by Wendy Jones
‘Was she upset?’
‘Yes. I feel dreadful about it.’
‘Nothing is simple,’ said Jeffrey, stroking the red whiskers of his droopy moustache. ‘Mind, you would have had Doctor Reece as your father-in-law.’ Jeffrey nudged him. ‘That would have been a barrel of laughs. Would have been like living with Moses.’ After a pause, he asked, ‘You all right, Wilf?’
‘Aye.’
‘That’s what happens, you see,’ Jeffrey said, sipping his pint, ‘when you spend all your time locked up with corpses in a workshop making coffins; you’s like a child in a sweetshop the moment you sees the fairer sex.’
Wilfred wiped the froth from his mouth with the back of his hand; the beer was warm, familiar and comforting.
‘True enough.’
‘Now you’ll have to tell the whole of Narberth.’
‘No, I won’t – now that I’ve told you,’ retorted Wilfred.
‘Come to the Young Farmers’ dance with me next Friday,’ Jeffrey offered. ‘There’s a charabanc of girls coming from Llawhaden.’
‘They’ll be straight back in the charabanc when they sees you.’
‘Well, you’d be lucky if they let you bury them!’
‘You still seeing Elizabeth?’ asked Wilfred.
‘No, seeing Clementine.’
‘Clementine?’
‘Everything changes,’ said Jeffrey.
‘Come again?’ mouthed Wilfred, nodding towards the rugby players in the corner who were freshly showered, rosy-faced and shiny, all proudly wearing their blue Narberth Otter ties. It was like a room full of bellowing, huffing prize bulls, Wilfred thought as the men erupted, for no apparent reason, into a body-shaking, heart-bursting rendition of ‘Hen Wlad fy Nhadau’.
Back in the workshop, Wilfred removed the lid of an empty coffin. There, stowed under a bundle of linen winding sheets, was a hessian bag. Wilfred guessed correctly that no one, not even a thief, would have the courage to open the lid of a closed coffin in a chapel of rest. Barclays Bank was in the High Street but Wilfred didn’t believe in interest, debt and security. Instead, their money was kept in two coarse hessian bags – one here, the other one hidden under the floorboards beneath his bed.
In the scully he took his da’s spade from the kitchen chair and sat down. Mr Auden had taught him about money: ‘We’ve buried some rich old buggers. Spend it while you can. But save some too – life is very unexpected.’ So each time Wilfred was paid for a funeral he strove to put aside a third, and discreetly, slowly and steadily, his savings had grown. Mr Auden had also advised him that, when he had completed his apprenticeship – was solvent – he must take a wife.
Wilfred cleared a space on the table, upended the bag and let the money topple out. Coins clattered down and notes fluttered around. He piled the money together, brushing his bare arm along the table to gather it when, unexpectedly, an image of Flora came into his mind’s eye. He paused for a moment, struck by an unexpected sense of her nearness.
A few coins had fallen on to the flagstones so he got down on all fours under the table to pick them up, and he was there when his da walked in.
‘Hang on – another ha’penny’s fallen next to those dumbbells, Wilf. And one by that snail in the corner.’
‘Thanks, Da.’
‘There’s a hell of a mess on this table,’ his da commented, taking off his cap. ‘What’s wrong with using the Barclays Bank? You usually like to be modern.’
‘No, Da, I’s not putting our hard-earned savings in the bank. Goodness knows what they do with it. Safer under the bed. Or in a coffin.’
‘But the bank manager is a God-fearing Calvinist. He goes to church three times on a Sunday.’
‘No doubt about it, Da. But I’m not trusting our money to a bank. Mark my words. I’s read the newspaper every day, Da. And the Bible.’
‘Wilfred! You don’t read the Bible from one year to the next.’
‘Well, I’s remember what it says: Neither a borrower nor a lender be.
‘Where’s that in the Bible, then?’
‘Don’t know. Sermon on the Mount?’ Wilfred speculated, rummaging for guineas and piling them up in groups of five.
Wilfred’s da fished a sixpence out of the remains of a bowl of soup.
‘I can always dig at St Issell’s graveyard,’ he said. ‘They have a lot of deaths that way from the coalmine at Bonville Court – when they’re not on strike.’
