Ten Things I've Learnt About Love

by Sarah Butler

  Anton kisses the envelope, and drops it into the red mouth of the postbox. ‘You have to go. Thank you, Daniel.’

  ‘I’ll see you,’ I say.

  He moves his head from side to side. ‘Maybe, Daniel.’

  He’s right. You never know what might happen.

  Ten inappropriate thoughts during my father’s funeral

  1) How the hell do aeroplanes fly when they’re so heavy?

  2) He loved Tilly and Cee more than me.

  3) There’s a bag of unwashed underwear in my lost rucksack.

  4) Kal looks well. He’s found someone else, I’m sure of it.

  5) There’s something ironic, surely, about a doctor dying.

  6) I don’t believe in God.

  7) How much would the machine that closes the curtains in front of the coffin cost?

  8) What if I told Kal I’d changed my mind?

  9) The vicar looks a bit like Sean Connery.

  10) I’d like to go back to the house, line up the whisky bottles, and drink the lot.

  I am cold; ever since he died I’ve been cold. Outside, the sky is a tasteless blue. I’m wearing the clothes I bought yesterday: skinny black trousers; a black top with a bow at the neck, which I don’t like much. I examine myself in the bathroom mirror, a toothbrush between my lips. The cold is stealing the glow from my skin, pinching my mouth thinner, narrowing my eyes.

  When I get downstairs, they are all standing in the living room, even though there are enough seats for everyone. Cee’s boys loiter by the fireplace, awkward in dark suits that look brand new. Tilly’s wearing a long black jersey dress that clings to the curve of her stomach. Cee is neat in a black linen suit. She’s wearing blue eyeshadow, like she’s going to a party. I stop in the doorway, and feel for just a moment that they are simply a bunch of strangers, that they are somebody else’s family and I have nothing to do with them. Everyone’s eyes keep straying towards the window; the room shifts each time a car goes by.

  ‘They should be here at eleven,’ Steve says. He has thick lips that always look wet. He pulls up his sleeve to look at his watch. It’s expensive, I can tell by the way he touches it. ‘About ten minutes.’ He swivels his head, as though looking for approval. Cee squeezes his arm.

  ‘I’m just going to have a cigarette,’ I say. ‘Out the front.’

  Cee tuts audibly and I see her and Steve exchange glances. ‘They’ll be here any minute, Alice,’ she says.

  My hand shakes as I light the cigarette. I pull smoke into my lungs, but it doesn’t make me feel any better. The front door opens behind me and I brace myself for a lecture from Cee, but it’s Tilly. She perches on the wall next to me.

  ‘Can I have one?’ she says.

  ‘You don’t smoke.’

  ‘I’d like one though.’

  ‘They’re terribly bad for you.’ I light her one. She takes a shallow drag, and starts coughing. She smiles at me, sheepishly, and I smile back.

  ‘I can’t help thinking about Mama,’ Tilly says.

  I flick my cigarette and watch the ash drift down towards the steps.

  ‘You were so young,’ she says. ‘I remember you were so young and I felt I should be like Mama for you and I didn’t know how to.’

  I stare down the road. The trees cast hard shadows onto the pavement. I think about the bag with the embroidered ballerina. I wonder what happened to it.

  ‘You did OK,’ I say. ‘You did fine.’

  Tilly smiles weakly.

  ‘You must have all blamed me,’ I say.

  ‘What?’

  ‘For Mama. For her driving that day.’

  ‘Oh, Alice. Don’t. You can’t think that.’

  We smoke in silence.

  ‘Alice?’ There’s an edge to Tilly’s voice.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I wanted to— The thing is, I told—’

  ‘Look, they’re here.’ I point to the black hearse moving slowly down the road towards us, followed by two long black Mercedes.

  ‘They’re here,’ Tilly echoes and stares at her cigarette like she doesn’t know what it is.

  His coffin sits on the low bed of the hearse. It’s made of rich red wood, polished so that the flowers on its lid have their white petals reflected back to them. The front door opens as the cars draw to a stop. There’s a scurry of movement behind us, Cee fussing with the boys – tissues, mobile phones off, ties straight. Tilly takes my hand and squeezes it.

