by Wendy Jones
‘Excuse me, Mrs Howell-Thomas, while I …’ he commented as he jammed soap under the ring. Then he rubbed the finger with castor oil and finally engine lubricant, but it wouldn’t budge. Mrs Howell-Thomas, so compliant in life, so stubborn in death! Ruddy ring was stuck tight. Wilfred gave it a final tug but nothing was doing. He would just have to mention to her daughter later – in the most delicate terms – that the ring was stuck fast on the deceased’s third finger and wouldn’t come off, even with quite a lot of force applied.
He could say, perhaps, ‘In preparing the body of your dear, departed mother it would seem that Mrs Howell-Thomas’s finger has bloated up dreadfully …’ No. Perhaps, ‘Your mother has ended her pilgrimage and entered eternal peace still devoted to your father, and as a sign of her everlasting devotion she has chosen to be reunited in heaven with her beloved Mr Howell-Thomas still wearing her wedding ring.’ That sounded like a bit of a fib to Wilfred, especially as Mrs Howell-Thomas and her husband had argued hammer and tongs. But he didn’t want to suggest hacking off the finger, although that was an option which the very poor would sometimes choose. Usually relatives liked to pretend the deceased were still alive, only sleeping. And one would never want to cut off the finger of a sleeping person; you just wouldn’t do it.
‘The bereaved, Wilfred, want to be spared the details of their loved one’s corpse,’ Mr Ogmore Auden had stated. ‘Talk about the deceased as if they were alive and kicking. Don’t let on they’re dead, dripping, dribbling and smelling in the workshop. Dress them up in their Sunday best and act as if you’ve got them round for tea. No one wants to know about their mother’s anal cork, Wilfred.’
‘Yes, Mr Auden,’ Wilfred replied, flabbergasted. So Wilfred had learned to soften over the details of death, to ease the grief for those left behind so they could move from the memory of their departed when they were warm, alive and at home, to – after the funeral – imagining them sitting in an armchair, drinking tea or perhaps tending a garden in those ever-illuminated Welsh hills of heaven.
All of a sudden, Flora woke. She reached for her alarm clock and it rattled lazily. Three o’clock exactly. She lay back between the sheets, under the blankets, and moved her legs to loosen the bedding. It was inconvenient to be wide-awake in the middle of the night and she would be drowsy tomorrow, not that she had anything much to do apart from wandering around the darkened house, waiting for the months of mourning to pass, although she could take some photographs, perhaps of the aspens. As her eyes adjusted to the dark her pictures on the wall slowly emerged, the photographs delineated by their elegant black frames. She knew why she had awoken. She only roused in the middle of the night when the deepest part of herself wanted to be listened to.
It was that man, Wilfred Price. He had smelled of Brylcreem and something spicy; he had the scent of a formally dressed man. He had touched her arm. Had he touched her lower back? He had put his hand near there, a couple of inches away – though it had felt as if he touched her. She lifted up her nightie and put her own hand there in the gentle curve of her lower spine. It might have felt like this, she thought, only his hand would have been stronger, more powerful. He had square nails. Flora had noticed his hands with their reddish hue, watched how they’d steered the car.
He could have put one hand on the small of her back and then he could have put his other hand … where could he have put his other hand? Where would she have liked him to lay his hand? Here, she realized with a shock. But then they would have had to stand close to each other, near enough for him to be able to touch her breast. If he had bent down slightly, their hair would have brushed. And where would this happen? In the transept of St Andrew’s Church? At her father’s funeral? The reality of her grief came to her, slapped her, chilled her. Flora moved to lie on her side, smoothing her nightdress back down over her hips, then tugged the blankets up. Death felt so close to her; close as a small child peering into her face, too close.
Ribbons of moonlight rippled through the gap in the curtains and her photographs of the cove were rendered visible. Despite her grief, she could still feel this feeling, one she didn’t think she would ever have again after Albert died. This feeling was like a thinly woven thread within her, was the desire to see and to be with this man again.
