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

by Wendy Jones

  Wilfred’s mind reeled, increasingly panicked. He knew the men in the Rugby Club would have suggestions: ‘Make a joke,’ the lads said. ‘Make her laugh and take her dancing.’ It seemed good advice, but this wasn’t a dance in the Queen’s Hall and Wilfred didn’t know many jokes – cracking jokes wasn’t part of the undertaking trade. He could only ever remember two riddles: What’s the difference between an onion and an accordion? No one cries when you cut up an accordion. And: What’s got a mouth but can’t talk? A letterbox. No, thought Wilfred, that wasn’t funny at all. And Flora might think it was rather an odd thing to say, like that, out of the blue: ‘Hello, Flora. What’s got a mouth but can’t talk?’ Flora might think he was a bit deranged, not quite the round shilling.

  As an undertaker he liked to be able to have something to say at solemn occasions and this was a momentous occasion. But it wasn’t a funeral. Wilfred was beginning to realize that the profession of undertaker wasn’t much use to him when it came to matters of romance.

  ‘Hello, Flora,’ he repeated. It wasn’t a very imaginative piece of conversation, but then he heard himself say it again: ‘Hello, Flora.’ A third time! His self-consciousness grew to enormous proportions. She would think there was something wrong with him. With nothing to say for himself! And him owning a business! He glanced at her and saw that she was smiling and there was a warmth in her deep-set brown eyes.

  ‘Hello, Wilfred.’ They smiled at each other and Wilfred took in Flora’s beauty. It was difficult not to stare; the soft down on the nape of her neck, the gentle way her body was held together and the silkiness of her. She was so lovely, he thought.

  Wilfred reached out and placed his hand around Flora’s shoulder. Then he stood beside her, accidentally bumping her slightly. It was difficult for men – he knew this because he had thought about it – to touch women gently and easily. Men’s bodies were for rugby, for great, big, clumpy movements and bashing into people. And he, like most men, had large hands. Craftsmen made intricate objects with their hands, he himself did dovetail joints on coffins, but compared to the refined quality of Flora’s downy skin and the grace of her body, his hands would always be large and clumsy, his touch would always seem butterfingered. Women – apart from the really old, fat ones, and the ones from Carmarthenshire – were nearly always daintier than men. With Flora he felt like a dog trying to touch a china figurine with its paws. But Flora was smiling; she liked his hand stroking her arm, self-conscious though Wilfred’s gestures were.

  When Flora spoke, Wilfred was startled all over again.

  ‘I have my blanket.’ She went to the fireplace where there, as before, was the same simple cream blanket buckled in a leather strap. She leaned down and began to unroll the blanket, placing it on the floor then smoothing it with the palms of her hands. Wilfred saw it for what it was: an invitation.

  Wilfred knew the recently bereaved sometimes wanted to take a lover immediately. Or else they wanted a dispute. Some of them, the drinkers especially, looked for fisticuffs. This was not something Mr Ogmore Auden had talked to Wilfred about – it would have been undignified. Mr Auden had maintained a discreet silence about the matter, but it was well-known in the undertaking trade in Pembrokeshire that some young widows – and he was sure it was the same for widowed husbands – needed love, reassurance, affection and sometimes something more, and would seek it out and accept it much sooner than people would imagine.

  Wilfred felt moved by this: the very human need to be held and to be intimate. As an undertaker, he saw that the recently bereaved needed to feel they were still alive, that their body and sensibilities hadn’t died along with their loved one. And while the Scripture said, In the midst of life we are in death – something Wilfred had heard repeated many times in funeral services – it was also true, Wilfred knew from his work, that in the midst of death we are alive. And what better way to know that and feel it in one’s living body than by sexual congress? The newly bereaved know that instinctively, Wilfred thought.

  Wilfred understood. He didn’t judge it. The bereaved were a lost and broken community, and making love would – must – help them find their way back to life. Flora, Wilfred knew, belonged among them. She had the white face, chilled fingers and the sad eyes that the recently bereaved had for the first few months. She was open and broken because her father had passed away. She needed gentleness and affection, and she needed to be held, and he wanted to give her whatever she asked him for.

