Quilt

by Nicholas Royle

  – Yes, she says hesitating, that would be perfectly all right, so long as it is in keeping with the occasion.

  And as for in the church or at the graveside, he says quite firmly:

  – By the graveside.

  But later he phones her and changes this, having considered the possibility of rain and elderly or less able mourners obliged to stand at length in the graveyard, and would the sound carry, he wonders, in the event of a hymn or reading ‘in keeping with the occasion’? What would be the point of it if no one can hear anything?

  In the event the rain holds off and they proceed to the side of the double grave standing in grass unmown for weeks, following his reading of Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ inside the church, he repeating in himself, to the syllable, the as if satirically stern, always surprising force of his father’s rendition, its loudness so much at variance with his diurnal taciturnity, a storming on the heights as at school carol services when the son was a boy, blindly cherubic with unbroken voice blushing in a sea of voices, buoyed up by his father’s among them.

  Then there is the vicar and the frog. At the omega of her call, at the denouement of what is to be the vicar’s first and last visit, all pleasantries ending, without quite going so far as to say lovely to meet you look forward to seeing you at the funeral, he opens the front door, there’s plenty of space for her to pass through, but then she retracts more fully the porch door already sufficiently ajar, and he detects a slight sound absolutely out of place, a faint crunch. She hears or seems to hear nothing, evidently too busy in the world of her own virtuous thoughts and feelings, or thinking about lunch, but he knows he hears something. Only after she has driven away does he look down and see in the jamb, close by the rusty hinge, a frog, or what remains of a frog, with possibly a final throe, the throe as he goes to touch, no, not a throe, a cast of the light, a fantastical last contraction. The vicar killed the frog as she was leaving.

  What is the frog’s place in the yarn? What is this leap of faith into the door jamb and wait for the final crunch, as if that frog is indeed another forgery, a hopping mad music or rhythmic throe, like slime, like a caul, over eyes and ears, like the rhapsody of sky and shadows at the bus station or the feeling of being a mollusc under someone’s descending shoe?

  And all the while leaping backwards, in an analepsis of ranarian lucidity, through the entire entraining of funeral arrangements and making the downstairs of the house clean and tidy enough to accommodate the reception after the service, at every turn and totting up of post-mortem preparations the bereaved man and the girl-stranger are, merely on his say-so, his implacable, irrefutable position on the topic having become evident to her over a series of evenings following her arrival, his laying out of the design, the vision he has, in order to do what has to be done, on his insistence they are at the same time making way for an impressively large aquarium, to be installed in the dining room. It needs to be longer than it is high, four by two metres and just sixty centimetres deep, the desirability of a pool as large as possible scarcely requiring specification, not only from an aesthetic point of view but in practical terms: if one of the creatures should die, it has far less effect in a large space. Inevitably, in the case of a small aquarium, products of decay from a decomposing body contaminate the water and can rapidly bring about the death of other creatures, but if you think big, if you reckon on the worst with a big showcase space, you can have one be dead and decaying for twenty-four hours or more and it have no unduly adverse effect on the life of the other inhabitants.

  These are not his words but she extrapolates them, in ironic form, from what he tells her.

  Not to mention the possibility of an electrical fault, say a heater or pump breaks down, and you don’t notice because it happens in the middle of the night, or you go away for the day, and come back to find the calamitous aftermath of power failure: with a large aquarium everything is more survivable, changes in temperature or pH level more gradual, salvation is plausible and no creature need die.

  – What creatures? And how many are we talking about here? she not surprisingly wants to know.

  – Four, he replies, South American freshwater stingrays: Potamotrygon motoro.

  There is no certainty as to which variant of the type. They might come from Peru, Brazil or Colombia. Many of these species remain unnamed, even undescribed in the scientific literature, but they are distinctive for the beautiful eyespots on their backs, like leopards, peacocks, chameleons or butterflies, and their bellies white as ghosts. He shows her some photographs.

