As we ducked under the shelter of a wide flat bridge, the drumming on the roof ceased instantly. And there in front of us, with its sidelights still on, was the hearse. I jumped out, and went over to where Jimmy was standing on the pavement. He looked superbly funereal, dressed in black tails with a black top hat and a black silk handkerchief in his breast pocket.
He shook my hand solemnly, and patted my shoulder. ‘Well done, Bertie. You made it. It is a little difficult to find. Nuisance about the rain. Of course she is beyond reach of all that now,’ he nodded solemnly towards the coffin in the back of the hearse with a single white lily laid on top of it. ‘Safe from tempest, storm and wind.’
‘Death lies on her like an untimely frost upon the sweetest flower.’ A tear sprang into my eye, but something about the coffin bothered me. ‘The coffin – it seems a bit cheap, Jimmy.’
‘Cardboard, old pal. Biodegradable. More environmentally friendly. We’ve all got to do our bit on climate change, haven’t we?’
I didn’t like the look of it at all; it reminded me of those big supermarket boxes they pack loo rolls in. But I supposed it was too late to do anything about it now. At that moment, two elderly women, dressed alike – all in black, with black hats, white frizzy hair and bright red lipstick – rushed up to us.
‘Where is Green Glade cemetery?’ they gabbled. ‘Is this Lily Sidebottom’s funeral?’
I was so taken aback it took me a few moments to recognise Ted Madeley’s twin daughters.
‘Bertie?’ The first twin looked me up and down.
‘Jenny? Margaret?’
‘Jenny. That’s Margaret.’ She pointed at the other twin, who was standing at the back of the hearse, trying to peep inside. At first sight, she seemed identical, but as I got used to their likeness I also noticed differences; Margaret appeared older, more frail and stooped, though of course they were exactly the same age. ‘Thanks for getting in touch, Bertie. It’s good to have a chance to pay our respects. She was a fine lady, Lily, even though we didn’t always see eye to eye.’
‘Fine. Yes, indeed,’ I murmured.
When I had last seen them, they were in their thirties. The cruel hand of time had indeed scrawled his ugly mark over their once pretty features. Then again, I had been just a boy, so it was a miracle that they remembered me at all. Mum had kept in touch for a while, but I hadn’t seen them since I left home. I heard they had both married in their thirties, and both lost their husbands in their sixties. That’s one of the strange things about twins, the way their lives mirror each other.
‘Why is the coffin made out of cardboard?’ asked Margaret.
‘It’s ecological,’ I said. ‘This is going to be a woodland burial.’
‘But won’t it go soggy in all this rain?’ From the edge of the railway bridge, water was sloshing down on to the traffic like an overflowing bathtub.
‘Lily was a great campaigner on climate change. It’s what she would have wanted.’ That shut her up. ‘This is Lily’s friend, Inna Alfandari.’ Inna had been prowling around the hearse, examining the coffin. I introduced Jenny and Margaret as Lily’s stepdaughters.
‘I am mother? I am sister?’ Inna whispered, glancing at them with a nervous smile.
‘Friend. Just a friend, Inna. A confused friend.’ I did a quick Lear’s Fool roll of the eyes.
She winked beadily, ‘Hey ho! Rain it rain it every day!’ Then she flicked out her umbrella as if for an approaching storm, and they all gathered under it, even though it was quite dry under the bridge.
‘We’d better drive up as close to Green Glade as we can,’ said Jimmy, who was wearing fancy grey trousers and leather-soled shoes. ‘Just follow us in the cab. You and I can carry the coffin between us when we get there. It’s not heavy.’
He introduced the driver of the hearse as Miss Wrest, the owner’s daughter, a lugubrious mousy-haired young woman wearing a top hat and a black suit, her face blanked out with panstick make-up which also covered her lips. I have never slept with a female undertaker, but this may be one life experience that passes me by.
As soon as we left the shelter of the bridge, the rain sheeted down. The minicab followed close behind the hearse. Miss Wrest was a nervous driver, heavy on the brakes. Once we almost slammed into the back of her when she braked sharply to avoid a drunk who lurched out into the road, and after that the cab driver held back a bit. As the hearse sailed past a parade of shops, a bus pulled out, getting in between us and the hearse. It had the smirking George Clooney poster on the back, which I took as a bad omen.