On Saturday lunchtime, Wilfred knocked on the door of the first cottage in the row: if it wasn’t this one then it must be the other one because they were both pictured in the postcard.
‘No,’ the woman who answered the door said. She wiped dough off her hands on to her apron. ‘No one has gone to meet the Good Lord in Amroth.’ The woman was holding a battered spatula in her swollen hand and Wilfred could smell Welsh cakes; she would have heated up the family bake stone and be making cakes for the Sabbath.
‘No. I don’t know anything about that now,’ she said warily, pushing her thin grey hair behind her ears. She was uncomfortable, as if Wilfred was the Grim Reaper turning up unannounced and asking her to bring out her dead.
‘But I’m to pick up a body at the cottage in the cove. A message was sent,’ Wilfred replied.
‘The cottage? You mean the one at the top of the hill? That’s been empty these last – oh, six or seven years. You’ll not find anyone up there, by damn; they’re all long dead and gone. Buried already! Are you certain you’ve got the right address?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Wilfred replied. ‘I’d better get up there and see if I can find out what’s happening. Thank you for your help, mind.’
Wilfred knew the cottage the woman meant. It had run to rack and ruin and used to belong to a father and son who’d not come back from the Front. The mother had died a while back – probably of heartbreak, Wilfred thought. That was very common, to die of a broken heart – he saw it often in his work. The husband went first, quick as a flash, then the wife followed, sometimes a year to the day. Most often – Wilfred didn’t know why – it was two years later that the wife got sick and gave up the flesh.
Wilfred left the Super Ford at the roadside and walked up the hill and through the copse. It was a slippery, muddy path and he had to concentrate on balancing. The light was flickering through the new leaves. There were many bluebells, daffodils and yellow primroses. Butterflies flitted around the nettles. Someone had called to him, Wilfred realized as he trudged up the hill. The front door of the cottage was lime-washed green but the paint was now bubbled and flaked. He pushed the door open and there, sitting in the dusky light among the grass and moss and dandelions that were growing through the damp earth in the now ownerless and empty cottage, was Flora. Flora, whose father he’d buried this last month, whose mother had forbidden him to take tea with her. It was Flora who had called him. He was startled all over again by her beauty. She looked vulnerable sitting on the ground; it was her courage, Wilfred realized, in asking him here that was making her vulnerable.
Wilfred opened his mouth to say something then understood that this wasn’t a time for talking. Flora had initially met his eyes but was looking away now. How could a woman, Wilfred marvelled, be so demure and so desirable all at the same time? A man could never do that. And what should he do? It was slightly chilly so he took off his suit jacket and walked the few steps towards the blanket; Flora moved over to make space for him. Before sitting beside her, he placed his jacket gently over her shoulders. They sat for a moment while the door of the cottage rattled in the wind. Wilfred got up to secure it with a large stone that lay near the entrance – he could barely keep still because he was so excited. He sat down again.
He turned to Flora. Flora met his gaze and he gently put his hand to her hair and stroked it until the clip of her silver earring came undone and the earring fell on to the blanket by her leg. Wilfred picked it up carefully and put it in Flora’s hand. This is the first time I am touching her hand, he thought.
Wilfred positioned himself round and lay back, suggesting with the pull of his hands that Flora lie down with him. She lay down willingly. Now Wilfred was on his back and Flora was
on her side, her head on his shoulder, and in his arms.
Wilfred traced the outline of her ear beneath her hair. Stroking her hair he was reminded of a poem he had learned at school by that Welsh priest, Manley Gerald Hopkins – was that his name? – no, that wasn’t right. The poem had a line he liked, Every hair is, hair of the head, numbered. He remembered it again.
I walked into a cottage and the woman I am so drawn to was waiting for me and she has lain down with me, Wilfred thought. He could feel the swift beat of Flora’s heart against his chest. This beautiful, raw woman still in her mourning clothes, had called him. He lay there stroking her hair, which was smooth and fine. Perhaps it is me, he thought, who has died, and gone to heaven.
