by Nick Hornby
No one’s crying in the reception area yet, but there are a few people on the edge, and you can see they’re going to go over it before the morning is over. They are all middle-aged, and they know the ropes. They talk quietly, shake hands, give wan smiles, kiss, sometimes; and then, for no reason I can see, and I feel hopelessly out of my depth, lost, ignorant, they stand, and troop through the door marked CHAPEL 2.
It’s dark in there, at least, so it’s easier to get into the mood. The coffin is up at the front, slightly raised off the floor, but I can’t work out what it’s resting on; Laura, Jo, and Janet Lydon are in the first row, standing very close, with a couple of men I don’t know beside them. We sing a hymn, pray, there’s a brief and unsatisfactory address from the vicar, some stuff from his book, and another hymn, and then there’s this sudden, heart-stopping clanking of machinery and the coffin disappears slowly through the floor. And as it does so, there’s a howl from in front of us, a terrible, terrible noise that I don’t want to hear: I can only just tell that it’s Laura’s voice, but I know that it is, and at that moment I want to go to her and offer to become a different person, to remove all trace of what is me, as long as she will let me look after her and try to make her feel better.
When we get out into the light, people crowd around Laura and Jo and Janet, and hug them; I want to do the same, but I don’t see how I can. But Laura sees Liz and me hovering on the fringe of the group, and comes to us, and thanks us for coming, and holds us both for a long time, and when she lets go of me I feel that I don’t need to offer to become a different person: it has happened already.
TWENTY-SIX
IT’S easier in the house. You can feel that the worst is over, and there’s a tired calm in the room, like the tired calm you get in your stomach when you’ve been sick. You even hear people talking about other stuff, although it’s all big stuff—work, children, life. Nobody’s talking about their Volvo’s fuel consumption, or the names they’d choose for dogs. Liz and I get ourselves a drink and stand with our backs against a bookcase, right in the far corner away from the door, and we talk occasionally, but mostly we watch people.
It feels good to be in this room, even though the reasons for being here aren’t so good. The Lydons have a large Victorian house, and it’s old and tatty and full of things—furniture, paintings, ornaments, plants—which don’t go together but which have obviously been chosen with care and taste. The room we’re in has a huge, weird family portrait on the wall above the fireplace, done when the girls were about ten and eight. They are wearing what look like bridesmaids’ dresses, standing self-consciously beside Ken; there’s a dog, Allegro, Allie, who died before I came along, in front of them and partially obscuring them. He has his paws up on Ken’s midriff, and Ken is ruffling the dog’s fur and smiling. Janet is standing a little behind and apart from the other three, watching her husband. The whole family are much thinner (and splotchier, but that’s the painting for you) than they are in real life. It’s modern art, and bright and fun, and obviously done by someone who knew what they were about (Laura told me that the woman who did it has had exhibitions and all sorts), but it has to take its chances with a stuffed otter, which is on the mantelpiece underneath, and the sort of dark old furniture that I hate. Oh, and there’s a hammock in one corner, loaded down with cushions, and a huge bank of new black hi-fi stuff in another corner, Ken’s most treasured possession, despite the paintings and the antiques. It’s all a mess, but you’d have to love the family that lived here, because you’d just know that they were interesting and kind and gentle. I realize now that I enjoyed being a part of this family, and though I used to moan about coming here for weekends or Sunday afternoons, I was never bored once. Jo comes up to us after a few minutes, and kisses both of us, and thanks us for coming.
“How are you?” Liz asks, but it’s the “How are you” that has an emphasis on the “are,” which makes the question sound meaningful and sympathetic. Jo shrugs.
“I’m all right. I suppose. And Mum’s not too bad, but Laura…I dunno.”
“She’s had a pretty rough few weeks already, without this,” says Liz, and I feel a little surge of something like pride: That was me. I made her feel like that. Me and a couple of others, anyway, including Laura herself, but never mind. I’d forgotten that I could make her feel anything and, anyway, it’s odd to be reminded of your emotional power in the middle of a funeral which, in my limited experience, is when you lose sense of it altogether.
