‘Absolutely. We discussed it in depth.’
‘Well, that really does surprise me. Will you be able to cope with it?’
‘Of course I will.’
Norah, who had been hovering in the background, asked if she was needed any longer. Amelia thanked her for what she’d done and told her to go home. After she’d left we found the Yellow Pages, got the twenty-four-hour number for the funeral directors in Dundee and arranged for them to come for the body. They said they wouldn’t manage for a couple of hours. Amelia gave them her mobile number and asked them to call when they were on their way.
She said, ‘I’m going home now. Gregor’s playing golf all day, and I’ve got the house to myself. I’m going to have a big glass of gin. Care to join me?’
‘I don’t really want to leave her,’ I said.
Amelia looked at her watch. Clearly her ideal way of spending Sunday afternoon was not in the company of a corpse. I said, ‘She’ll have gin here. I could do with one too. Would you mind? If you don’t want to stay I’m happy to wait for the undertakers myself.’
‘Okay,’ Amelia said. ‘Fix us a couple of large ones. I don’t suppose she’d mind us helping ourselves.’
‘She’d mind if we didn’t,’ I said.
‘Maybe we can sit somewhere else,’ Amelia said. ‘It’s a little stuffy in here.’
I found gin, tonic water and glasses, even a lemon, and poured us two enormous drinks. We sat in the kitchen on a bench-seat below the big window overlooking the back garden. Half a dozen blackbirds, male and female, were flitting about on the grass with their characteristic busyness. We toasted Catherine. I said, ‘I can’t believe she’s just taken off like this without saying goodbye.’
‘You nearly did the same yourself,’ Amelia said.
We sat watching the blackbirds. ‘She always enjoyed garden birds,’ I said. ‘She said there was something optimistic about them. So long as they were singing life couldn’t be so dreadful.’
‘It’s funny, isn’t it,’ Amelia said. ‘You and I, different jobs, but we deal with a lot of the same stuff. And right at the core of what we do sits this nasty old bugger called death. I do my best to send him packing, or at least keep him at bay, and you spend your time preparing people for him, telling them there’s nothing to be frightened of, they can walk through death’s dark vale and there’ll be something good on the other side. Don’t you?’
‘Depends who I’m talking to,’ I said. ‘Catherine, for example, wouldn’t tolerate any of that. Happy hopeful birds was fine, but she’d have slung me out if I’d started any of the kingdom come routine.’
Amelia said, ‘I bet she would have. That’s why I’m surprised at you presiding over her funeral. I know you were friends, but it doesn’t quite fit with what I imagine her views were. What are you going to say?’
‘I’ll think of something,’ I said.
‘I reckon even the most convinced atheist must get a bit nervous when the moment comes,’ she said. ‘More perhaps than those of us who just don’t think about it very much. I mean, if you’re an atheist you’ve really nailed your colours to the mast, haven’t you?’
I thought of Pascal’s bet, and I thought of David Hume, dying and completely unfazed by the prospect of death. ‘Catherine wasn’t an atheist,’ I said. ‘She was very explicit about that. She was an agnostic. She said denying the existence of God was as arrogant and stupid as asserting it. The only sensible way to behave is to believe in what we know to be real.’
‘Yes, but that’s not how people’s minds work. People can’t help speculating. That’s why your crowd will never go out of business.’
‘Who? The Kirk?’
‘All churches. People whose job it is to articulate spirituality for other people. You’re willing to talk about it. And you’re willing to talk about death. Everybody else in the West is running around forming boy bands or girl bands, doing reality TV or being famous for being famous, everybody’s in denial about this one inescapable fact, and you guys are the only ones talking about it. Well, apart from us in the medical profession.’
‘You can’t expect boys in boy bands to spend a lot of time contemplating death. You can’t blame anybody for not thinking much about it. Why dwell on something you can’t do anything about?’
‘I get the sense that we’re both playing devil’s advocate here,’ Amelia said. ‘Surely the way you think about death totally determines the way you live your life? If you don’t ever think about it can you really be alive in any meaningful way?’