Flora lay in Wilfred’s arms and breathed in the male smell of his black woollen waistcoat and the spiciness of his hair oil. His arms were solid around her. She hadn’t intended to lie on her back, or even lie down at all, but when he pulled her down she went down with him; lay with him, close to him. Flora noticed how Wilfred breathed regularly: inhaling, then exhaling confidently. This man was not Albert, but this man was alive. This is Wilfred, Flora thought. Beyond that, she knew very little about him, the barest facts – that he was the undertaker from Narberth. Flora had a sense of him and that was enough: his mind was alive, questioning, forging, deciding, and she knew instinctively that she was safe with him.
Lying there with Wilfred there were so many possibilities, so many ways they could go. Flora rested serenely, safely, waiting to see what would happen.
When they had left the cottage at the end of the afternoon, Wilfred stood to the side of the doorway and let Flora go out first. Then he had pulled the door to, using some force so as to close it completely and Flora, serenely, shyly, without speaking, had got on her bicycle and cycled away quickly, down the muddy lane, past the hazelnut trees and bluebells and back on to the empty road. Behind her she heard the sound of the engine spluttering and the car driving away along the deserted road in the other direction. She wondered if Wilfred would come to the cove again.
When she reached the road she stopped, pushed her hair from her face and was struck by a thought: why did she like this man? Why Wilfred and not another? Flora didn’t know. There were many men: the two men she had loved, her father and Albert, both now dead. There were other men, the boys in Stepaside with whom she’d gone to school, the farmers’ sons who had brought their horses to her father for shoeing, young men at church. And all the men who had been killed not so long ago, whose names were chiselled on the new war memorial, each letter precise and neat, every name representing a young man and a whole world that had come and gone. All those men. So why Wilfred? And why now, in this dislocation between her father being dead and Flora feeling peaceful about his death?
She began to cycle past Wisemans Bridge, steadily at first then harder and faster, almost as hard as when she had raced to the post office when her father had collapsed, only this time she felt alive, not panicked. It had been years since she had felt this exhilarated. She held the handlebars tightly, feeling her strength. It was windy and the air was carouselling around her.
My father is dead, Albert is dead, but I am alive, she told herself. She forced her hands around the rubber handlebars and dug her thumbnails into the skin of her first fingers, stood up on the pedals, pushing down furiously with all her might. The wind was surging into her. Her face flushed and she kept shaking her head to fling strands of hair out of her eyes. Her lips tasted tangy from the sea air. She could feel her pulse beating in her wrists. She wanted to throw back her head and scream it all out, all the suppressed passions and frustrations of those quiet, deathly years without Albert. She wanted to scream away the dull, dusty deathliness that had befuddled her mind and coddled her body when, all along, she had been surrounded by the sea, endless plashy waves, the great sky, the sharp rocks and the smooth pebbles – though she had seen or felt none of it. She glanced around but there was no one to be seen so she threw back her head, lunged down on the pedals, looked up at the crystal blueness of the sky and said aloud with abandon and certainty.
‘I am alive!’
She cycled wildly until she reached the middle of the cove, where she stopped, took her camera and pointed it at the sea and the sky, framing the immense seascape for a photograph. Framing the view, she remembered the postcard she had sent Wilfred, a photograph of this beach, with its unadorned message: The cottage, the cove, Saturday. The postcard had been a seed, like a plum stone – small, hard, and capable of so much – planted in fertile ground. Perhaps, with time and patience, the seed would grow into a blossoming and fruit-bearing tree. She had taken a risk, hoped for happiness, something beyond grief. She clicked the shutter and took the photograph.
Flora turned her bracelet around on her wrist. If Wilfred came to her, if he came to the cottage next Saturday, she would respond, she would be present with him, talk with him, be alive with him, together, in the world of living people and green trees and warm houses, busy shops and tended farms.