“She’ll be OK,” says Liz decisively. “But it’s hard, when you’re putting all your effort into one bit of your life, to suddenly find that it’s the wrong bit.” She glances at me, suddenly embarrassed, or guilty, or something.
“Don’t mind me,” I tell them. “Really. No problem. Just pretend you’re talking about somebody else.” I meant it kindly, honest I did. I was simply trying to say that if they wanted to talk about Laura’s love life, any aspect of it, then I wouldn’t mind, not today, of all days.
Jo smiles, but Liz gives me a look. “We are talking about somebody else. Laura. Laura and Ray, really.”
“That’s not fair, Liz.”
“Oh?” She raises an eyebrow, as if I’m being insubordinate.
“And don’t fucking say ‘Oh’ like that.” A couple of people look round when I use the “f”-word, and Jo puts her hand on my arm. I shake it off. Suddenly, I’m raging and I don’t know how to calm down. It seems like I’ve spent the whole of the last few weeks with someone’s hand on my arm: I can’t speak to Laura because she lives with somebody else and she calls from phone boxes and she pretends she doesn’t, and I can’t speak to Liz because she knows about the money and the abortion and me seeing someone else, and I can’t speak to Barry and Dick because they’re Barry and Dick, and I can’t speak to my friends because I don’t speak to my friends, and I can’t speak now because Laura’s father has died, and I just have to take it because otherwise I’m a bad guy, with the emphasis on guy, self-centered, blind, and stupid. Well, I’m fucking not, not all the time, anyway, and I know this isn’t the right place to say so—I’m not that daft—but when am I allowed to?
“I’m sorry, Jo. I’m really sorry.” I’m back to the funeral murmur now, even though I feel like screaming. “But you know, Liz…I can either stick up for myself sometimes or I can believe anything you say about me and end up hating myself every minute of the day. And maybe you think I should, but it’s not much of a life, you know?”
Liz shrugs.
“That’s not good enough, Liz. You’re dead wrong, and if you don’t know it, then you’re dimmer than I thought.”
She sighs theatrically, and then sees the look on my face.
“Maybe I’ve been a little unfair. But is this really the time?”
“Only because it’s never the time. We can’t go on apologizing all our lives, you know.”
“If by ‘we’ you are referring to men, then I have to say that just the once would do.”
I’m not going to walk out of Laura’s dad’s funeral in a sulk. I’m not going to walk out of Laura’s dad’s funeral in a sulk. I’m just not.
I walk out of Laura’s dad’s funeral in a sulk.
The Lydons live a few miles out of the nearest town, which is Amersham, and I don’t know which way the nearest town is anyway. I walk round the corner, and round another corner, and come to some kind of main road, and see a bus stop, but it’s not the sort of bus stop that fills you with confidence: there’s nobody waiting, and nothing much there—a row of large detached houses on one side of the road, a playing field on the other. I wait there for a while, freezing in my suit, but just as I’ve worked out that it’s the sort of bus stop that requires the investment of a few days, rather than a few minutes, I see a familiar green Volkswagen up the road. It’s Laura, and she’s come looking for me.
Without thinking, I jump over the wall that separates one of the detached houses from the pavement, and lie flat in somebody’s flower bed. It’s wet. But I’d
rather get soaked to the skin than have Laura go mental at me for disappearing, so I stay there for as long as is humanly possible. Every time I think I have got to the bottom, I find a new way to sink even lower, but I know that this is the worst, and that whatever happens to me from now on, however poor or stupid or single I get, these few minutes will remain with me as a shining cautionary beacon. “Is it better than lying facedown in a flower bed after Laura’s dad’s funeral?” I shall ask myself when the bailiffs come into the shop, or when the next Laura runs off with the next Ray, and the answer will always, always be “Yes.”
