water. That innocence felt a long time ago to Flora now. It was painful to remember.

  Flora turned her gaze away from the window. The undertaker, she noticed, was looking at her in the driving mirror. Perhaps it was her grief – she was crying – perhaps he was discomforted by that. But he was an undertaker, he must be used to grief. She adjusted her veil. He glanced at her again. Their eyes met. He had blue eyes – dark blue, watchful eyes – the eyes of a man who observed life and saw death. And he was looking at her. Flora stared down at the palms of her hands. This was unexpected. A man was giving her the glad eye on the way to her father’s funeral. And what was even more shocking to Flora was that she didn’t altogether mind.

  ‘Excuse me, Miss Edwards, if you wouldn’t mind coming this way, down the nave,’ Wilfred said in a confident voice, once the service was over. He put a guiding hand a few inches from the young woman’s back. She followed him towards the west doors at the end of the church, her skirt rustling and her heels clicking on the mosaic of tiles. He noticed a perceptible vitality in her step, and there was something intangible about her that inspired him, as if her beauty gleamed from her. She had beautiful, enchanting posture. That’s what he liked about women, their grace, the poise with which they moved. It wasn’t true of all women but it was true of most; they moved in a way that men couldn’t. Except perhaps male ballet dancers, like that Russian chap Nijinsky in the newspaper.

  The church was dim and musty. Other mourners collected their service sheets, neatened their ties and adjusted their hats, but Wilfred was less aware of them than he would usually be as he walked beside Flora to the end of the aisle. He glanced at her. It would be ridiculous, he thought, to say a woman moved like a deer: that would mean she skipped on all fours, but Wilfred could understand, looking at Flora’s slender figure, what people meant when they said a woman had a deer-like grace.

  At the last pew she stopped for a moment and rested, as if to gather her strength. She lifted her eyes up to him as if she sensed he was thinking about her. He looked at her gentle, sad eyes and warm mouth, and smiled consolingly. The young lady had deepset brown eyes and a startled look, as if she had been hurt, like the shocked eyes of an animal caught in a trap. But perhaps that was because she was grieving now. Then he did something he never expected to do as an undertaker; he put his hand on her bare forearm for a moment, looking down at her golden skin.

  As they were walking along the uneven gravel path in St Andrew’s churchyard, Wilfred said in a low, earnest voice, ‘It would be best if you stand close to the grave and then it will be that bit easier for you to
drop your handful of earth in.’

  Wilfred wanted the funeral to go well. No hitches was his constant aim. A hitch was never a good thing at a funeral. His job was to oversee the small details so that the family, lost in the enormity of their grief, would be free to mourn their loved one.

  ‘It’s a windy day,’ the undertaker continued. ‘If you move forward you will be better able to hear the Reverend Williams speaking.’ Wilfred liked to give advice to his mourners, to ‘help them’, as Mr Ogmore Auden used to say, ‘get the most from the day’. That was true, Wilfred knew. A guiding word here or there, even the most obvious advice, was often needed – people at funerals sometimes looked so lost they appreciated being shown the way.

  They reached the newly dug grave with its neat corners and pile of displaced, raw earth lying beside it.

  ‘Just by here, now,’ Wilfred said to Flora. ‘There we are then,’ he added, placing his hand gently and close – very close – to the curve of her back.

  ‘Thank you again, Mr Price, it’s been an exemplary service.’ Mrs Edwards shook Wilfred’s hand. Once the funeral was over, he had driven Mrs Edwards and her daughter home as carefully and surely as he had driven them to the funeral earlier in the day. They were all standing on the gravel outside the front door of White Hook.

  ‘Not at all, Mrs Edwards,’ Wilfred replied, bowing slightly and feeling obsequious.

  ‘And a bright day too! My husband would have appreciated that. He always liked a sunny day – it helped if the horse’s hooves were dry, made it that much easier for him than the rain.’ Wilfred knew that Mrs Edwards’s jollity was forced. He was used to the bereaved trying too hard.