  – I’ve already ordered them, he says.

  They are due to be collected on the eve of the funeral and, as if for children to be adopted and brought home to a house where nothing is prepared, with winter coming and no wood chopped or food laid up, they must work like demons to ensure a welcoming environment.

  Sometimes he says they, sometimes we, he says things, she notices, that fray or slide off at the edges, splashes of grief paint, verbal splay, semantic bubbles, mimosaturated existence popping before you can adjust your vision to see inside. In the evenings when there is nothing to do besides sit in exhaustion, dusty fusty musty in the twilight of the increasingly empty drawing room, dining room or kitchen, or outside on the garden bench to no sound besides sheep in the field above the house and a washing vaguely up of distant traffic on the road running like an unseen wound along the valley below, they discuss at great length the materials required to be ordered or purchased the following day. Gradually they clear and clean, emptying the dining room sufficiently to paint it.

  – We are getting ready for them, he says laughing, slapping it on.

  She is surprised at how many of the materials are available locally or at short notice from elsewhere, and at his passion to have the thing done, the rigour of his researches and enquiries, the forays to builder's merchants and aquarium shops in nearby towns, sea-life centres strung along the coast, online companies for aquaculture supplies and aquarium systems.

  – I never dreamed we’d custom-build a ray pool, did you?

  He makes her face light up with laughter. He works out the volume in cubic inches, divides by 231 to establish how many gallons of water: 2,078. He insists on making the thing out of acrylic, not glass, despite the drawbacks. Acrylic sheets are more easily scratched but they don’t crack or break so easily and, in any case, it’s much simpler to drill acrylic. When it comes to installing an individual filtration system the last thing anyone wants are dead-spot areas of water. Lack of circulation means anaerobic conditions. The spillway design is likewise crucial. We need to make sure there are appropriate corner overflows to take away the protein waste that tends to collect at the surface. Despite the fact that acrylic constructions come with a significant lip to help prevent any creature escaping, we really need a covering. Of this last he explains:

  – No problem. I’ll just cut it from egg-crate plastic.

  Putting together the frame he shows an expertise and dexterity she has not anticipated in him, forcefully snapping together, securing, screwing, drilling the construction of the stand, taking care to ensure sufficient space inside to enable work on the filter as and when required, tilting and adjusting and finally firmly bedding down the acrylic plates. It makes her laugh at least once a day with an absolutely unexpected pleasure, as if this were really how to live, what to do.

  And then everything is ready, as if fairies have been in labour, the day breaks, the downstairs of the house is clear, everything that needed to go to the tip has gone, everything that could be put out of sight in this or that cupboard has been put out of sight, the drawing room and dining room and kitchen and downstairs toilet have been cleaned and vacuumed and scoured and washed. The dining room in particular has been especially arrayed for the occasion, the table moved off into one corner, the candles, cups and saucers, glasses, plates and napkins set forth, the wine, soft drinks and food all in preparation. Everyone who could reasonably be expected to have wanted to know knows this is the d
ay, the church at two o’clock, friends of his parents and family arriving from far and near. He has written his speech and the two of them are ready, he dressed in the black clothes he bought on the morning of the death and she in black picked up on a later outing to the town. They stand clasping one another in the dining room clad in black amazed at what it seems they have done, disbelieving, as if supernatural forces or forgeries must have been at work; it is time to walk down to the church.

  They have no black shoes. They have been aware of this for some days but failed to take action. Their shoes by chance are green, and this is the first thing the undertaker and pallbearers notice, by the hearse outside the lychgate, some twenty minutes before the official start of the proceedings. The undertaker shakes the hand of each in turn and looks them in the face, but his primary focus is the shoes. His gaze drops to the ground, bright green trainers, both of them wearing green trainers: what is this about, why for the life of him hasn’t the gentleman got black shoes and the lady for that matter, the sylph-like slip of a girl who must be half his age? What does it mean, this green, this dividing of green shoes among the two of them? It’s a conspiracy, a sign, something not right.