  ‘It was like this with Mama,’ she says. ‘It doesn’t feel real.’

  A sombre-faced man climbs the steps with slow deliberation. ‘Cecilia, Matilda, Alice.’ He shakes our hands and nods as he says our names. His hand is large, his skin cool: comforting. ‘You’re ready?’ he asks. His eyes meet mine, and I want to say no, I’m not ready for any of this. I am really not ready at all. Instead, I lower my gaze and follow him. I am wearing a pair of heels I found in my old room; I can’t remember leaving them there. I watch my feet on the steps – black patent with pointed toes – and I remember, too late, that the last time I wore them was the night Kal and I went for dinner, when I told him I couldn’t do it any more, not unless things changed, not unless we could stop pretending. It’s not pretending, he said, we’re not pretending. Well, it’s starting to feel like it, I said.

  I let the man herd me into the back of one of the cars and sit squashed between my sisters. They have always made me feel even smaller than I am.

  I know that if I looked up I’d see Mrs Williams at her window, her cat cradled in her arms, watching. Instead, I stare at the hearse. From here I can see the word Granddad, spelt out in red carnations, framed in the back window. I look across at Cee. She is staring straight ahead. I don’t say anything.

  We drive as though we are moving against a steady headwind. I catch glimpses of light and shade and colour through the windows, but I keep my head down, fix my gaze on the polished fittings around the gearstick.

  ‘I wish we didn’t have to do the whole thing twice,’ Tilly says.

  ‘It’s what he wanted,’ Cee says. Her words are clipped short. ‘He wanted family there at the crematorium, and then a church service afterwards.’

  Tilly sighs. ‘Did we do this with Mama too?’

  Cee coughs, her hand pressed against her mouth. ‘I’m not sure I remember,’ she says.

  ‘Did she kill herself ?’ I say it without thinking.

  ‘Alice, for Christ’s sake.’ Cee glares at the back of the driver’s head. I watch Tilly’s hands fidget in her lap.

  ‘I’m just asking.’ I fold my arms across my chest. ‘Wasn’t she going in the wrong direction?’

  Neither of them answers me.

  ‘Maybe she was running away,’ I say.

  I think I hear Cee mutter ‘just like you’ under her breath, but I’m not sure.

  We get there too quickly. I attach myself to Tilly, lace my fingers through hers. We walk between two fat pillars into a carpeted room with wooden pews down both sides – like a church. Four men I don’t know carry my father’s coffin in front of us. They place it carefully on a narrow table. They have done this before. The curtains are yellow velvet. The coffin sits on rollers. My father is—

  The woman leading the service has a soft, irritating voice. She keeps saying ‘a celebration of life’. The boys sit behind me, shuffling in their seats. I wish Kal was here, his arm around my shoulders.

  I should have gone back and talked to Dad. I don’t know what I was thinking, trying to punish him, when there was no time left. I picture him that evening in the tapas bar, before I left for Moscow, sitting across from me at the small, circular table with its red cloth, a crowd of half-glazed terracotta dishes around the candle. Are you sure this is the best thing for you to be doing, he asked me. I thought the job was going well. It is, I said, it is, but I have to get away. Leaving isn’t the only option, Alice, he said. Sometimes it’s worth sticking around and trying to make things work.

  If I’d stayed, I’d have had more of him. If I
hadn’t—

  The woman has stopped speaking. Tilly squeezes my hand, hard enough to hurt me. The curtains twitch, and then draw themselves together into a yellow wall. Someone must have set up a business selling self-drawing curtains, to make a coffin vanish at the flick of a switch. I hear the hum of another machine, the rollers beginning to move. I imagine him, inside the box, moving towards the heat.

  He took us to the ballet every Christmas, for years. Him in a suit, the three of us in new dresses and polished shoes. The hustle and excitement of it. A box with red velvet seats and a view of the wings. Everything gilt-edged and glowing. The lights lowered and that moment of silent anticipation before the curtains parted, as though by magic, and the whole thing began. I loved watching the dancers when they got off stage, how they changed into real people out of the spotlights.