‘No, Da. You dig for Narberth, that’s plenty for you. I’ll look after you.’ Wilfred collected the half-crowns together. ‘I could put up my charges,’ he said, running his hand through his hair, ‘but I don’t like to, what with times being hard and getting harder … I’s need a new pair of trousers, my other ones are worn through. And a pair of socks. I could buy them from Mrs Russell’s Haberdasher’s and Draper’s this month. Or I might be able to wait for another month or two.’
‘Ask Auntie Blodwen to mend them for you.’
‘I have. But she’s already darned them five times. She said she wouldn’t do it again and that I should buy a brand new pair. Anyone would think we were made of money.’
‘I thinks she was cross because you don’t wash them properly. Said they were stiff with dirt, like cardboard, and she didn’t want to touch them.’
‘Well, there’s fussy! I have a clean pair every day – it must be the floor that’s dirty. And no one ever died of stink.’
The higgledy-piggledy pile of money was being turned into exact piles of coins and notes.
‘You not going out today?’ his da asked.
‘No, thought I’d stay in.’ Wilfred was waiting for the talk of him and Grace to die down a little and for some other choicer gossip to replace it before going out and about too much.
He jotted down some numbers on the back cover of the Undertaker’s Journal and totted them up.
‘Five, ten, fifteen, twenty,’ he counted to himself. ‘We’ll be all right now, Da, don’t worry, even if no one pops their clogs for two or three months – and someone surely will.’
‘Mustn’t be thinking too much about money, Wilfred. It’s not the be-all and end-all.’
‘But it is important. And we have this now – this is for us. And it means we can look after ourselves, and not worry.’
But Wilfred did worry. Wilfred who, as a child, was always starving hungry; everyone said he had worms and hollow legs because he ate so much. He remembered the way his father had eked out his paltry wage so Wilfred might have more food. When money was very short, his da made kettle broth with hot water poured over broken bread, and when there was no work as a gravedigger, he would spend his days walking the hills and valleys around Narberth foraging for food with an instinctive sharpness born of hunger and the imperative to feed his child. He would find mushrooms and wild garlic, occasionally potatoes, and in the late summer there were hazelnuts, walnuts, many blackberries and sometimes strawberries. Then in their small yard his da grew vegetables, willing himself to be green-fingered while tending the peas, turnups, cauliflowers and the parsnips, and feeling dismayed if there were caterpillars on the cabages.
Hunger made Wilfred eat every morsel in his bowl, even the tasteless kettle broth, scraping the enamel until there was nothing left. Then his da would turn from the table and stand at the sink tidying so Wilfred could lick his bowl clean while his da pretended not to see, because he knew that his son was hungry and needed all the food he could get. And they shared their meals with great generosity because they had both lost so deeply and dearly when Wilfred’s mam had died that neither of them could bear the thought of life without the other – and so their consideration for each other overrode their own hunger.
‘No, Da, I’m not hungry – you have the last slice of bread,’ Wilfred would insist when he got older. ‘I found an apple on the way home.’ From necessity, he had become an adept scrumper of the many pears and apples in Narberth’s orchards.
‘You eat it, boy,’ his da would urge. ‘I’ve had more th
an enough, an ample sufficiency.’ Both of them knew the other was fibbing.
But there were many nights when Wilfred, despite his da’s very best efforts, went to bed hungry, his stomach taut over his hipbones, and he would lie, listening to his da snoring and harrumphing in the next room, unable to think of anything but Mrs Annie Evans’s magnificent Conduit Stores with its breathtaking array of sweet jars crammed with pastel-coloured sugar almonds, sticky liquorice allsorts and toffee, precious as gold. Then there was the counter lined with fresh, hot, wondrous loaves. In those famished bedtimes of his childhood, Wilfred imagined eating huge mouthfuls of bread spread munificently with butter and piled high with jam before falling asleep while saying his prayers: ‘Our Father, Who Art in Heaven, eating jam.’
Wilfred settled into the driving seat of the hearse and adjusted the mirror. He found a barley sugar in his trouser pocket, brushed the lint off it then popped the sweet in his mouth. He still felt guilty about Grace, very worried that he had hurt and humiliated her in the High Street, but he must try and put thoughts of Grace out of his mind and focus on the matter at hand today: young chap from Templeton. Flu.