  6

  Half in Leaf, Half on Fire

  ‘What are you doing up there, Grace Amelia?’ Grace’s mother called shrilly.

  ‘Reading, Mother.’

  Grace had never stood on a book before. She’d been taught not to fold over the corners of the pages but to use her leather bookmark with the picture of St David’s Cathedral embossed on it, and also never to break the spine despite the satisfying crack it made as the glue broke and, while nobody had told her so, she knew putting her feet on books was unconscionable: equal probably only to burning them, something that had happened during the Crusades, a long time ago, in darker, more violent times. Imagine burning books – they were so precious, more so than herself. She would take her shoes off first; that would make it somewhat better, but her parents would be shocked, nevertheless, that she had stood on books.

  Grace took some volumes from the shelf and placed them in a small, exact pile. She looked up at the ceiling beam, calculating its height: six books – two piles of three – on the dressing-table should be enough. She was going to choose very carefully. The books she would put her feet on were important; they would be the ones she stood for and the ground she stood on. She looked at her bookshelf, reading the spines. Jane Eyre? Jane Eyre was well intentioned, just in difficult circumstances. People in History? Boudicca was Amazonian and strong-armed, riding her chariot and fighting for freedom. There was Madoc’s copy of Beekeeping: A Discussion of the Life of the Honeybee and of the Production of Honey by Everett Franklin Phillips, Ph.D? George Bernard Shaw’s new play, Saint Joan? But Joan of Arc was impossibly pure, and a martyr. This Side of Paradise – Madoc’s friend Sidney had given her that.

  Then there were her childhood books: Anne of Green Gables, Heidi, What Katy Did Next, Pollyanna – stories about girls who were good. All Pollyanna had ever done wrong was ruin her parasol. Beth in Little Women was so perfect she was only fit for heaven. Why were girls in novels exemplary, almost saintly? Grace preferred adventure stories, histories and romances about what to do if you were damned and female, tales about women who were kind, likeable and believable, who escaped unpunished. No thin Quakers with lace caps. No beatific consumptives coughing delicately. No unloved, eternally jolly orphans. Grace craved books about girls like herself: good women, normal women in a world bigger and more powerful than themselves.

  Suddenly a fragment of memory burst into her mind. She heard herself speaking in an urgent, desperate whisper, so frightened her parents would overhear what she was saying and equally terrified he wouldn’t hear her. ‘No, no, don’t, please don’t!’ she pleaded. ‘Please don’t, please don’t, please don’t!’ They were in the bedroom. Next to the stairs! Her mother and father came up the stairs. He was here again, charming, neat, handsome, personable, his shoes squeaking on the linoleum. ‘Please, oh please don’t!’ That was all she had said. And she had meant it, really meant it. Perhaps he thought she hadn’t meant it – or didn’t care. And while it was happening to her, what filled her mind’s eye was the brown wallpaper: she focused on the intertwining lines of the raised shapes, she saw the exact tone of the slick, dark brown paint on the paper and the delicate six-petalled daisy trapped in the arms of one square of Anaglypta.

  ‘Grace Amelia!’ her mother squalled from downstairs, interrupting Grace’s thoughts. ‘You’ve been up there too long; you’d better be doing something productive. I’m going to the Mothers’ Union Thursday Club for the afternoon. And I’m expecting you to have finished knitting those dishcloths before I get back.’
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  ‘Yes, Mother.’

  Grace heard the front door click and her mother walk out. The house was empty. She took the jar of cold cream and talcum powder from her dressing-table and put them on to the floorboards, then dragged the dressing-table into the middle of the room so it was hard against the bed. There was a dead bee under the dressing-table, so she picked up its weightless, papery body and dropped it out of the top of the sash window. A memory came to her as if on a wave and she felt herself overcome with its reality. And shock. She would not, would not think of it.

  If she pushed the dressing-table to the left … she’d have to take the glass cover off first otherwise it would be slippy … Would the piece of furniture take her weight? The pile of books needed to be high enough and level – one more big book should do it. She remembered her copy of The Mabinogion and took it out of the drawer in her bedside cabinet where it was always kept. The Mabinogion, the very first Welsh book, began with a story in Narberth. When she took that step off the dressing-table, right under her feet would be the book she loved most. She dusted the wine-red cover then opened it at the first page and read, And he saw a tall tree by the side of the river, one half of which was on fire, from the root to the top, and the other half was green and in full leaf. Grace felt like the tree in The Mabinogion, the one that had stood by Narberth Castle nine hundred years ago, the tree that was half on fire and half in green leaf. That was how she felt, both burned and oddly budding.