  It’s a hot day and the undertaker is sweaty already, a corpulent man liable to feel the heat even without all his clobber on, and whether it is the sun or something about the couple, he is not one to be fazed in the course of things, but he is having trouble with these green shoes on the both of them. And what is their relation in any event? Is she his daughter? No, that can’t be right, nor his sister, no resemblance there either. And those green shoes in which they are conjoined, up to what could an undertaker like himself ever suppose to be other than no good! What a colour! He’ll tell his wife, even more than himself massively overweight, dying off the fat of the land, he’ll regale her with the details tonight. After the second funeral and the forty-mile round trip, that evening back in the flat over the funeral parlour, upstairs from the chapel of rest where the son had gone just the day before with the same girl, the wife saw them then, remember, the son come in to pay his respects and the young woman followed like a cat. He never thought anything of it at the time, regarding what their relation was, but the gentleman come in and the undertaker conducted him through to the chapel, a surreal little living room with no television or other furnishings of the living but a chintzy wallpaper with no windows besides one curtained-off interior window that would, were the curtain drawn back, give view onto the stuffy little corridor. It resembled a retro-room in a shabby provincial museum, how life looked decades ago, or so the son thought. Reproductions of landscape paintings are pinned to the walls, lepidopterously; there is a little table with artificial flowers and a faded doily; and crème de la crème, you look up to see a little picture of Jesus, the crucial accoutrement to the designation of chapel of rest. What else?

  Anything else?

  Yes, of course, no twitching at the curtain of the interior window needed to catch that. It is the labyrinth at the centre, the bier or bed or bearing point of life. The day before the funeral and this is the one and only opportunity to see his father reposing, almost prostrate, laid almost horizontally but with a slight propping up of the upper body, the shoulders and head just as he had been last time ‘in life’. All our yesterdays a fortnight of solemnity. Day fought to death, seems only yesterday, but then propped up perhaps a shade more, and smiling that faintly Mona Lisa cryptic valediction about which he will never tell anyone unless in a touch, a certain squeeze of the hand, and now so strangeways, all awry, all away, utterly not. As she said when he invited her to come in and stand a moment with him:

  – That is not your father.

  You expect to see the one who has died, instead this bier, this base, this resting-place empty but for this untenable tenant, intolerable not least because all the time you are acutely aware that the laying out and propping up is but the exhibition of a moment and no sooner will you have vacated the office at the front of the funeral parlour than your lumbering undertaker with the help of his brother-in-law will be carting that one out and bringing in the next for some other’s viewing an hour hereafter, and the body not the body but gone away, imprisoned without weight, the air heavy with lilies, the strange starched white shirt sported by the corpse not his father, his face drawn, yes, hollowed away and weirder than waxwork, with eyelids sealed and stitching too on the forehead, a word he always hears in his father’s voice, the suppressed aitch introducing a sort of naval charm, familiar as a fo’c’sle, for’ead with the proper dropping of the aitch pronounced deep in a forest of id, not head, stitching not only of the surrounding of the face but for the gash, the foregashed forehead a couple of centimetres long, the trace of the wound sustained when he fell from the hospital bed, unattended and unnoticed for who knows how long, onto something he imagines sharp as gravel.

  So digging into that steak and potatoes his wife cooks that night the undertaker will remark on the son as is bereaved and the slip of a girl with him both wearing spring-green shoes and what is the meaning, in a lifetime of working on the sward, turfing up and turfing back down, he never asked himself about green as such and now with this strange couple it is written all over the churchyard. The vicar arrives and they exchange a few practical and time-of-day remarks, suitably subdued. Neither says anything about being ill-at-ease with the manner of the man and the woman in green shoes, but both are troubled, the undertaker now in particular, by suspicions of superstition, a supernaturalistic greenery jarring with the homely Christian calling that goes with the territory, as of grace omitted before the steak. There’s a lifetime’s mistaking brought up in a moment like this, spotting the green shoes and wondering quite out of church bounds, and it’s a blessed relief he considers, as the pallbearers maintain their shuffles of conversation looking at the ground, that he can keep his thoughts to himself and imagine the place where it’s already not possible, what with all the newfangled technology, a man’s privacy approaching the verge of extinction.