‘The unexamined life is not worth living, you mean?’
‘The unexamined patient may be harbouring a life-threatening disease,’ Amelia said. ‘If you find out in time, you can do something about it.’
‘Sometimes,’ I said. ‘Sometimes all you can do is tell them.’
‘Or not tell them,’ Amelia said. ‘Like you said, it depends who you’re talking to. Anyway, what about you? What do you think of death after your recent escape from his clutches?’
I thought about the clear white light in the tunnel, I thought about coming back and I thought about my Devil. ‘The honest truth?’ I said. ‘I did come pretty close, Amelia. I know I did, I remember it. The honest truth is, I’m not frightened by death. I don’t really want to elaborate on that, but I think there really is something good on the other side. I don’t know what, but it’s not the end.’
‘For Catherine too? Or only if you believe in it?’
‘Ah,’ I said. ‘That’s an impossible question to answer.’
‘It’s where it all falls apart, as far as I’m concerned,’ Amelia said.
She finished her gin and said she’d phone when she heard from the undertakers. I reassured her that I would switch off everything and lock up when Catherine had been taken away, and she headed off, closing the front door behind her.
It was coming up to one o’clock. The service would be long over, but Lorna had said she would call in if I wasn’t at it. I knew she wouldn’t give the manse doorbell one ring and leave it at that. She’d hang around. She’d try to get me in later. I didn’t want to deal with Lorna. In spite of the circumstances, I was glad to be where I was. Catherine was giving me a kind of sanctuary.
I went back to the kitchen. It was a very quiet street. The only sounds I could hear were the whirr of the fridge and birdsong in the garden. How strange it was that at that moment nobody in Monimaskit except Amelia and myself knew that Catherine Craigie was dead. She was gone but everybody assumed she was still here. Which, of course, she was. Then I remembered Norah. Word would get around pretty quickly.
I drank up, washed the glasses and went back into the drawing room. She reclined like a statue of herself, or like one of those people overwhelmed by the volcanic fumes and ash at Pompeii. There was a faint, sweet odour in the room, something like warm earth. I went and stood over Catherine and her distinctive old cupboard smell rose around me. The table beside her had a single drawer in it, where she kept her stash of alternative medicine. I opened it and found three unsmoked joints and a wee plug of cannabis, all of which I carefully pocketed. I picked up the whisky glass, swilled it, sniffed it. Strong, pungent: an Islay malt. I put the glass back down and lifted the book, a large paperback: The Late Medieval Scottish Parliament.* Like the malt, typical Craigie taste. I hoped she’d been at a gripping part when it happened. But maybe she hadn’t been reading at all. Maybe she’d been sleeping, or thinking, or lying, a little stoned, listening to music.
I went over to the stereo, which was still on, opened the CD slide and checked what she’d been playing. Manuel de Falla’s Nights in the Gardens of Spain. That was Catherine too: classical but a little out of the mainstream. Romantic as well. I could hear her vehemently denying that she was a romantic.
I pushed the slide home again and pressed play. The strings of the orchestra began to seep into the atmosphere, slow and dark at first, then gathering pace, and the piano trickling in above them. I sat down in the chair I usually oc
cupied. After a minute I stretched my legs out, leaning back as the music filled the room. I could almost see it. I imagined the notes entering the empty shell lying on the couch, swirling around in her skull, leaving again. She was here but she was away. Like my mother but different. I missed her already. Who would I talk to now?
I closed my eyes and let the music pour over me. Until Amelia phoned to say that the undertakers were on their way, I would be quite safe from disturbance. I liked that. There was a great contentment in it.