We only just managed to keep behind the hearse as it turned right – our driver’s view was blocked by the bus. After that we wended our way down some anonymous residential roads and soon came to a halt in a cul-de-sac, at the bottom of which a footpath led towards a bank of trees. Here we got out, and opened our umbrellas. I noticed a not-very-prominent sign stuck into the ground that said Green Glade, with an arrow pointing towards the footpath. Beside it stood a couple of guys waiting under a green and white striped umbrella, whom Jimmy introduced as the gravediggers. They were wearing smart but soggy black tracksuits with a Wrest ’n’ Piece logo on the breast pocket, and both had pencil moustaches, presumably because they thought it was part of the gravedigger look. A third man – a thin elderly guy wearing a damp black suit, a bit short in the leg, and a bowler hat – stood beside them under his own black umbrella. I wondered who he was. I shook his hand and introduced myself, and he mumbled something I didn’t catch, his words mashed by the booze I could smell on his breath.
Jimmy was right – the coffin bearing my mother’s body was not heavy at all. So many years of life and love reduced to this puny parcel of cardboard and dust. I held back my tears as we hoisted it on to our shoulders, him on the right side, in front, me at the back on the left, leaving his right arm and my left arm free to hold umbrellas. This awkward equilibrium was like the balance of gladness and sadness in my heart as I bore my dear mother’s mortal remains towards their resting place. Although frankly, the rain was annoying.
Mousy Miss Wrest, who was wearing knee-high black boots, the only one of us with sensible footwear, strode out in front, holding a black umbrella. Inna and the Madeley twins huddled behind us under Inna’s leopard-print umbrella, and the gravediggers, sheltering under the green and white, brought up the rear, with the thin bowler-hatted man tagging along beside them. With downcast eyes we set off up the muddy path. The trees dripped all around us. My mind was so caught up with the solemnity of the occasion that I hardly noticed the slipperiness underfoot, but Jimmy was slithering about in his leather-soled shoes.
The footpath from the cul-de-sac joined another larger track through woodland, which was gravelled and raised, about the width of a railway track. Here under the trees the rain was gentler and the ground less treacherous. We followed this for some two hundred metres, until another Green Glade arrow pointed up a grassy rise towards a grove of trees through which I caught a glimpse of a wide green glade. It would indeed have been an idyllic spot, had it not been for the rain.
Even in her sensible boots Miss Wrest struggled to keep upright on the wet grassy slope, now partly trodden into mud. I cunningly pointed my umbrella downwards, and used the spike to stick in the ground to give myself a bit of leverage. I daren’t look over my shoulder to see how the old ladies behind were doing. In front of me, Jimmy was skidding dangerously, flailing with his umbrella arm. We had made it about halfway up the incline, when his phone rang. Balancing the coffin on one shoulder, he fumbled in his pocket.
‘Yes, Phil, yes, okay, I get what you’re saying … parting of the ways … sorry, I can’t speak now … Green Glade … sorry it had to end like this …’
Suddenly a roar like a low-flying jet reverberated through the trees, making the ground shake beneath our feet. In the moment that I lost concentration, Jimmy slipped. The coffin slid off his shoulder and bounced down the steep path on to the track below. I turned, lost my footing, and slid after it, my opened
umbrella acting as a sort of parachute. Jimmy did a sideways skid and managed to bring down the three old ladies and the bowler-hatted gent, before landing beside the dented coffin, his phone still pressed against his ear in one hand and his umbrella aloft in the other. Only the gravediggers were upright, and they were still on the main track, standing by being elegantly unhelpful.
Amidst all the confusion, I was aware that there was a terrific amount of noise – the low-flying aeroplane now sounded more like a high-speed train roaring past quite close by behind the trees, Jimmy was still jabbering into his phone and the three women were screaming their heads off. The screaming seemed a bit excessive, I thought, but in a moment I could see the reason for it. The wet cardboard coffin had burst open, and the corpse had tumbled out, stiffer than its container, to join the melee. Inna was screaming and crossing herself. Margaret had fainted. Jenny, who was underneath it, was trying to push its shoulder out of her face. I looked, and looked again. Even beneath its muddy coating, the corpse didn’t seem quite right.
