by Zadie Smith
‘It’s pretty low rent,’ dared Zora.
‘Look, it was her church, I came here with her – she would have wanted the service in her church,’ insisted Jerome.
‘Of course she would,’ said Kiki. Tears pricked her eyes. She squeezed Jerome’s hand and he, surprised by this emotion, returned the pressure. Without any announcement, or at least not one the Belseys heard, the crowd began to file into the church. The interior was as simple as the exterior suggested. Wood beams ran between stone walls, and the rood screen was of a dark oak, plainly carved. The stained glass was pretty, colourful, but rather basic, and there was only one painting, high on the back wall: unlit, dusty and too murky to make anything of at all. Yes, when you looked up and around you – as one instinctively does in a church – everything was much as you might have imagined. But then your eyes came to earth again, and at this point all those who had entered this church for the first time suppressed a shudder. Even Howard – who liked to think himself ruthlessly unsentimental when it came to matters of architectural modernization – could find nothing to praise. The stone floor had been completely covered by a thin, orange-and-grey capsule carpet; many large squares of fuzzy industrial felt slotted together. The pattern therein was of smaller orange boxes, each with its own sad grey outline. This orange had grown brownish under the influence of many feet. And then there were the pews, or rather their absence. Every single one had been ripped out and in their place rows of conference chairs – in this same airport-lounge orange – were placed in a timid half-circle meant to foster (so Howard envisioned) the friendly, informal atmosphere in which tea mornings and community meetings are conducted. The final effect was one of unsurpassable ugliness. It was not hard to reconstruct the chain of logic behind the decision: financial distress, the money to be had from selling nineteenth-century pews, the authoritarian severity of horizontal aisles, the inclusiveness of semicircles. But no – it was still a crime. It was too ugly. Kiki sat down with her family on the uncomfortable little plastic chairs. No doubt Monty wanted to prove he was a man of the people, as powerful men so often like to do – and at his wife’s expense. Didn’t Carlene deserve better than a small ruined church on a noisy main road? Kiki felt herself quiver with indignation. But then, as people took their seats and soft organ music began, Kiki’s logic flipped all the way around. Jerome was right: this was Carlene’s place of local worship. Really Monty was to be commended. He could have had the funeral somewhere fancy in Westminster, or up the hill in Hampstead, or – who knows – maybe even in St Paul’s itself (Kiki did not pause over practicalities here), but no. Here, in Willesden Green, in the little local church she had loved, Monty had brought the woman he loved, before a congregation who cared for her. Kiki now chastised herself over her first, typically Belseyian opinion. Had she become unable to recognize real emotion when it was right in front of her? Here were simple people who loved their God, here was a church that wished to make its parishioners comfortable, here was an honest man who loved his wife – were these things really beneath consideration?
‘Mom,’ hissed Zora, pulling her mother’s sleeve. ‘Mom. Isn’t that Chantelle?’
Kiki, thus separated from uneasy thoughts, looked obediently to where Zora was pointing, although the name meant nothing to her.
‘That can’t be her. She’s in my class,’ said Zora, squinting. ‘Well, not exactly in it but . . .’
The double doors of the church opened. Ribbons of daylight threaded through the shady interior, tying up a stack of gilt hymn books in their radiance, highlighting the blonde hair of a pretty child, the brass edging on the octangular font. All heads turned at once, in an awful echo of a wedding, to see Carlene Kipps, boxed in wood, coming up the aisle. Howard alone looked up into the simple concameration of the roof, hoping for escape or relief or distraction. Anything but this. He was greeted instead with a wash of music. It poured down on his head from above, from a balcony. There eight young men, with neat curtains of hair and boyish, rosy faces, were lending their lungs to an ideal of the human voice larger than any one of them.