XL
I couldn’t keep the world away so easily after I returned to the manse. From the Monday I felt obliged to deal with a large number of phone calls, letters, visitors. The press were still interested in me. So were the folk at 121 George Street, who phoned in order to update their own press statement. On the Monday evening about half the Session turned up en masse, to shake my hand and wish me well, to assure me that they would keep parish matters ticking over for a week or two till I was fully recovered and (for they were only human) to see what physical and emotional state I was in. I thanked them for their kind thoughts and said I would indeed greatly appreciate their help while I recuperated. The only business that I could not, and did not wish to, delegate for the time being, I said, was the funeral of Catherine Craigie, who they might have heard had passed away at the weekend. The ways of a small town are wondrous: they had indeed heard, and while some of them were not great admirers of Catherine they all concurred that Monimaskit had lost a prominent citizen, and that it was fitting that I should bury her. I was not surprised that Peter Macmurray was absent from this party. I expected to hear from him in due course.
I had that morning spoken to Catherine’s lawyers, a Montrose-based firm. Mr Stewart, the partner whose client she had been, sounded down-to-earth and efficient. He had a copy of her funeral wishes and asked me if I intended to carry them out. When I said yes, he answered – I could almost hear his smile – that he would be sure to attend. Later, after he had talked to Amelia about the cause of death and then to the undertakers, and after I had checked with the council’s cemeteries department about the availability of gravediggers, we spoke again and agreed that the burial could take place on the following Monday. He would place the necessary notices in the papers if I handled the special arrangements for the funeral.
I had good reasons, quite apart from Catherine’s desire that I conduct the event, for not passing this duty on to anybody else. I went to see the headteacher of the Academy and said that in recognition of Miss Craigie’s long service at the school it would be highly appropriate if a class of first- or second-years represented the school at the funeral. The head prevaricated: perhaps, he suggested, older students would be better. Some of the twelve-year-olds were not always well behaved and had short attention spans. I understood that, I said. The more mature pupils would be welcome too, but Miss Craigie had especially wanted younger children to be there. The funeral would be neither long nor sombre, but celebratory. The head was a relatively recent appointment: he had been in post barely a year and knew Catherine only by reputation. After some more humming and hawing he agreed to supply me with twenty-four children.
I went round to Catherine’s house by car and collected everything she’d gathered for the funeral from the cupboard under her stairs. I took it all back to the manse and spent a couple of evenings in the dining room – a space I virtually never used – assembling kites, unwrapping streamers and testing different percussion instruments. I ordered a selection of confectionery from Jim Currie, the newsagent, and arranged with the church hall committee to provide tea and sandwiches after the service. I also notified the beadle (the church officer who looks after the building itself) that the funeral would be taking place. It would not be a formal service, I said, and I was happy to organise everything myself if she couldn’t be there. There would be no need for the organist.
At six o’clock on the Wednesday evening the doorbell rang. Through the glass I saw the stocky figure of Peter Macmurray hotching from one foot to the other. I opened the door.
I have not written in any detail about Macmurray, but it is necessary to do so now. He is a barrel-shaped, red-faced, aggressive man in his sixties. He has thin, yellow hair plastered across the top of his head in long strands, like unfinished raffia work. He tends, when roused, to stab the air with his podgy fingers, and he seldom smiles – and never did in my company. By day he is an accountant and by night, as Jenny used to say, he adds the saved and subtracts the damned, and always comes out with a minus figure. Certainly in his estimation my wife had been in the latter category, since she never attended church, and I was in there too, for being a wolf in sheep’s clothing. I once heard another minister, at the General Assembly, say that in every Session there is an elder given by God to be a thorn in the minister’s flesh. I felt that Peter Macmurray had been specially selected to goad me in Monimaskit.
‘Peter,’ I said. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘I’d like to come in, please,’ he said. Somehow he managed to imply in this brief statement that I was preventing him from doing so and that, since the manse was Church property, this was a breach of his rights.
‘Well, you’d better, then,’ I said, and led him to the study. I sat at my desk and offered him a seat. He looked me up and down, glanced around the study as if to refresh his mind of its contents, sat down and then fired his opening salvo.