I screamed too. ‘There’s been a mistake! This isn’t my mother!’
‘Don’t distress yourself, Mr Sidebottom.’ Miss Wrest laid a soothing hand on my arm. ‘Appearances of a post-life loved one can often be deceptive. Death is a great counterfeiter, you know.’ She patted me with her fingertips; her nails were painted scarlet, the only touch of colour about her.
‘She was probably done by one of the trainees,’ added Jimmy, replacing his phone in his pocket. ‘We’ve had some new jobseeker placements in the funeral parlour. Lily would have been in favour of that, you know, helping to prepare the long-term unemployed for useful jobs. We’ve all got to do our bit on the economy, haven’t we?’
‘But …’ I looked again. It looked distinctly unlike Mother. ‘… it’s a man. An old man. An ex-old-man, I should say.’
‘It not my Lily! It fake!’ cried Inna.
The dead man’s false teeth had popped out and were grinning up at her from the mud. His face looked partly shaven with some ghastly cuts in the skin.
‘Nonsense! Look, we’ve got the death certificate!’ Miss Wrest flourished a soggy piece of paper, which did indeed bear my mother’s name.
The thin bowler-hatted man looked about him in surprise. ‘Is thish not Mrs O’Reilly’s funeral?’
‘No,’ replied Miss Wrest. ‘She’s with the Council up at St Pancras. They undercut us.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘It’ll all be over by now.’
‘Could you tell me, will there be a wake after thish funeral?’
‘No,’ I snapped. ‘Now piss off.’
‘I’m very shorry,’ he slurred, ‘I think I made a mishtake.’ He crawled towards the solid ground of the path and staggered off on his muddy way.
Inna was struggling to get up, but couldn’t find her footing. Her glasses were down in the mud beside the false teeth. I reached down to offer her a hand, lost my balance, slipped, and crashed. A piercing pain shot through my left eye. When I put my hand to my face, it was covered in blood.
Then I blacked out.
When I came round I was in the back of an ambulance woo-wooing through the streets of London. A male paramedic was pressing a blood-soaked pad to my face and the world was half dark. Miss Wrest was sitting beside me holding my hand. She had lost her top hat, and her long mousy hair was damp and tangled over her face. Most of the panstick make-up had washed off too, so that I could see her features, which were pudgy and babyish but not unattractive – as far as I could tell with my remaining eye.
‘What happened?’ I asked.
‘You stabbed yourself in the eye with the spoke of your umbrella,’ Miss Wrest answered calmly. ‘You were extremely distressed.’
The memory of the ghastly scene flooded back to me and I struggled to sit up, but the paramedic pushed me back gently but firmly on to the stretcher.
‘Lie still.’
‘Mother! What happened to my mother?’
Miss Wrest squeezed my hand reassuringly. ‘Don’t worry.’
Berthold: Gauze and Ashes
By one of those weird backflips of fate to which life is prone, I found myself lying in a hospital bed with a cardboard bowl beside me while Inna perched next to me with a bunch of grapes in a paper bag. My head was throbbing horribly and I felt nauseous from the after-effects of the anaesthetic. The cardboard bowl was full of soggy and bloodstained bits of gauze.
‘Oy! You all right, Mister Bertie?’ She gazed down into my injured face with a look of undisguised horror in her beady eyes. Of course I could not see what she saw, but it must have included a dramatic gauze bandage over one eye, and maybe a bit of dry blood. ‘You going to be one-eye blind?’
‘Could be,’ I shrugged, not wishing to put an end to the flow of sympathy, though the pretty young doctor had reassured me that the injury had been superficial, the emergency treatment had been successful and my sight would be unaffected.
Inna crossed herself and sighed. ‘When you come home I make golabki kobaski slatki. We drink vodka.’
‘Lovely. Can’t wait.’ Though I had resolved to go easy on the slatki. Just in case. ‘It’s my birthday on the sixth of May. And we can invite our new next-door neighbour.’
‘Blackie?’
‘Violet. You’d better check that she’s not vegetarian.’
I wondered whether she would be filled with revulsion at the sight of my eyepatch, or whether tender-hearted sympathy would prevail. Women are so unpredictable.
