The day drags past from breath to breath, each seeming for one shuddering moment to be the last. When Nick takes Geordie’s hand there’s an unexpectedly strong answering grip. Geordie seems to be trying to pull himself into an upright position. He says, Pull, pull, but it hardly seems fair hauling him into an upright position, when there’s nothing to be gained. But ignoring the plea’s horrible. Geordie’s totally helpless now and yet Nick’s not doing the one thing he’s asked to do.
From time to time Frieda puts a feeding beaker to his lips, and he drinks eagerly, his mouth puckering round the spout like a baby’s on the nipple. When he’s finished there’s a smear of milk on his chin that Nick wipes away. Then for hours – nothing. Asleep, drugged, unconscious, it’s hard to tell – his breath hardly raises the counterpane, and his eyes are closed.
The doctor comes, hooks up the eyelids between thumb and forefinger, shines a torch. A stroke, he says, and for one insane – no, not insane, entirely sane – moment Nick wants to laugh. Bayonet wound, cancer, doesn’t matter now. Geordie’s sidestepped them both. After the doctor’s gone, Nick, remembering something he’s heard or read, puts his fingers to Geordie’s pulse, and there it is: beat, echo, beat, echo. His breathing’s changed too, though Nick would find it difficult to describe the change.
They sit with him, one on either side of the bed, not saying much. At last, just after ten o’clock, Geordie draws a particularly raucous breath, holds it, lets it out slowly. Nick and Frieda look at each other, she leans forward, half in the expectation of relief. Then another breath, and she sits back. They glance at each other and then quickly away, each dreading to see the other’s disappointment. Another breath, another pause. They wait. A shudder passes through Geordie’s thin chest, a lifting of the ribs. A clock ticks in the silence. No breath and still no breath. Tick. Tick. No breath. ‘He’s gone,’ Frieda says, and, though they’ve expected this moment for weeks, the words are amazing.
NINETEEN
Downstairs, Nick makes a cup of tea, pours a slug of brandy into Frieda’s, and persuades her to drink it.
‘I can’t believe he’s gone,’ she says, cradling the cup in her hands. ‘It’s like the side of the house going.’
‘What do we have to do?’ Nick asks.
‘Nothing, I don’t think. Nothing we can do now till morning.’
‘I’d like to tidy him up a bit.’
‘I can do that.’
‘No, let’s do it together.’
They get a bowl of water, towels and soap, and go upstairs.
‘He was shaved yesterday. I don’t think we need to do that,’ Nick says.
‘No, the undertaker’ll do that. Just straighten him out.’
Nick pulls the sheets down, and Frieda looks away while he does what has to be done.
‘You’d better put a towel,’ she says. ‘Sometimes, they… You know.’
Nick pushes a clean white towel between Geordie’s legs. He feels self-conscious, handling the penis and scrotum as he cleans him up, wondering why he’s bothering since Geordie can’t be aware of, or care, who does these essential last jobs. But it’s right they should be done by somebody who knew and loved him. Right too that they should be difficult to do. Even in death the genitals are a source of power. Frieda’s averted face and his own shyness have a truth to them that trivialized the easy acceptance of nudity. He dries the still warm skin, fastens the pyjama jacket, and draws the sheet up to his chin. The eyes have opened slightly, and he presses them closed. ‘Do we put his teeth in, do you think?’
‘We’d better,’ Frieda says. ‘He’ll have stiffened by morning.’
They force the teeth into his mouth and then Frieda works on it, producing a more natural expression than the faintly sardonic sneer left by the stroke.
‘Doesn’t he look peaceful?’ Frieda says, standing back to inspect her handiwork.
Nick opens his mouth to agree, but at that moment Geordie’s voice says in his ear, so loud it’s like taking a punch: ‘I am in hell.’
His last words, Nick thinks, hoping it’s not true, straining to remember something else he’d said afterwards, but he said nothing else, except ‘Pull, pull’, which hardly seems to count.
‘Should we sit up with him?’ He’s treating her as the expert in death, though her experience, like his, is limited. The expert’s lying in the bed between them.
‘No,’ Frieda says. ‘I think you should try to get a good night’s sleep. There’ll be a lot to do in the morning. I’ll stop here.’
It’s now nearly midnight. He’s been dead two hours. His forehead’s cold and damp, the clammy feel of mushrooms before they’re washed.
‘Will you be all right?’
‘’Course I’ll be all right,’ she says.
‘You won’t be frightened?’
‘What of?’ A scornful sniff. ‘The dead can’t hurt you.’
Fran’s asleep. On a sudden impulse Nick walks along the corridor to Miranda’s room. She’s reading. ‘Miranda,’ he says.
She looks relieved to see him. ‘Dad. I’m sorry about Gramps.’
‘Yes, I’m sorry too. Shouldn’t you be asleep?’
‘I was just going to put the light out.’
‘It’s late, you know.’
‘All right, I’ll stop now.’