Howard, who had long ago given up on this ideal, now found himself – in a manner both sudden and horrible – mortally affected by it. He did not even get the opportunity to check the booklet in his hand; never discovered that this was Mozart’s Ave Verum, and this choir, Cambridge singers; no time to remind himself that he hated Mozart, nor to laugh at the expensive pretension of bussing down Kingsmen to sing at a Willesden funeral. It was too late for all that. The song had him. Aaaah Vay-ay, Aah, aah, vay sang the young men; the faint, hopeful leap of the first three notes, the declining dolour of the following three; the coffin passing so close to Howard’s elbow he sensed its weight in his arms; the woman inside it, only ten years older than Howard himself; the prospect of her infinite residence in there; the prospect of his own; the Kipps children weeping behind it; a man in front of Howard checking his watch as if the end of the world (for so it was for Carlene Kipps) was a mere inconvenience in his busy day, even though this fellow too would live to see the end of his world, as would Howard, as do tens of thousands of people every day, few of whom, in their lifetimes, are ever able to truly believe in the oblivion to which they are dispatched. Howard gripped the arms of his chair and tried to regulate his breathing in case this was an asthmatic episode or a dehydration incident, both of which he had experienced before. But this was different: he was tasting salt, watery salt, a lot of it, and feeling it in the chambers of his nose; it ran in rivulets down his neck and pooled in the dainty triangular well at the base of his throat. It was coming from his eyes. He had the feeling that there was a second, gaping mouth in the centre of his stomach and that this was screaming. The muscles in his belly convulsed. All around him people bowed their heads and joined their hands together, as people do at funerals, as Howard knew: he had been to many of them. At this point in the proceedings it was Howard’s more usual practice to doodle lightly with a pencil along the edge of the funeral programme while recalling the true, unpleasant relationship between the dead man in the box and the fellow presently offering a glowing eulogy, or to wonder whether the dead man’s widow will acknowledge the dead man’s mistress sitting in the third row. But at Carlene Kipps’s funeral Howard kept faith with her coffin. He did not take his eyes from that box. He was quite certain he was making embarrassing noises. He was powerless to stop them. His thoughts fled from him and rushed down their dark holes. Zora’s gravestone. Levi’s. Jerome’s. Everybody’s. His own. Kiki’s. Kiki’s. Kiki’s. Kiki’s.
‘Dad – you OK, man?’ whispered Levi and brought his strong, massaging hand to the cleft between his father’s shoulders. But Howard ducked this touch, stood up and left the church through the doors Carlene had entered.
It was bright when the service began; now the sky was overcast. The congregation were more talkative departing from the church than they had been before – sharing anecdotes and memories – but still did not know how to end conversations respectfully; how to turn the talk from the invisibles of the earth – love and death and what comes after – to its practicalities: how to get a cab and whether one was going to the cemetery, or the wake, or both. Kiki did not imagine she was welcome at either, but, as she stood by the cherry tree with Jerome and Levi, Monty Kipps came over to them and expressly invited her. Kiki was taken aback.
‘Are you sure? We really wouldn’t want to intrude in any way whatsoever.’
Monty’s response was cordial. ‘There’s no question of intrusion. Any friend of my wife is welcome.’
‘I was her friend,’ said Kiki, perhaps too keenly, for Monty’s smile shrank and tightened. ‘I mean, I didn’t know her real well, but what I knew . . . well, I really loved what I knew. I’m so sorry for your loss. She was an amazing person. Just so generous with people.’
‘She was, yes,’ said Monty, a queer look passing over his face. ‘Of course, one worried sometimes that people would take advantage of exactly that quality.’
‘Ye
s!’ said Kiki, and impulsively touched his hand. ‘I felt that too. But then I realized that that would always be a deadly shame on the person who did it, I mean, who took advantage – never on her.’
Monty nodded quickly. Of course he must have many other people to speak to. Kiki drew her hand back. In his low, musical voice he gave her directions to the cemetery and to the Kippses’ house, where the wake was to be, nodding briefly at Jerome to acknowledge his prior acquaintance with the place. Levi’s eyes widened during the instructions. He had no idea these funeral things had second and third acts.
‘Thank you, really. And I’m . . . I am so sorry about Howard having to leave during the . . . he had a stomach . . . thing,’ said Kiki, motioning unconvincingly in front of her own belly. ‘I’m really just very sorry about that.’
‘Please,’ said Monty, shaking his head. He smiled again briefly and moved away into the crowd. They watched him go. He was stopped every few feet by well-wishers and dealt with each of them with the same courtesy and patience he had shown the Belseys.
‘What a big man,’ said Kiki admiringly to her sons. ‘You know? He’s just not petty,’ she said, and here stopped herself, under the aegis of a new resolution not to criticize her husband in front of her children.
‘Do we have to go to all that other stuff?’ asked Levi and was ignored.
‘I mean – what the hell was he thinking?’ demanded Kiki suddenly. ‘How can you walk out of somebody’s funeral? What goes on in his head? How is that a way to . . .’ she stopped herself again. She took a deep breath. ‘And where in the hell is Zora?’
