Authors: David Nobbs
Nobody spoke. Everyone was too drained to accept the responsibility of making the first remark. Everyone except Stanley tried to eat with a degree of delicacy. They were ashamed of how hungry their grief and emotion had made them.
Then Stanley bowed his head towards his plate, his fork poised to spear a prawn. The fork slipped out of his hand, his head slipped onwards and sank onto his plate, splattering mayonnaise onto the smooth tabletop. He gave a single, vast, shuddering snore.
‘I think we’re going to have to get him to bed,’ said James.
‘He’ll be heavy,’ warned Philip.
‘We’ve four strong men,’ said James.
‘Um …’ said Charles.
As ums go, it was a rather powerful one, and they all looked at him. It was impossible to see whether he was blushing, under all that hair.
‘I’m afraid under my contracts, in this age of Health and Safety, I have guaranteed not to indulge in any physical activity that might be risky. I’ve a big tour coming up. I just can’t risk it.’
‘We can manage,’ said Max.
It was almost a shock to hear him speak. James realised that he hadn’t spoken to him or even been conscious of seeing him since he had asked him to take responsibility for the wake just after the service. In a way this was a compliment. Max could be trusted. He didn’t need to check up on how he was doing.
‘I can take his head. I’m pretty used to weights in logging. And Dad and Philip can take one leg each. We won’t need you, Uncle Charles.’
Valerie tried, not entirely successfully, to hide a tiny smile, a smile that said, you, the mighty Charles, the centre of all attention, will not have enjoyed it being pointed out by your nephew that you are surplus to requirements.
Max went to the back of Stanley’s chair and put his hands round the old man’s bent shoulders. James and Philip slid their hands under his mighty buttocks. The three of them lifted the elderly, forgotten author of
The Physiognomy of Tribes
. Stanley rose from his chair like an old car pulled from a river. James took hold of his left leg while Philip maintained a hold on his buttocks. Then Philip let go and moved his arms hurriedly to Stanley’s right leg. His inert body lurched for a moment, then they steadied him. He gave a low moan, stirred, but did not wake.
‘May I suggest you don’t take him up two flights?’ said Charles. ‘We can go home tonight. It would be more sensible. I’ve been thinking of suggesting that, anyway. I’ve lots to do at home, and then there’s the next ridiculous tour planned by another maniac. Put him in our room. The bed’s perfectly clean.’
Valerie blushed slightly as if this was an admission of sexual inactivity.
‘I hardly think he’ll worry about that,’ she said.
They began to carry Stanley to the door.
‘Just a moment,’ said Mum.
She hurried over with her napkin and gently wiped the mayonnaise off Stanley’s face. He stirred, grunted and gave a single immense cough. Bits of hard-boiled egg sprayed from his mouth. Mum reeled from his alcoholic breath, but she stayed to finish her task.
‘There,’ she said. ‘A bit of dignity for the poor old boy.’
The three men carried the sleeping anthropologist very slowly up the first flight of narrow stairs, Max walking backwards at his head, James and Philip at his feet, a brother who had just discovered that he had been about to be cuckolded side by side and sharing a task with the brother who had been about to do the cuckolding, their bodies touching in the narrow space, their minds knowing that nothing in their changed relationship had yet been resolved.
The three men carried Stanley across the landing. Mum hurried into the main guest bedroom, and pulled back the sheets. The three men laid Stanley gently on the bed, loosened his tie and took off his shoes. Mum pulled the sheet up and tucked him in tenderly. He gave another huge single snore.
They tiptoed out of the room, leaving him to dream of Celts and cataclysms.
They returned to their food. James tried to eat, but his appetite had gone. He put his knife and fork down, although he still had plenty of food left, and spoke in a low, but, he hoped, not too earnest tone.
‘I discovered something momentous in the chapel today,’ he said. ‘I discovered that I didn’t believe in God. Belief in God has never been something I’ve thought about. I think I’ve been unbelievably lazy intellectually. I’ve drifted along, a non-churchgoer rather than a non-believer. Suddenly today I thought, I wouldn’t dream of belittling other people’s faith, but it doesn’t make sense to me. I don’t believe I shall ever see Deborah again in some strange unbodily form. We had an adventure. We had a story. And stories and adventures end.’