After Inna had gone, I managed to snooze for a while. I was awoken by a voice calling my name. Carefully I opened my good eye. I can’t have been asleep for long, for it was still light, and the ward was full of clatter and voices. An elderly woman with white hair and red lipstick was leaning over me, but the image was somehow split, like in a mirror, so she appeared to be on both sides of my bed at once.
‘Hello? Bertie?’ said the one on my left.
‘Hello? Bertie?’ echoed the one on my right.
My headache had intensified and everything around me seemed fragmented and unreal. Can one have double vision, I wondered, with only one eye?
‘Jenny,’ said the one on my left. ‘Margaret,’ said the one on my right.
‘Oh. Hello.’ I tried to move my head to look from one to the other, but my neck had seized up. ‘Thank you for coming.’
‘We got these for you,’ said Margaret.
Jenny slapped down a box of chocolates on the bedside table. ‘The nurse said you were doing well. They’ll be sending you home soon.’
‘I hope so. I can’t wait to get back to my flat.’
They exchanged glances.
‘The thing is, Bertie …’ said Margaret.
‘There’s something we need to talk about,’ added Jenny. ‘You see, it’s not really your flat.’
‘Not mine? What d’you mean? Who else’s could it be?’
‘Actually, it’s ours. Our dad left the tenancy to us in his will.’
‘ “To my darling daughters, Jenny and Margaret, the tenancy of my flat.” That’s what he said,’ Margaret added in an irritating faux-naive bleat.
While she was talking, Jenny had reached for the box of chocolates and stripped off the cellophane film.
‘Aren’t you going to eat these, Bertie? They were quite expensive.’
‘Oh, by all means. Help yourselves.’
‘But no rush,’ said Margaret, selecting a chocolate, popping it in her mouth and licking her fingers. ‘Stay until you find somewhere that suits you.’
‘But now we’re widows, we’ve been looking for a nice two-bedroom flat where we could live together.’ Jenny took the box and mirrored her sister’s action. ‘We don’t want to chuck you out, Bertie, but with house prices in London the way they are, there’s not much in our price range.’
‘But I’m not planning on moving anywhere. The tenancy was my mum’s and now it’s mine.’ Mother’s death-bed words echoed in my brain. I had assumed she was talking about the Council, or one of her exes, b
ut maybe it was the twins she had been warning me against. ‘She succeeded to the tenancy automatically when your dad, Ted Madeley, died. That’s the rule. And she passed it on to me.’ I could feel my face going red. My bad eye began to throb. The twin faces started to spin, frizzy white hair framing vampire-red lips. I wished they would just go away.
‘The thing is, Bertie,’ Jenny pursued, ‘we didn’t want to tell you this, but you’d have to find out eventually. Ted, our dad, and your mother weren’t actually married. They never tied the knot legally, so your mother never actually inherited the tenancy. They were going to get married, but after Lily lost the baby –’
‘What baby?’
‘Your mother was three months gone when they moved into the flat. He promised to marry her.’
‘It broke our mother’s heart.’ If there was a hard-cop, soft-cop act, Jenny was the hard one.
‘But she lost the baby at twenty-two weeks.’
‘They must have got married. I’ve got the wedding certificate. I can show you,’ I said.
They exchanged significant glances.
Jenny spoke first. ‘You see, our mum and dad were never actually divorced. He may have married Lily, but it wasn’t …’
‘… legal.’
‘And once they moved in together Ted’s health went downhill. He was forty years older than her, remember. He …’
‘… wasn’t up to it.’ She lowered her eyes and whispered, ‘Sex!’
‘His heart attack happened while they were …’ Margaret offered me the box of chocolates but I shook my head. I was beginning to feel sick.
‘I still don’t see how that makes it your flat,’ I said.
‘The tenancy was our mother’s by law, and we have the right to inherit it,’ Jenny snapped.
‘Dad promised it to us,’ said Margaret. ‘But he said Lily could stay there until she died, and we respected his wishes.’ She crammed two more chocolates into her mouth. One of them must have been caramel, for it stuck to her teeth as she said, ‘Glbut now she’s tragbiclly passed away … glb … it’s time … glb.’
The Lubetkin Legacy Page 12