Holding hands with both her boys, Kiki walked the edge of the wall. They found Zora by the church doors talking to a shapely black girl in a cheap navy suit. She had a flapper’s helmet of ironed hair, a kiss curl glued to her cheek. Both Levi and Jerome perked up at this attractive prospect.
‘Chantelle’s Monty’s new project,’ Zora was explaining. ‘I knew it was you – we’re in poetry class together. Mom, this is Chantelle, who I’m always telling you about?’
Both Chantelle and Kiki looked surprised by this.
‘New project?’ asked Kiki.
‘Professor Kipps,’ said Chantelle, barely audible, ‘attends my church. He asked me to intern for him here over the holidays. Christmas is the busiest time – he has to get all the contributions to the islands that need them before Christmas Day – it’s a real good opportunity . . .’ added Chantelle, but looked miserable.
‘So you’re in Green Park,’ said Jerome, stepping forward as Levi hung back, for even this much acquaintance had confirmed for both that this girl was not for Levi. Despite her name and other appearances to the contrary, she was from Jerome’s world.
‘Excuse me?’ said Chantelle.
‘Monty’s office – in Green Park. With Emily and all those guys.’
‘Oh, yeah, that’s right,’ said Chantelle, her lip trembling so violently that Jerome at once regretted bothering her with the question. ‘I’m just helping out a little, really . . . I mean I was going to help with that . . . but now it looks like I’m going home tomorrow.’
Kiki reached out and touched Chantelle’s elbow. ‘Well, at least you’ll be home for Christmas.’
Chantelle smiled painfully at this. One sensed that Christmas in Chantelle’s house was a thing best avoided.
‘Oh, honey – it must have been a shock . . . coming here, and now this awful thing happens . . .’
It was just Kiki being Kiki, offering the simple empathy her children were so used to, but for Chantelle it was exactly too much of what she needed. She burst into tears. Kiki at once put her arms around her and brought her into her bosom.
‘Oh, honey . . . oh . . . it’s OK. It’s OK, honey. There you are . . . you’re fine. There’s no problem . . . it’s OK.’
Slowly Chantelle pulled back. Levi patted her gently on the shoulder. She was the kind of girl you wanted to look out for, one way or another.
‘Are you going to the cemetery? Do you want to come along with us?’
Chantelle sniffed and wiped her eyes. ‘No – thank you, ma’am – I’m gonna go home. I mean – to the hotel. I was staying at Sir Monty’s house,’ and she said this very carefully, emphasizing the oddity of the title to the American ear and tongue. ‘But now . . . well, I leave tomorrow anyhow, like I said.’
‘Hotel? A London hotel? Sister, that’s crazy!’ cried Kiki. ‘Why don’t you stay with us – with our friends? It’s only one night – you can’t pay all that money.’
‘No, I’m not –’ began Chantelle, but then stopped. ‘I have to go now,’ she said. ‘Nice meeting all of you – I’m sorry about . . . Zora, guess I’ll see you in January. Nice to see you. Ma’am.’
Chantelle nodded goodbye to the Belseys and hurried away towards the church gates. The Belseys followed at a slower pace, looking around themselves all the time for Howard.
‘I do not believe this. He’s gone! Levi – give me your cell.’
‘It doesn’t work here – I ain’t got the right contract or whatever.’
‘Me neither,’ said Jerome.
Kiki ground her court heels into the gravel. ‘He’s crossed a line today. This was somebody else’s day, this was not his day. This was somebody’s funeral. He has just got no borders at all.’
‘Mom, calm down. Look, my cell works – but who’re you going to call, exactly?’ asked Zora, sensibly. Kiki phoned Adam and Rachel, but Howard was not in Hampstead. The Belseys got into a minicab the practical Kippses had thought to call, one of a long line of foreign men in foreign cars, windows down, waiting.
3
Twenty minutes earlier, Howard had walked out of the churchyard, turned left and kept on walking. He had no plans – or at least, his conscious mind told him he had none. His subconscious had other ideas. He was heading for Cricklewood.