At Templeton Church the pallbearers were waiting, bowler hats held tightly, looking out desolately to the empty road and the green valley beyond, waiting for Wilfred to arrive.
‘Good afternoon, Mr Enoch Davies. And Mr James Davies and Mr David Davies,’ said Wilfred, nodding at the father and brothers of the deceased. ‘My sincerest condolences to you all.’ He had already offered his condolences to the next of kin but one could never say enough comforting words to the anguished souls of the bereaved. The men collected sombrely and silently around the sleek hearse to help slide the casket out.
‘At the count of three: one, two, three.’ Wilfred took his usual position of back right and checked the pallbearers were ready to process. Today the chief pallbearer was the deceased’s father. Sons, sons-in-law, sometimes brothers and the occasional husband carried the casket, but fathers were unusual now the Great War was over. This father would be weakened by his grief, perhaps struggling to stand upright under the burden of intolerable feelings. Wilfred would have to ensure the other pallbearer at the front was strong and could carry the weight on his shoulders alone should the father falter, as fathers were wont to do on these occasions.
‘Right we are then, in we go,’ he instructed. At the tabernacle the four men stopped, adjusted their shoulders under the wooden box to calibrate the weight of it between them and began walking the long path through the graveyard into the sturdy church, past the congregation to the waiting vicar. The intensity of the mourners’ grief increased the nearer to the altar they were sitting. In a funeral, unlike the theatre, no one wanted to be entitled to a front seat.
The Revd Waldo Williams preached the peroration on the verse Blessed are the pure of heart for they shall see God. Wilfred sat quietly in an empty pew behind a professional mourner and listened while the Reverend spoke earnestly about the brief life of the deceased.
‘And Mr Davies, who was known for enjoying a flapjack …’ A muffled squeak emerged from a grieving lady in the next pew who quickly put her hanky to her mouth. Wilfred bowed his head.
‘Mr Davies was a keen horticulturalist of root vegetables and celebrated throughout all of Templeton for his inventive carnival costumes,’ the vicar declared.
Wilfred surreptitiously stretched his long legs, which were getting stiff, and lost himself in his thoughts. I did a good job on that coffin, he thought to himself. As the Revd Waldo Williams continued his – it had to be said – rather lengthy sermon, Wilfred noticed how the vicar spoke. The Reverend had come to Narberth from Birmingham: he spoke differently and it wasn’t only his funny-peculiar accent. His family, Wilfred had heard, owned a locks-and hinges factory, and as a boy he’d been sent away to a school called Rugby where the game of rugby football was created, then on to the University of Oxford. Wilfred knew that because after the Reverend’s name on the Tabernacle Chapel board it was painted: Minister: The Reverend Waldo C. Williams, MA (Oxon.). MA meant Master of the Arts, which is what you were, Wilfred knew, if you had been to Oxford University. (Oxon.) had nothing to do with dairy farming.
Wilfred stood again for the New Testament reading, barely listening to the familiar words of the Gospel of St Mark nor to the second hymn, ‘Nearer My God to Thee’. He wanted to improve himself, to keep on learning. Mr Ogmore Auden often said, ‘As long as you’re reading, you’re learning.’ Indeed, his father spent many evenings before going to the graveyard bent over the pictures of the celestial spheres in The Constellations of the Stars for the Enthusiastic Amateur. It was the only book in the house – apart from the family Bible, of course. Wilfred liked the names in his father’s book: Cassiopeia, Virgo, Venus, Ursa Minor, Ursa Major – they sounded like lovely ladies rather than burning balls of gas in the heavens.
The thought of ladies reminded him of Grace. He had not been very clever towards Grace. It was not his finest hour. Quite undignified, really, if he thought about it. And hurtful. Caused him no end of worry. Perhaps if he had a bit more learning and a bit less stupidity – if he knew more things – then that could only be a help.
‘Mr James L. Davies has ascended on angelic wings of burnished gold,’ preached the Reverend, ‘with seraphim and cherubim, into the immutably effulgent dominion of Heaven!’