  Then again, in her mind’s eye, she saw the wallpaper. She blinked tightly, desperate to crush the memory away. She tried extremely hard never to think of those moments but it happened without her wanting to. And it was impossible for her to think clearly about anything to do with it, except that she must be the only person in Narberth, in Pembrokeshire, perhaps in the whole world, to have this happen to her. Her face was pushed against the paper on the wall; she saw the intricate daisy held safe and sound in the square. It was a square with rounded corners. A perfect memory of one patterned square. She knew it had happened because she remembered the bedroom wallpaper. It was true but it wasn’t convincing. It wouldn’t stand up in Narberth courthouse:

  ‘What do you remember of the event in question?’

  ‘I know it happened because I remember the wallpaper.’

  ‘What else do you remember?’

  ‘Only the wallpaper.’ No one would be sent to Swansea Prison because of the memory of wallpaper.

  The six books were chosen now. She placed them in two piles in the middle of her dressing-table. From its drawer she took a silk scarf. The midnight-blue fabric was beautifully, imperceptibly woven; it seemed almost impossible that thread could be so fine and that a craftsman – or probably a machine – could weave it so delicately. She had been given this neck scarf by her nana for her twenty-first birthday, had chosen it herself from the display in the shop window at Mrs Hewyll Russell’s Haberdasher’s & Draper’s, liking the white fleur-de-lys against the blackish-blue background. She wore it when she wanted to feel like an adult, a woman, and appear more sophisticated, more knowing, than she felt.

  The practicalities were proving more awkward than she had imagined. Her silk scarf felt sleek in her hands and she was concerned the knot wouldn’t hold – she had washed the scarf two days ago for this purpose and it was very silky. What if the knot slipped out? Should she sew the scarf around the beam – Grace wasn’t sure she would be able to reach that high – and would the stitches even hold? Grace didn’t want to put stitches in her beautiful neck scarf, didn’t want to pierce the finely woven fabric that her nana had bought for her. Did she need rope instead?

  Grace picked up the Lily of the Valley talcum powder from the floorboards and twisted the lid open and shut. She didn’t have a choice. Secrecy wasn’t possible, her body wouldn’t allow it and it was naïve to think so. She had hoped for a few weeks that perhaps she would have some luck – but her luck was lousy. It was not that she wanted to die; it was that she didn’t know how to endure what was now her life. She wouldn’t think about what she was going to do, she would just do it.

  There was the verse in John, chapter eight, And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free. Her mother had embroidered it as a sampler and it hung in an unvarnished frame opposite her parents’ iron bed. What if Grace told the truth? Her mother would scream – if she didn’t die of shock. Or kill Grace. What would the neighbours say? No one would believe her. And if they did, they would tell her to lie. Say she’d gone mad. It was more than people could sympathize with, too real for people to bear. And too real for her to endure.

  She held the scarf to her face and breathed in the faint aroma of lavender from the muslin bag of dried flowers she kept among her clothes. Perhaps Wilfred …? If she told Wilfred, would he understand? He had loved her once, if only for an afternoon. Grace had tried to be light and airy for Wilfred, to pretend that she, her situation, was simple when the truth was bleak, complex and barely utterable, never mind explicable. And if she explained, would anyone, anyone, understand? Her world would be different if she knew that only one person would understand.

  Grace took Moll Flanders from the bottom of the neat pile on the dressing-table and sat in the window seat, scrunched herself up tightly and opened the book randomly but soon put it down by her stockinged feet, unable to read. A desk, six books and a silk scarf. Or honesty. It was a stark choice. ‘Speak plainly,’ was what her father said to his patients as they struggled to explain their symptoms when they were embarrassed, ashamed and guilty. ‘Speak plainly so that I can understand.’ Perhaps, then, her father would have an answer – he seemed to have an answer to a hundred illnesses. But to this? Did this happen anywhere else? Surely not in Narberth.