By foot he completed the final quarter-mile of a journey he had started by car this morning: down that changeable North London hill, which ends in ignominy with Cricklewood Broadway. At various points along this hill, areas are known to fall in and out of gentrification, but the two extremes of Hampstead and Cricklewood do not change. Cricklewood is beyond salvation: so say the estate agents who drive by the derelict bingo halls and the trading estates in their decorated Mini Coopers. They are mistaken. To appreciate Cricklewood you have to walk its streets, as Howard did that afternoon. Then you find out that there is more charm in a half-mile of Cricklewood’s passing human faces than in all the double-fronted Georgian houses in Primrose Hill. The African women in their colourful kenti cloths, the whippet blonde with three phones tucked into the waistband of her tracksuit, the unmistakable Poles and Russians introducing the bone structure of Soviet Realism to an island of chinless, browless potato-faces, the Irish men resting on the gates of housing estates like farmers at a pig fair in Kerry . . . At this distance, walking past them all, thus itemizing them, not having to talk to any of them, flâneur Howard was able to love them and, more than this, to feel himself, in his own romantic fashion, to be one of them. We scum, we happy scum! From people like these he had come. To people like these he would always belong. It was an ancestry he referred to proudly at Marxist conferences and in print; it was a communion he occasionally felt on the streets of New York and in the urban outskirts of Paris. For the most part, however, Howard liked to keep his ‘working-class roots’ where they flourished best: in his imagination. Whatever the fear or force that had thrust him from Carlene Kipps’s funeral out on to these cold streets was what now compelled him to make this rare trip: down the Broadway, past the McDonald’s, past the halal butchers, second road on the left, to arrive here, at No. 46 with the thick glass panel in the door. The last time he stood on this doorstep was almost four years ago. Four years! That was the summer when the Belsey family had considered returning to London for Levi’s secondary education. After a disappointing reconnaissance of North London schools, Kiki insisted upon visiting No. 46, for old times’ sake, with the k
ids. The visit did not go well. And since then only a few phone calls had passed between this house and 83 Langham, along with the usual cards on birthdays and anniversaries. Although Howard had visited London often in recent times, he had never stopped at this door. Four years is a long time. You don’t stay away for four years without good reason. As soon as his finger pressed the bell, Howard knew he’d made a mistake. He waited – nobody came. Radiant with relief, he turned to go. It was the perfect visit: well intended but with no one at home. Then the door opened. An elderly woman he did not know stood before him with a nasty bunch of flowers in her hand – many carnations, a few daisies, a limp fern and one wilted star-gazer lily. She smiled coquettishly like a woman a quarter of her age greeting a suitor half Howard’s.
‘Hello?’ said Howard.
‘Hello, dear,’ she replied serenely, and pressed on with her smile. Her hair, in the manner of old English ladies, was both voluminous and transparent, each golden curl (blue rinses having recently vanished from these isles) like gauze through which Howard could see the hallway behind.
‘Sorry – is Harold in? Harold Belsey?’
‘Harry? Yes, ’course. These are his,’ she said, shaking the flowers, rather roughly. ‘Come in, dear.’
‘Carol,’ Howard heard his father call from the little lounge they were swiftly approaching, ‘who is that? Tell themno.’
He was in his armchair, as usual. With the telly on, as usual. The room was, as ever, very clean and, in its way, very beautiful. It never changed. It was still frowsty and badly lit, with only one double-glazed window facing the street, but everywhere there was colour. Bright and brazen yellow daisies on the cushions, a green sofa, and three dining chairs painted pillar-box red. The wallpaper was an elaborate, almost Italianate paisley swirl of pinks and browns, like Neapolitan ice-cream. The carpet was hexagons of orange and brown and, in each hexagon, circles and diamonds had been drawn in black. A three-bar fire, portable, tall, like a little robot, had its metal back painted blue, bright as the Virgin’s cloak. There was probably something richly comic about all this 1970s exuberance (left by the previous tenant) settling itself around the present, grey-suited, elderly tenant, but Howard couldn’t laugh. It hurt his heart to note the unchanging details. How circumscribed must a life have become when a candy-coloured postcard of Mevagissey Harbour, Cornwall, is able to hold its place on the mantelpiece for four years! The pictures of Howard’s mother, Joan, were likewise unmoved. A series of photos of Joan at London Zoo remained gathered in the one frame, overlapping each other. The one of her holding a pot of sunflowers still rested on top of the television. The one of her being blown about with her bridesmaids, veil flapping in the wind, remained hanging right by the light switch. She had been dead forty-six years, but every time Harold switched the light on, he saw her again.