When I can’t take it anymore, when my white shirt is translucent and my jacket streaked with mud and I’m getting stabbing pains—cramps, or rheumatism, or arthritis, who knows?—in my legs, I stand up and brush myself off; and then Laura, who has obviously been sitting in her car by the bus stop all this time, winds down her window and tells me to get in.
What happened to me during the funeral was something like this: I saw, for the first time, how scared I am of dying, and of other people dying, and how this fear has prevented me from doing all sorts of things, like giving up smoking (because if you take death too seriously or not seriously enough, as I have been doing up till now, then what’s the point?), and thinking about my life, especially my job, in a way that contains a concept of the future (too scary, because the future ends in death). But most of all it has prevented me from sticking with a relationship, because if you stick with a relationship, and your life becomes dependent on that person’s life, and then they die, as they are bound to do, unless there are exceptional circumstances, e.g., they are a character from a science-fiction novel…well, you’re up the creek without a paddle, aren’t you? It’s OK if I die first, I guess, but having to die before someone else dies isn’t a necessity that cheers me up much: how do I know when she’s going to die? Could be run over by a bus tomorrow, as the saying goes, which means I have to throw myself under a bus today. When I saw Janet Lydon’s face at the crematorium…how can you be that brave? Now what does she do? To me, it makes more sense to hop from woman to woman until you’re too old to do it anymore, and then you live alone and die alone and what’s so terrible about that, when you look at the alternatives? There were some nights with Laura when I’d kind of nestle into her back in bed when she was asleep, and I’d be filled with this enormous, nameless terror, except now I have a name for it: Brian. Ha, ha. OK, not really a name, but I could see where it came from, and why I wanted to sleep with Rosie the pain-in-the-arse simultaneous orgasm woman, and if that sounds feeble and self-serving at the same time—oh, right! He sleeps with other women because he has a fear of death!—well, I’m sorry, but that’s the way things are.
When I nestled into Laura’s back in the night, I was afraid because I didn’t want to lose her, and we always lose someone, or they lose us, in the end. I’d rather not take the risk. I’d rather not come home from work one day in ten or twenty years’ time to be faced with a pale, frightened woman saying that she’d been shitting blood—I’m sorry, I’m sorry, but this is what happens to people—and then we go to the doctor and then the doctor says it’s inoperable and then…I wouldn’t have the guts, you know? I’d probably just take off, live in a different city under an assumed name, and Laura would check in to the hospital to die and they’d say, “Isn’t your partner coming to visit?” and she’d say, “No, when he found out about the cancer he left me.” Great guy! “Cancer? Sorry, that’s not for me! I don’t like it!” Best not put yourself in that position. Best leave it all alone.
So where does this get me? The logic of it all is that I play a percentage game. I’m thirty-six now, right? And let’s say that most fatal diseases—cancer, heart disease, whatever—hit you after the age of fifty. You might be unlucky, and snuff it early, but the fifty-plus age group get more than their fair share of bad stuff happening to them. So to play safe, you stop then: a relationship every couple of years for the next fourteen years, and then get out, stop dead, give it up. It makes sense. Will I explain this to whomever I’m seeing? Maybe. It’s fairer, probably. And less emotional, somehow, than the usual mess that ends relationships. “You’re going to die, so there’s not much point in us carrying on, is there?” It’s perfectly acceptable if someone’s emigrating, or returning to their own country, to stop a relationship on the grounds that any further involvement would be too painful, so why not death? The separation that death entails has got to be more painful than the separation of emigration, surely? I mean, with emigration, you can always go with her. You can always say to yourself, “Oh, fuck it, I’ll pack it all in and go and be a cowboy in Texas/tea-picker in India,” etc. You can’t do that with the big D, though, can you? Unless you take the Romeo route, and if you think about it…
“I thought you were going to lie in that flower bed all afternoon.”
“Eh? Oh. Ha ha. No. Ha.” Assumed nonchalance is tougher than it looks in this sort of situation, although lying in a stranger’s flower bed to hide from your ex-girlfriend on the day that her dad is buried—burned—is probably not a sort, a genre of situation at all, more a one-off, nongeneric thing.