  ‘Yes, Mrs Edwards, we were most fortunate with the weather. Most fortunate,’ he added self-consciously. Wilfred knew there weren’t many things more desolate than a funeral in the freezing cold and pouring rain. Actually it had been a surprisingly blowy day – bright but blustery – though it was always best to agree with the recently bereaved. Mr Ogmore Auden had made a rule of it: ‘Agree with them, Wilfred, or there’ll be a to-do about the bill.’ Wilfred understood why. People who were grieving were in so much pain they could easily be argumentative.

  Flora Myffanwy dallied with the button on the wrist of her glove, listening to the exchange. Inside the silk-lined gloves her hands were dirty because the earth she had scattered over the grave while the Reverend was intoning, ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,’ had been sodden – almost mud. The sludge had seeped under her nails, forming brown half-moons, and her fingers would hold the scent of the earth. She imagined when she was an old lady being constantly stained with earth because she probably would spend all her days gardening and her hands would get dirty. That’s what many old ladies did, tended to the earth and covered it with flowers, before eventually being laid down in it. Suddenly Flora felt spent; it had been a long day.

  She turned to look at the undertaker: his black hair shone brightly with hair oil, his side parting was exact. He is a man, she thought, who visits the barber often. In her mind’s eye she framed him. He would make an interesting – and handsome – subject for a portrait photograph. He was broad, and taller than her, but the same age, she would suppose – a little older perhaps. Twenty-seven? Perhaps twenty-eight. He was wearing a crisp white shirt, and his sideburns were precisely trimmed and he was carefully and closely shaved, and she imagined that gave an unnatural smoothness to his cheeks. It was a long time since she had touched a man’s face. There were Albert’s stubbly cheeks, scratchy like the corn stubble they had laid in that last August of his life, but Albert was blond, sandy-coloured. This man – the undertaker – would have dark stubble.

  The undertaker was looking at her again, offering his outstretched hand. They shook hands. His hand was warm and strong, not cold and flaccid like that of a corpse, which was what her father’s fingers had been when she kissed them before the lid had been placed – presumably later on nailed down – on the coffin.

  ‘It has been a pleasure,’ Wilfred said to her. Flora noticed her mam’s slight surprise at his choice of words, but Flora knew what Wilfred meant.

  Wilfred sat down heavily on the wooden seat, his thick woollen trousers settling around his ankles. It was always a relief to use the lavatory after a funeral. He put his feet wide apart and opened up the Narberth & Whitland Observer. He tried reading: PATIENT NOT ADMITTED TO HOSPITAL. WAS THE PROCEDURE CORRECT? The unusual occurrence of a patient who was sent to the County Hospital for an operation and then was sent back home – but he couldn’t concentrate on the story. His mind was on that young lady – he had heard her mother call her Flora. That was a nice name. He couldn’t imagine anyone called Flora being horrible.

  He would like to see her again. But how? He turned the front page of the newspaper absentmindedly. If he was truthful with himself he hadn’t been able to stop looking at her, although he was certain that she hadn’t noticed. He had needed to be attentive to the funeral proceedings; indeed, he had kept his eye on the ball, but it was also true that, while the Revd Waldo Williams had delivered his eulogy and when Flora – he liked saying her name in his head – and when Flora had been seated in the pew in front of him with the other chief mourners, Wilfred had had what Mr Ogmore Auden once referred to as ‘lustful thoughts’.

  ‘Young men’, Mr Ogmore Auden had announced confidently as Wilfred was cleaning some gummy sawdust off the saw-blade, ‘are prone to lustful thoughts. Wilfred, do not be prone to lustful thoughts.’

  Wilfred had looked up. ‘No, Mr Auden.’

  ‘Refrain from dwelling on thoughts of a lewd nature while in the presence of the deceased. Especially when using a sharp tool.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Auden.’ Wilfred had been using the new motorized saw when Mr Ogmore Auden had made his wholly unexpected pronouncement. He was seventeen at the time.