  There must be an answer. There must be a way out.

  Grace looked up to the ceiling and the creosoted beam above her dressing-table. There was a way out in the roof. She climbed on to the dressing-table. I will lift up mine eyes to the Lord from whence cometh my help. Is that what King David meant: a pile of books on a dressing-table and a silk scarf around a beam?

  Wilfred’s da had work to do. He looked around at the graves in St Andrew’s churchyard, many of which he had dug. Gravedigging required strength, a cheerful disposition and a robust state of mind. Wilfred’s da had taken to it over twenty years ago, enjoying the toil of digging the earth whether it was frozen in the winter or full of rainwater in the spring. He felt at peace in the graveyard with its view of the green curvaceous hills.

  As he began digging he thought of his wife – Wilfred’s mother – who had died after giving birth to their son. Wilfred’s da didn’t know a woman, least of all his quietly spoken wife, could make sounds like that – the screams and the bellowing – for almost five hours. He had waited in the kitchen and then in the yard listening to her. At ten past six in the morning his wife’s screams had been replaced by Wilfred’s crying, and then for four endless days, his wife’s incessant moaning for water, finally followed by the quiet of her death room, overlaid by the mewling of the small baby. His sister, Blodwen, had given Wilfred goat’s milk from a glass bottle and the baby had sucked vigorously. ‘He wants to be alive,’ he said in Welsh to Blodwen, and then to his tiny son, ‘you suck like you want to live.’ Wilfred had learned all this from his Auntie Blodwen who had been at both his birth and his mother’s death.

  After his wife’s death, Wilfred’s da had been a broken man, at a loss as to how to live and go on without his wife beside him. It had taken a good two or three years, until Wilfred was up and toddling about, before his father had been able to find a way forward. By day his father worked as a labourer on Clunderwen Farm, but at night he would go and visit his wife, sitting tranquilly by her grave. It gave him a sense of peace and soothed his grief, which was more intense and painful than anything he had ever known. It was during these nights that he met the gravedigger, a now elderly man of fifty-nine; too old to do his work well. The gravedigger had befriended his father, understanding as he did
the nature of grief – his father hadn’t been the first person to sit through the night by the granite gravestone of a loved one – and accustomed to the solemnity and madness of the bereaved. Wilfred’s father had begun to help the older man to cut the sod and dig the graves, and had eventually taken over the position himself when the gravedigger’s arthritic spine prevented him from working.

  Wilfred’s da felt blessed, as he dug the new grave, to like his work. He toiled in the day tending to the grass and the hedgerows in the graveyard but he liked to dig graves at night by moonlight, to be free and alone with the stars and the planets. He took satisfaction in being outside, casting an eye for Cassiopeia or the three stars in Orion’s belt, and was pleased when he recognized the familiar and distinctive light reflected by Jupiter. Every couple of months he borrowed The Constellations of the Stars for the Enthusiastic Amateur by Ferdinand Nell from the Mechanics’ Institute Library, each time reading about a different constellation then searching for it in the night sky, mapping it out and watching it, over the months, cross the heavens.

  When there was a death in Narberth or Templeton, as there was earlier today, he would go unbeckoned, the wind flapping at his coat, a lantern on a stick, to the graveyard at St Andrew’s and measure the plot. He left home at nine o’clock at night, after a pint in Mrs Annie Evans’s public house the Conduit, then dug until four o’clock in the morning. It took him seven hours – one, he said, for every age of man – never less, never more. He would put an hour of sweat into the earth for every decade of a man – or woman’s – allotted time in the world whether the deceased had had a full lifespan or not. It was different for a child; a child’s grave never took long.

  Wilfred’s da knew this earth, he knew the different textures of the soil in the graveyard: where the roots of the blackberry bushes matted the mud, where the whitethorn grew, how the shale at the bottom of the graveyard was waterlogged in spring and mottled with moss. He was acquainted with where the magpies nested, where the red squirrels built their drays and where the moles would likely make their crumbly molehills. He remembered when to expect the swarms of swallows and the murmurations of starlings and he watched the swifts flicking and dashing, marvelling at how – some birdwatchers said – they could stay airborne for years without landing once.