He leaves her reaching out a hand to the switch.
Gareth next. Only the bed’s empty, and for a moment he’s surprised, then he remembers that Gareth’s staying with Fran’s mother.
Jasper. Breathing snuffily, smelling of pee and milk, a warm, animal smell that makes Nick want to rest his face against the tiny chest. Instead he tucks the sheet more snugly round him.
Fran’s deeply asleep, but stirs, moving slightly to accommodate him as he slides in beside her.
Nick wakes to find her side of the bed empty, goes downstairs and finds her in the kitchen feeding Jasper soft-boiled egg. They embrace over his noisy gesticulating form. ‘I thought I’d leave you to sleep,’ she says, a little shy with him, not knowing quite how she’s supposed to react. ‘Yeah, thanks,’ he says, and bends down to Jasper, who knows nothing and is therefore easier. Jasper’s holding a soldier dipped in yolk up to him. ‘Is that for me?’ Nick says, pretending to eat. ‘Yum yum yum.’
‘Did Frieda stay there?’
‘Yes.’
‘You should have brought her back here.’
‘No, she wanted to stay. I’d better get back there,’ he says, looking at his watch. ‘We’ll need the doctor out, I suppose, and the undertaker.’
‘He’s going into the chapel of rest?’
‘I should think so, but she’ll want him home before the funeral. Apparently he wants – wanted – to be buried in St John’s. My grandmother’s buried there. So I thought we might have the tea here, but you know we –’
‘Of course we’ll have it here.’
‘I mean she’ll want him back home before the funeral, but she’ll sleep there, I expect. I don’t suppose he can be left in the house on his own. Though I don’t know why not, give the burglars a shock.’
‘Nick.’
‘No, he’d like that.’
Nick nibbles two slices of toast, standing with his back to the sink, wanting to be gone. At the back of his mind there’s some absurd idea that Grandad’s expecting him to walk through the door.
Instead, when at last he opens the front door, a breath of cold air greets him. Of course the windows will have had to be kept open all night. The house sounds emptier and smells different. Frieda’s winding up the cord on the vacuum cleaner, having cleaned the living room. She doesn’t look as if she’s slept much, he thinks, with a stab of compunction, as he bends to kiss her. ‘How was it?’
‘Quiet,’ she says with a roguish twinkle, and they giggle together like a couple of naughty children. ‘Will you go up and see him?’ she says.
‘Yes, all right.’ Straightening his face, he goes up, feeling the cold of Geordie’s bedroom meet him halfway up the stairs. Geordie’s still lying with the sheet pulled up to his chin. Well, of course he is, Nick tells himself impatiently; it’d be a remarkable state of affairs if he’d moved. But then he
has
moved, infinitesimally. The muscles of his face, stiffening, have changed his expression from stern to quizzical, and the eyes have opened slightly so that a line of white’s just visible. Nick reaches out to close them again, and the skin feels icy cold, and somehow thicker, which must be a sign of rigor mortis.
It has the curious effect of making Geordie untouchable, as he had not been the previous night, when his body, though cooling fast, had felt little different from his living body. ‘Oh, Grandad,’ Nick whispers aloud.
The movement of exhaled breath disturbs the dust motes that are sifting about in the shaft of sunlight that comes through the crack in the skimped curtains. The silence receives the whisper and deepens around it. Nobody here, Nick thinks, though he sits for a while longer, taking in the smells, all clean and cold, white sheets, soap, the musty smells of sickness banished, the smell of death mercifully not detectable yet. And then, as he stands up to go, there’s another smell: Antaeus. ‘Yon pansy stuff you put on your chin.’ But Nick’s not wearing any, and when he leans forward, putting his face close to his grandfather’s, he can detect no trace of aftershave lingering on the skin. There shouldn’t be – they washed his face last night. Yet the smell’s powerful – nothing vague or tentative about it. You’d think a whole bottle of the stuff had been spilled.
Nick remembers that he’s not yet told Helen about Geordie’s death and goes downstairs, intending to get it over with as fast as possible. She’s on her answering machine. ‘… and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.’ Nick waits for the beep, knowing he won’t be able to leave this message on the machine. ‘Hello, Helen, this is Nick,’ he says, sounding self-conscious. ‘Could you give me a ring?’
The phone’s picked up before he’s finished. ‘Nick.’ Her voice sounds incredibly close and breathless.
‘Helen.’ Faced with her unexpected presence, he’s lost for words. ‘I’m afraid it’s over. Well, pleased it’s over, I suppose.’
He hears his voice objectively, as if this is a recorded message and he’s playing it back. He finds himself thinking, That man sounds desperate.
‘Peaceful?’ she asks, obviously detecting his uneasiness.
Nick hesitates. ‘Not exactly.’
‘I’ll be here all day.’
He was wanting her to say that. ‘Later this morning? About twelve?’
‘I’ll see you then.’