“You’re soaking.”
“Mmm.”
“You’re also an idiot.”
There will be other battles. There’s not much point in fighting this one, when all the evidence is conspiring against me.
“I can see why you say that. Look, I’m sorry. I really am. The last thing I wanted was…that’s why I went, because…I lost it, and I didn’t want to blow my top in there, and…look, Laura, the reason I slept with Rosie and mucked everything up was because I was scared that you’d die. Or I was scared of you dying. Or whatever. And I know what that sounds like, but…” It all dries up as easily as it popped out, and I just stare at her with my mouth open.
“Well, I will die. Nothing much has changed on that score.”
“No, no, I understand completely, and I’m not expecting you to tell me anything different. I just wanted you to know, that’s all.”
“Thank you. I appreciate it.”
She’s making no move to start the car.
“I can’t reciprocate.”
“How do you mean?”
“I didn’t sleep with Ray because I was scared of you dying. I slept with Ray because I was sick of you, and I needed something to get me out of it.”
“Oh, sure, no, I understand. Look, I don’t want to take up any more of your time. You get back, and I’ll wait here for a bus.”
“I don’t want to go back. I’ve thrown a wobbler too.”
“Oh. Right. Great. I mean, not great, but, you know.”
The rain starts again, and she puts the windscreen wipers on so that we can see not very much out of the window.
“Who upset you?”
“Nobody. I just don’t feel old enough. I want someone to look after me because my dad’s died, and there’s no one there who can, so when Liz told me you’d disappeared, I used it as an excuse to get out.”
“We’re a right pair, aren’t we?”
“Who upset you?”
“Oh. Nobody. Well, Liz. She was…” I can’t think of the adult expression, so I use the one closest to hand. “She was picking on me.”
Laura snorts. “She was picking on you, and you’re sneaking out on her.”
“That’s about the size of it.”
She gives a short, mirthless laugh. “It’s no wonder we’re all in such a mess, is it? We’re like Tom Hanks in Big. Little boys and girls trapped in adult bodies and forced to get on with it. And it’s much worse in a real life, because it’s not just snogging and bunk beds, is it? There’s all this as well.” She gestures through the windscreen at the field and the bus stop and a man walking his dog, but I know what she means. “I’ll tell you something, Rob. Walking out of that funeral was the worst thing I’ve ever done, and also the most exhilarating. I can’t tell you how good and bad I felt. Yes I can: I felt like a baked Alaska.”
“It’s no
t like you walked out of the funeral, anyway. You walked out of the party thing. That’s different.”
“But my mum, and Jo, and…they’ll never forget it. I don’t care, though. I’ve thought so much about him and talked so much about him, and now our house is full of people who want to give me time and opportunity to think and talk about him some more, and I just wanted to scream.”
“He’d understand.”
“D’you think? I’m not sure I would. I’d want people to stay to the bitter end. That’d be the least they could do.”
“Your dad was nicer than you, though.”
“He was, wasn’t he?”
“About five or six times as nice.”
“Don’t push your luck.”
“Sorry.”
We watch a man trying to light a cigarette while holding a dog lead, a newspaper, and an umbrella. It can’t be done, but he won’t give up.
“When are you going to go back, actually?”
“I don’t know. Sometime. Later. Listen, Rob, would you sleep with me?”
“What?”
“I just feel like I want sex. I want to feel something else apart from misery and guilt. It’s either that or I go home and put my hand in the fire. Unless you want to stub cigarettes out on my arm.”
Laura isn’t like this. Laura is a lawyer by profession and a lawyer by nature, and now she’s behaving as though she’s after a supporting role in a Harvey Keitel movie.
“I’ve only got a couple left. I’m saving them for later.”
“It’ll have to be the sex, then.”
“But where? And what about Ray? And what about…” I want to say “everything.” What about everything?
“We’ll have to do it in the car. I’ll drive us somewhere.”