  The church, once they’re all ensconced (besides a cousin who is stuck in traffic and only makes it to the reception shortly before everyone leaves), is cool and surprisingly calm out of the August mid-afternoon heat. There are more people than the son had suspected or could even recognise. Presiding over the proceedings, the vicar has comfortably internalised a modus vivendi for dealing with this slightly odd occasion: the bereaved man, evidently not a church-goer, wants nonetheless to read a speech. Complacently she introduces this, after repeatedly invoking in first-name terms the dead man she has never met. In lucid and collected fashion, determined to remain straightforward, neat and audible, he proffers a few remarks about his father’s love of words, his gifts with language, his extraordinary precision with syntax, grammar and spelling (he had worked as an editor and proof-reader over many years), and also about his father’s passion and inventiveness with things, his skill as a maker of objects and contraptions sometimes more Heath Robinsonian than others might tolerate let alone admire. The speech then moves on to a truncated version of an anecdote about the church in which they are standing, concerning a period around twenty years earlier, when the vicar had no connection with the parish.

  One day a builder came and erected scaffolding around the lychgate, presumably with the intention of painting or reroofing or otherwise repairing it, but no one ever followed it up, the days passed and the weeks and months and no one came and no one seemed to mind, besides the son who saw it as a daily eyesore and defacement of the church. Eventually he took it upon himself to type out a statement on the subject, on a single sheet of paper:

  THE SCAFFOLDING

  One of the most recent and most striking features of the village church is the scaffolding at the lychgate. It has now been in place for a year – some say even longer – and its purpose is shrouded in obscurity. It seems likely that the original purpose of the scaffolding was to facilitate the application of a new coat of paint. Perhaps a more fundamental, strenuous and time-consuming operati
on had been envisaged: structural repairs to the lychgate? Rumours have been rife. One account which appears to retain credibility locally is the postulation of an argument between a painter and a builder and their consequent parting of ways. The painter may never return; or, of course, may never have existed. Already it is so long ago that few locals can easily picture the church without its parergonal complement. Another rumour has concerned the establishment of a small group known as the village Revolutionary Council, working for the peaceful overthrow of the scaffolding, as well (it is claimed) as the removal of the grotesque bow of barbed wire which secures the little ‘kissing gate’ round at the back of the church.

  Is the scaffolding now a permanent feature at last, a monument in its own right? And if so, should it be attributed symbolic significance? These are questions which, over the past three months in particular, have caused fierce debate in certain areas of the parish. Suffice to bring to notice the philological endeavours of one local historian who has noted the word ‘scaffolding’ as etymologically of obscure origin but nevertheless as bearing the less widely known sense of ‘a raised framework, as for hunters, or among some primitive peoples for disposal of the dead’ (Chambers). Given the etymology of ‘lychgate’ (Ger. Leiche, corpse), the notion of an alteration in church policy, with regard to the practice of excarnation, irresistibly suggests itself.

  This document was signed ‘For the people of the village’ and dated ‘June 1986’. His father apparently delighted in this so much that he created a specially carved wooden platter, like the sort of distended table-tennis bat you find in certain churches with information about the history and architecture of the building. The dead man screwed down this little text about ‘THE SCAFFOLDING’ under a carefully cut plastic plinth. The son placed the platter in the church that afternoon. Within days the scaffolding was dismantled. Unread at the funeral, this text is nonetheless exactly as the vicar pictured. Every word conforms to her sense of the inside narrative of the occasion.