Wilfred snipped the advertisement from the Radio Times with a pair of nail scissors. This was just the thing! What an invention! A wireless set you could walk around with in your arms while listening to the British Broadcasting Corporation. Who ever had thought of that? Heck, people were clever these days. He looked at the illustration again. Mind, the wireless looked quite a weight. He’d have to walk with it, he couldn’t run, but nevertheless, he could now take a leisurely drive to Tenby after a day in the workshop and sit on a blanket on the west beach with the Pye Portable Radio next to him and listen to the Six o’Clock News broadcast. He could scarcely believe such a thing was possible. He was awed.
‘What’s that you’re reading there, boy bach?’ his father asked, coming into the kitchen.
‘Da, you’ll be surprised when I tell you about this. A wireless set you can walk around with.’
‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ his father answered, putting his cap down on the dictionary. Wilfred read on. The advertisement declared the Pye Portable Radio was for the strong and silent type. Wilfred thought he could be the strong and silent type; he was certainly silent when he was listening to the radio, and he could be described as strong, what with carrying all those caskets.
‘What poor fool would be wanting one of them, then?’ his da asked, reading the advertisement over Wilfred’s shoulder. ‘Nothing wrong with a wireless sitting on the sideboard. Who’d want to walk around carrying a great big thing like that? More bloody noise, all the time. What is the world coming to! Cup of tea, Wilfred?’
‘There’s fresh in the pot, Da.’
‘Wilfred, are you taking it into your head to get one of those radios? Get away with you! You’re like a fart in a colander.’
Wilfred looked at the advertisement again. His da had a point. Wirelesses were very heavy – but the man in the drawing was swinging the portable radio in one hand: he looked very dapper and not at all burdened.
‘Perhaps these newfangled radios don’t weigh much,’ Wilfred remarked hopefully.
‘Mark my words,’ said his father, looking for a teacup in the sink, ‘it would be easier walking around with a coffin. Look, it says here it weighs thirty-one pounds.’
Thirty-one pounds was certainly quite a weight, Wilfred thought to himself, though he was easily strong enough to carry it. But he didn’t want to be plodding around Narberth with the wireless set. He was going to place it in the back of the motorized hearse – when there wasn’t a body in it – then drive to the cove and take the wireless into the cottage and they … Flora and he … would have music. Well, it occurred to Wilfred, they might have music. And dance. Mind, they would have to meet when a music programme was being broadcast. He would need to look at the Radio Times to check. It would be no good if it were the news broadcast on the airwaves. He didn’t want the Prime Minister’s voice in the background when he was lying on the blanket with Flora – that wouldn’t do at all. No, one couldn’t hold a young lady with Mr Ramsay MacDo
nald droning on about the Labour Party in the background. The Prime Minister in London was a sober and important man but his voice wasn’t conducive to kissing. Wilfred didn’t know much about these things but he knew that much.
The following Saturday when Wilfred entered the cottage, Flora was standing. Wilfred had pictured her resting on the blanket again, but this time she was standing in the centre of the cottage, wearing a simple linen dress, her dark brown hair held high on her head. And she was here, she had come. The message had said, The cottage, the cove, Saturday. Wilfred had hoped, rightly, that the message meant more than just that one, first Saturday last week.
‘Hello, Flora,’ he said, and he was surprised by the sound of his own voice. Last Saturday she had been mute apart from a gentle, ‘Oh,’ when her earring had fallen into her lap. She had neither greeted Wilfred nor bade him farewell. She had sat serenely and patiently and then left by bicycle.
‘Hello, Wilfred.’ Her voice was fresh and cool with a strong Welsh lilt. They could speak to each other! Wilfred realized. There could be even more than the rich silence they had when they met before. There was a whole world of talking to Flora. But then there was a pause, a silence after the enormity of their first words – and the silence moved into awkwardness as Wilfred tried to think of something to say. It was a charged pause, difficult to shift. Now they had spoken to each other once, it was possible, necessary and natural that they should speak again. But what to say?