  Wilfred shook the newspaper to flatten the creases and rested his elbows on his knees. Maybe Flora went to the tea dances or fancy-dress parties in the Queen’s Hall; perhaps he could meet her again accidentally – well, accidentally on purpose – at a dance. Lord knew it would look better than meeting her at a funeral. But she wouldn’t go dancing, Wilfred realized, because she was in mourning. Weeks, months of misery, drawn blinds, draped mirrors and plain dark clothes in lifeless crêpe. It would probably be autumn, he thought sadly, before Flora would be in her glad rags and doing the Foxtrot or the Twinkle. He liked the thought of Flora dancing, and lingered on it. Then he wondered what she would be like when she laughed.

  He glanced at the Notes of the Week column. Opening the Narberth Nurses Fête last week Miss Lewis of Trefilan paid quite a neat little compliment to our town, which she described as ‘a wonderful place’. Her eulogy was inspired by the remarkable fact that in connection with nursing services the town raises between £400 and £500 yearly, which we should imagine stands unique in Pembrokeshire.

  Then it occurred to Wilfred: he could call at White Hook with the invoice for the funeral. He decided to do it as soon as possible, but not too soon or it might look as if he was being greedy or avaricious. Though it might be better to appear avaricious than lustful. But he was a man too, not just an undertaker! And at that thought, Wilfred stood up.

  There were no newspaper squares again on the nail in the wall. By damn, that was awkward. It was difficult to remember to rip up old newspaper when there was a funeral to organize. Both he and his da always forgot to tear up old copies of the Radio Times or the Narberth & Whitland Observer. Wilfred would have to use a piece of today’s Observer, so that when his da sat down by the fire this evening to read the paper and found the centre pages missing, he would be under no illusions as to what Wilfred had done with it.

  3

  The Red Dictionary

  The bar of Narberth Rugby Club was straining with the mountainous bodies of the rugby team. The walls were lined with ancient team photographs and there were silver trophies proudly and confidently displayed in glass cabinets. Wilfred had come for a swift half before l
unch.

  ‘Price is here!’ someone roared.

  ‘The handsome bugger’s come to bury us!’

  ‘Well done, lads,’ Wilfred called back, raising his hand in greeting and referring to the morning’s win against St Clears.

  ‘They didn’t stand a chance,’ the tighthead prop replied. ‘You should have seen them – like gnomes they were!’

  Jeffrey, Wilfred’s old schoolfriend, came up to him with a pint of pale ale.

  ‘Wilfred Price – you bugger!’ enjoined Jeffrey, patting him on the back and handing him his drink. ‘I’ve heard the latest – congratulations! You never even mentioned you were seeing Grace Reece.’

  ‘No,’ said Wilfred cautiously.

  ‘All right, you two?’ said a man, shoving past and spilling beer.

  ‘All right, Sidney? You back to the Army soon?’ asked Jeffrey.

  ‘That’s right,’ Sidney replied curtly, walking by and getting lost in the throng.

  ‘Never liked that Sidney,’ Jeffrey confided to Wilfred, ‘too fly for me. So,’ he continued, supping ale, ‘I heard the news you’re marrying her.’

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘But Mrs Evans at the Conduit Stores said.’

  ‘Wilfred Price!’ hailed Norman Collins from a nearby table. ‘Have a pint before you get to the altar.’

  ‘No, Collins,’ Wilfred rejoined, waving his hand.

  ‘So, then you’s not marrying her?’ Jeffrey queried, looking up at Wilfred.

  ‘No …’

  ‘But you asked her?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Wilfred guiltily. There was a sudden round of applause from the players at the bar.

  ‘Nice legs on her,’ Jeffrey commented, adding somewhat doubtfully, ‘Nice legs isn’t everything, mind.’

  ‘No, that’s exactly what I thought myself.’