‘Mr Mack,’ he said, ‘I am of course relieved, as is the rest of the Session I’m sure, that you have been safely returned to us after your accident, and I appreciate that you are taking some time to regain your health. Nevertheless there are two matters which it is my duty to raise with you. I fear there is very little that can be done with regard to the first of these but I’m going to raise it nevertheless. The second matter is of some urgency, so I trust you’ll allow me to speak my mind.’
‘You generally do, Peter,’ I said, ‘and I’m grateful for your concern. What’s bothering you?’
He eyed me suspiciously. ‘I’m speaking on my own behalf and from my own conscience,’ he said, ‘as I have had occasion to do more than once in the years you’ve been here. The first matter is this exhibition that you got involved in at the museum. I realise that it’s too late to do anything now, but I’d heard about your part in it so I went to see for myself. Quite apart from the doubtful merits of the display itself, I see that the artist, I forget his name…’
‘William Winnyford,’ I said.
‘Aye, Winnyford. Clearly he’s modelled part of his exhibition on this very room, which I don’t recall being on the agenda at any recent Session meetings. And clearly you have gone out of your way to help him, reading out bits of fairy tales and encouraging silly ideas about devils in caves, and what I want to say and put on record is, is this really the way for a minister in our Church to behave? It seems to me yet another example of how you have brought the sacred office that you hold and the good name of our Church and faith into disrepute. As for the exhibition itself –’
I held up my hand. ‘Peter,’ I said, ‘if you want to complain about Bill Winnyford’s work, go to the museum. If you want to complain about my involvement in it, and put it on record as you say, bring it up at the next Session meeting. I’m not prepared to discuss that any further here.’
He snorted and turned a little pinker. ‘That’s the response I expected,’ he said. ‘I’m not surprised that you do not defend the indefensible. I will do as you suggest. The other matter is more serious and immediate. I understand that you intend to officiate at the burial of Catherine Craigie next week.’
‘On Monday, yes.’
‘You cannot do that.’
I drew myself up in my chair.
‘What did you say?’
Macmurray drew himself up too. ‘You cannot do it,’ he said. ‘The woman was an atheist who mocked and derided the Kirk, Christianity and everything to do with religion. She has a family lair in the kirkyard and we cannot prevent her from being buried there, but fo
r you to officiate at her funeral, well, it’s just intolerable.’
I felt like getting to my feet and punching him.
‘I do not need you to tell me whose funeral I may or may not conduct,’ I said. ‘She’s a parishioner. I surely don’t need to remind you that I have an obligation to all the people in this parish, regardless of their faith or lack of it.’
‘There are exceptions,’ he said coldly.
‘No, there are not. We are the national Church. It’s in our Articles. She requested my services at her funeral and I cannot, even if I wished to, refuse her.’
‘You’re doing it because she was your friend, not because she was a parishioner, and certainly not because of the Declaratory Articles,’ Macmurray said, pushing himself forward on his seat. ‘Everybody knows how chief you and she were. It was an unfitting relationship for a minister while she was alive, and it is equally unfitting for you to do her a favour like this now she’s dead.’
I stood up. ‘That’s enough,’ I said. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself. I think you should leave before you say anything more foolish.’
He rose too, but he chose not to hear what I had said. His stubby fingers began to poke at the space between us.
‘And I hear that the service you intend to conduct is to be an improper one. God knows what you have in mind. Something sordid that would suit her, no doubt. Some piece of Amazonian voodoo dressed up as scholarship. She was a proud, wicked woman and a fallen one at that.’
‘You are an ignorant man,’ I said, ‘and I don’t know what you are talking about, but I ask you again to leave this manse.’
‘I’m on my way,’ he said. He strode from the room and through the hallway, then stopped at the front door, one hand on the handle, and turned to face me again. ‘She told you she went to Mexico, didn’t she? She told everybody that. Well, maybe she did and maybe she didn’t, but that wasn’t why she left. We all know why she left. She was carrying a bairn and she went away to get rid of it. Aye, she did, and if she didn’t give it up for adoption she did worse. And when she came back she was a schoolteacher, and you’d think butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.’
The Testament of Gideon Mack Page 36