They were big words, Wilfred thought, but a clever man such as the Reverend Waldo Williams, MA (Oxon.) used a great many difficult words – and furthermore knew what they meant. What was the word the Reverend had used in a sermon a while back? Necro-something. Wilfred had never heard of that word before. But a man of the world, a man of commerce, should know what long words meant, be able to use them in his sentences and in conversations, particularly with his elders and betters. Wilfred was proud of what he had achieved: coffin-making was a craft and there would always be a call for craftsmen. He did an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay and there was honour in that, but he felt that if he wanted to be a man about town, a man about Narberth and a purveyor of superior funerals, then there was a call for him to have some learning.
Wilfred knew the words for undertaking, the unusual words: pall, formaldehyde, catafalque, moment of committal and veronica, he even knew columbarium, but he wanted a better vocabulary. Vocabulary – that was a big word. There were big words in the dictionary. The answer, Wilfred realized, with the suddenness of inspiration, was to buy a dictionary and read it.
First thing the next morning, Wilfred caught the train to St Clears and from there the number 29 bus to Laugharne and, in the damp cellar of Laugharne Books under the lopsided staircase amid a mountain of books, found, with no help at all from Mr Rudyard Sackville – miserable bugger – an old dictionary with red cloth covers and no dust jacket. Wilfred read the gilt lettering on the front cover: The Concise English Dictionary: Literary, Scientific and Technical with Pronouncing List of Proper Names: Foreign Words & Phrases: Key to Names in Mythology & Fiction and Other Valuable Appendices. Also a Supplement of Words of Recent Occurrence. By Dr Charles Annund. And he felt confident that, with such a title, the dictionary would surely include all the words he should ever need and all the words that could answer all the questions in the world. It might even help him be somewhat kinder and wiser with ladies. There were green mould spots all over the endpapers, it smelled as mildewy as Laugharne Books itself and the silk ribbon was broken, but no matter. Nor was it a new dictionary, but words were words. They never changed, did they? thought Wilfred.
‘I’ll take this dictionary, please,’ he said to the very fat Mr Rudyard Sackville who was wearing a food-stained waist-jacket and slumbered behind a desk tottering with books. ‘I came from Narberth specially to get it.’
‘Three shillings,’ Mr Rudyard Sackville stated, and sighed hopelessly.
Wilfred counted out his shillings one by one, then said, ‘Thank you.’
The bookseller nodded regretfully and slumped back in his chair with a deep
fatigue.
‘It’s useful to have a dictionary,’ enjoined Wilfred.
‘Who’s to say?’ Mr Rudyard Sackville replied, then asked, sighing, ‘What’s it for?’
‘Well, actually, to tell the truth, I thought I might read it.’
‘What’s it all for?’ the man mumbled.
There are happier buggers in the graveyard, Wilfred thought to himself.
The inscription on the inside cover read Presented to Caradoc Griffiths for Sunday School Attendance, in the Year of the Lord, 1892. PWLLGWAELOD Chapel. Then underneath someone had written, presumably Caradoc Griffiths in a less Christian moment:
Black is the raven and black is the rook
But blackest is the person who stealeth this book.
Steal not this book for fear of life
For the owner carries a carving knife.
Wilfred – once he’d bought it, of course – went straight home and immediately put a bold line straight though Caradoc and Griffiths and wrote his own name in obsidian ink in his best cursive hand, Wilfred Price, then added, UNDERTAKER so that the red dictionary was officially his. He could start reading it from the beginning at the letter A … well, he would think how he would do it, but for now he only knew that he would start.
Wilfred was full of purpose; he had some business he needed to attend to. The sun was on his broad neck and he was cycling powerfully. He could have pushed the bike up the hill instead of pedalling because the road was very steep – all the hills near the sea in Pembrokeshire were steep and it was many miles. But, well, Wilfred told himself, if Flora is wearing a dress, a flimsy summer dress that goes in at the waist and out at the … and her arms are bare and her wild brown hair loose, then it would be all to the best if he was physically exhausted. Even if Flora’s clothes and dark hair were very becoming, he resolved that he would: Not. Be. Overcome. There were many very attractive ladies in Narberth – some real tomatoes! – but he couldn’t be proposing to them all. He had learned that now, and felt another pang of remorse towards Grace. He dearly hoped she was well and no longer hurt.