  It’s over. We’re standing up. There’s music playing, Fauré, I think, tinny through their speakers. We are sliding ourselves out from the pews and walking the carpeted aisle to the door. It’s done. He’s gone.

  The hearse has gone too. I wonder if it’s already on its way to another funeral. The red-carnation Granddad has been put on the back shelf of one of the cars. He wouldn’t have liked it. He would have thought it was tacky.

  We turn off Hampstead High Street, and slow to a stop outside the church. Trees hang their branches, heavy with leaves, over the top of a black iron fence, dapple sunlight onto the concrete paving slabs. It is not until I have stepped out of the safety of the car that I see Kal.

  My stomach presses itself back against my spine and adrenalin shoots through my legs. He stands by the arched entrance into the churchyard, looking at me. Dark eyes. Wide mouth. I turn away. I scan the street – a line of trees down the centre of the road; a white wood-panelled house with a yellow door; a graveyard behind a tall fence; a man wearing an old waxed jacket, his hand raised like he’s greeting someone. I can feel my heartbeat.

  Tilly’s standing close next to me. I glare at her.

  ‘I tried to tell you. Alice, he’d have wanted to know. I know Dad could be— But they got on, didn’t they?’

  The two of them, drinking whisky, talking about the cricket scores, some article in the BMJ, doctors’ politics.

  ‘You had no right to,’ I hiss.

  She lays her hand on my arm, and I have to force myself not to push her away. I set my shoulders and turn to face the church, to face Kal. He is wearing a suit. I always fancied him in a suit. Stop it. If he’d just move, just step to one side, or go into the church, that would make it easier. He stays where he is, looking at me. Those eyes. Stop it. I curl my fingers around Tilly’s arm and squeeze.

  ‘Don’t leave me,’ I whisper.

  ‘I won’t.’ She puts her hand over mine.

  I walk straight past him. I try to walk straight past him.

  ‘Alice.’ That’s all he says.

  I almost stumble. I nod my head in his direction, but I can’t look at him. I stare at the church. The door and window on the right aren’t straight; you can see where the wall’s been re-mortared along the cracks. There must be something wrong with the foundations.

  Tilly leads me inside. The ceiling rises into white arches above us. Twisted gold lines reach up and over, like painted ropes. We arrange ourselves along the front pew. I fix my eyes on the altar and think about the yellow velvet curtains in the crematorium. I think about Dad’s bed, stripped of its sheets, and then I think about my mother at the wheel of a car, the bonnet crumpled like a piece of paper, the windscreen shattered. There was barely a scratch on her, Tilly told me once; I don’t believe it.

  The church is filled with subdued noise: footsteps, whispers, people fussing with the order of service, shuffling with the prayer cushions, making themselves comfortable. I allow myself a single glance around. Kal sits on the other side of the aisle, a few rows back. He is wearing the green tie I brought him back from Vietnam. It was the first trip I’d been on since I’d moved in with him. I remember standing in the shop and running my fingers over the colours, waving away the over-attentive shopkeeper. It’s the colour of your eyes, Kal said, when I gave it to him. Hardly, I said. He said, I’ll think about your eyes every time I wear it. Stop it.

  Hugo Wells does the first reading. He worked with Dad. He has cropped white hair and a neat white beard. His hands are slender. Piano player’s hands, I remember Dad saying, best surgeon I’ve ever worked with. His voice is strong and certain. Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? I am waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just round the corner. All is well. Nothing is hurt; nothing is lost. The light falls golden through the stained glass, glints off the brass, pretends the world is beautiful.

  I can’t concentrate on the sermon. I twist in my seat. Kal’s head is lowered. He doesn’t see me. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe we could have carried on the way we were. Maybe we could try it again.

  Tilly gets to her feet and walks clumsy steps up to the lectern. She lifts her head and gives a nervous half-smile. I will her on.

  ‘Our father was a very special man.’ Her voice wobbles, rights itself again. ‘We were lucky to have known him.’ People shuffle and nod. ‘He was quiet, serious, hard-working, but he also had a real sense of fun.’ She glances at Cee and me and I find myself smiling and nodding. ‘When I was ten, and my sister Cecilia was eight – this was before Alice came along – we went on holiday to Normandy.’