The doctor comes at half past nine. He stands by the bed looking down, a younger man than Nick, but used to death as Nick is not. Faced often enough with far worse deaths than this. ‘Well, he had a good innings,’ he says. Nick agrees. He goes on agreeing, because the neighbour says it too, and then the Vicar. A few old friends come in to see the body, and that’s good, because it’s the old way, and Frieda thinks Geordie would have liked it. But, at intervals, throughout the day, as startling as gas bubbles bursting on the surface of a pond, he hears Grandad’s voice: ‘I am in hell.’
Am
. It’s the present tense that ambushes Nick now.
They’re going in later to choose the coffin. For now, the undertakers arrive with a body bag, and when he looks at this thing, this gleaming black plastic dustbin liner, Nick feels overwhelming anger. He’d imagined a coffin, labouring shoulders, jostling on the narrow stairs, that impressive mixture of extreme physical effort and silent respect, familiar from royal funerals. Instead there’s this zipper bag, drawn up across the face. Mind his nose, he wants to say as the zip closes. Stupid – even if they did catch the skin, he wouldn’t feel anything.
The body sags, between the men carrying it, into a shallow U. Even a deeply unconscious man would respond to being moved in a slightly different way. There’d be some residual muscle tone to differentiate him from this limp parcel of dead meat which can do nothing to help itself or its bearers. Nick doesn’t want to see them carry it downstairs. Instead, he stays in the room, staring at the creased and rumpled sheets which, despite all his precautions with the towel, are slightly stained. He listens to the rustle of plastic, as the shuffling steps recede, thinking that the rumpled bed looks more like the scene of recent love-making, than a place where somebody had died. Again, on the cool air, the scent of Antaeus. Once more, Nick smells the pillows, the counterpane, his own fingertips, but there’s nothing there.
After the undertakers have driven away, Nick walks slowly along to the bathroom, where he looks into Grandad’s steel shaving mirror. There’s a syndrome that consists of an inability to recognize one’s own face. Perhaps he’s just succumbed to it, for the face that stares back at him is nothing like his own.
It’s late afternoon when he stops the car outside Helen’s flat and looks up at her window above the trees. There’s nobody else he wants to talk to now, nobody else who knows Geordie as intimately as he does. He presses the intercom and announces his name.
A crackle of sound that he hardly manages to identify as her voice tells him to come in. On his way up the four flights of stairs he pauses, not wanting to arrive gasping for breath, and from then on is puzzled by the sound of talking. She has the radio on perhaps, but then one of the voices – a man’s voice – starts to sound familiar. It’s somebody he knows. He hopes she hasn’t got one of their mutual colleagues with her. If she has, he decides, he’ll stay the minimum length of time, then make some excuse and leave.
Standing outside the door, hand raised to knock, he recognizes the voice as Geordie’s, and feels his skin roughening like the sea when the wind blows over it. Geordie, not dead, not silenced. Geordie, preserved on Helen’s tapes for ever. He’s singing the song his wife used to sing, to calm him, in the early days of their marriage, when his nightmares soaked her in sweat and she’d wake to find the sheets drenched with his piss.
Keep yor feet still, Geordie hinny,
Let’s be happy for the neet,
For we may not be sae happy thro’ the day,
So give us that bit comfort,
Helen’s voice joins in.
Keep yor feet still, Geordie lad!
And dinnet drive me bonny dreams away.
It’s a good moment, and he wonders whether she intended it for him, this reminder that the truth of Geordie’s life did not consist of those traumatic memories that erupted to plague his final months, but in the continuity of loving that had filled all the years between.
He needs to know. He knocks, and the door swings open. It’s been open all the time.
They’re in the room together now, not speaking because the tape’s still playing. The song ends in a burst of shared laughter. Helen clicks stop. She’s holding herself, as she looks down at the recorder, her face slightly averted from Nick. When she finally turns and raises her face to his, he sees her eyes are full of tears, and, without thinking, opens his arms to her.
They cling together, Helen choking back tears. After a while she pushes herself off his chest and says, unsteadily, ‘Drink.’
‘I’m driving.’
‘You can walk from here. Anyway, one won’t hurt.’
Yes, that’s true, he thinks, I can walk from here. ‘All right.’
The chink of ice in the glass, she knows exactly how he likes it, they’ve been friends for so many years. Miranda was a baby when they first met. She comes back into the room and hands him the glass. He moves further along the sofa to make room, but, struggling with tears, she shakes her head and goes to stand near the window, a spare dark shape silhouetted against an intricate network of branches. She raises her glass and drinks. The sunlight, catching the cut-glass, dazzles him.
He says, ‘He was in love with you.’
A turn of the head. ‘Yes, I know.’ A moment’s silence. Then: ‘How was it?’
‘His last words were, “I am in hell.”’
She waits. Nick realizes he can’t – daren’t – go on. After a while, he manages to say, ‘I want you to tell me about Harry.’
‘Yes.’ A faint smile. ‘I thought you might.’
‘You didn’t destroy the tape, did you?’