  All I can hear is the roar of blood in my ears. Before Alice came along, everything was fun. Before Alice came along, Dad wasn’t so distracted, so withdrawn. I remember Cee, once, her eyes black with anger, her fists locked onto her hips, declaring I should never have been born in the first place, I was a great big mistake and Mama and Daddy were cross when I came along. I ran crying to Dad. I must have been six, maybe seven. He lifted me onto his lap and smoothed the hair from my eyes, rocked me until I was calm enough to speak through the sobs. He denied it, of course he did, told me I was beautiful and wanted, a gift to him and Mama. He said he loved me and there was no accident involved, and that he would have words with Cecilia because it was a cruel thing to have said. Even so, I left his study with a lingering sense of uncertainty, lodged like a sea-worn pebble at the base of my throat.

  I close my eyes and force myself to remember: eating ice-creams on Westminster Bridge with Dad trying to teach us about politics. Christmas mornings – one of Dad’s socks at the end of each of our beds, an orange at the bottom, because as a boy he had always had an orange at the bottom of his. My graduation, when he held both my shoulders and I could see the pride in his eyes.

  I watch Tilly’s lips move. I try to tune back into her speech. ‘I remember him lifting Alice onto his shoulders to see over the crowds,’ she says.

  It was some kind of parade, the streets packed with people. I was too small to see; too big, really, to be picked up. I remember holding onto his hair, my feet against his chest – tottering, but safe; on top of the world.

  ‘We always felt very loved by him. We knew he was someone who would have laid his life down for us had it been necessary.’ Tilly takes a shaky breath; it is magnified by the microphone. ‘We will miss him very much.’ She bows her head and stumbles down from the lectern, back to the pew. Once she’s seated, she crumples into tears. When we stand for the last hymn, I put my arm around her shoulders and try to hold her upright. The Lord’s my shepherd, I sing, though I don’t believe a word of it.

  * * *

  ‘You’re lucky,’ Kal said to me once, ‘to have a dad like yours.’

  ‘What, one who was never around?’

  ‘That’s not true.’

  ‘Speaks the fellow surgeon.’

  ‘I like him.’

  ‘So do I.’

  ‘He’s not—’

  ‘What?’

  He shrugged, his eyes closing up the way they did whenever we got anywhere near talking about his parents.

  I picture Kal sitting behind and to my left. If his father died
, no one would even think to tell me. I used to fantasise about his family. When he went over for dinner I would drink a bottle of wine on my own in the flat and imagine his parents’ house – from the blue carpet in the hallway to the marble-effect tiles in the bathroom. I’d act out their dinner conversation. Have you met a nice girl yet, Khalif ? Not yet, Ummi. You want to get a move on. Mrs Abad’s daughter’s just graduated from Cambridge, you know. I can get a picture for you.

  * * *

  It is all done, again. I walk with Tilly down the aisle and feel people’s gazes snag against us. Someone is playing the organ, not particularly well; they falter over the complicated passages. Dad wouldn’t have been impressed. Not with that, not with the flowers which have been positioned on a bench at the back of the church, not with any of it.

  Cee corrals us into a line by the door. I let people take my hand and say what they need to say. I don’t know who all of them are.

  I am waiting for Kal. As soon as I see him, my heart quickens and I feel that burst of adrenalin; I am ready to run. Maybe he will walk straight past. He doesn’t. He takes my hand and the shock of it stops my breath.

  ‘Alice, I’m sorry—’

  I swallow hard. I can’t speak.

  ‘He was a good man.’

  Dad got used to Kal, quicker than Cee did. They’d talk about the NHS, and the cricket. Kal bought him a bottle of malt whisky every Christmas.

  ‘How are you?’ he says.

  I raise my eyebrows.

  ‘I’m sorry. I— I heard you’d been away.’

  I think about Mongolia: the colour of the earth as the sun dipped towards the horizon; a couple of yurts, a scattering of horses, miles and miles of emptiness.

  ‘I should let you get on,’ he says, glancing behind him at the raggedy queue of people.

  ‘We’re having drinks.’ The words come out in a rush. ‘At the house.’ I look down at my black patent shoes and wonder if he remembers them too.