He glanced at Philip, whose face was a mask. He didn’t know if he should be saying these things to him, but he had to. He couldn’t carry the burden of his surprise on his own.
‘I found I couldn’t join in with the responses.’
‘I noticed that,’ said Max.
‘I know. I noticed that you noticed. I felt so very close to you, Max.’
Max blushed with a pleasure that he tried unavailingly to hide.
James felt the need to continue. ‘If there is no God, if we are not serving some purpose in life outside ourselves, the meaning of our life is the sum total of all our actions, and it’s therefore even more important, not less important, that our actions should be good, as mine, I’m sorry to say, so often haven’t been. Chaos without God? I don’t think so. I daresay I’m not making much sense to you, but really all I need to do is make sense to myself.’
He took up his knife and fork, cut off a small piece of tongue, and began to eat it.
‘I’m telling you this, because I need to, but I honestly think I’m too tired to debate it,’ he said. ‘Oh, Mum, you’ve got your don’t-talk-with-your-mouth-full face on.’
‘I can’t help it,’ said his mum. ‘I hate the sight of wet food revolving in a mouth like clothes in a washing machine.’
‘Sorry.’
He realised that this was the first ‘sorry’ he had uttered for quite some time. He tried to rally, take up his theme again, but it was difficult to get back to the meaning of life after a comment about wet food in mouths. Good old Mum. He felt very tired now. He looked across at Philip and felt that he too looked tired, and very strained. They must talk.
He saw Mum making when-are-you-going-to-take-me-home signs to Philip.
Philip saw them too and said, ‘I think Mum wants to be taken home.’
‘I’m not thinking about me,’ protested Mum. ‘I was thinking of you. You’ve got to go all the way to Leighton Buzzard.’
‘We must be getting back too,’ said Charles, who had been very subdued since his refusal to help putting Stanley to bed.
‘Well, before you go, Philip,’ said James, ‘there’s that little bit of business to discuss.’
Philip looked at him questioningly, then the penny dropped.
‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘May as well get it over. Won’t be long, Mum.’
‘Don’t worry about me,’ said Mum defensively.
James led Philip upstairs to his little office at the back of the first floor, next to the house bathroom. He only worked at home when it was unavoidable, and the small, cluttered room had no sense of importance. There were papers on the chairs, papers on the floor, papers everywhere. Two crumpled handkerchiefs stood on top of a pile of invoices. As he cleared papers off the two adjustable swivel chairs, James could hear his father saying, of his bedroom, ‘An untidy room reflects an untidy mind, boy,’ and slapping him hard across the cheek. His father, even in his worst tempers, had never hit him hard enough to cause injuries. The tempers, it struck him now, had never been uncontrolled. They had been fuelled by cold, calculated cruelty. Mum had never had an inkling that their father ever hit them. And here they were now, the two younger sons of this vicious man, in this bleak, untidy room, here not to discuss, as they hoped those downstairs thought, some abstruse financial fallout from Deborah’s death, but a question of passion, their shared love of a wonderful woman.
‘I feel as if I’ve been summoned to the headmaster’s study,’ said Philip.
‘A very untidy, unmethodical headmaster,’ said James. ‘I … I need to speak to you about Deborah, Philip.’
Philip looked back at him impassively.
‘Your face gives away so little, Philip. No wonder I got you wrong.’
‘I’m a very private person.’
‘I’ve been utterly shocked by what you told me today.’
‘I can understand that. I suppose what I did was shocking.’
‘I didn’t say I was shocked by what you did. I said I was shocked by what you told me. I was shocked to think that I’d made Deborah so unhappy that she could contemplate such a course of action.’
‘Don’t punish yourself too much, James. I think Deborah still … I think you and she still led a life that she found … well … oh, God, words, they’re so much harder for me than numbers … that she found … I have to get the word right … bearable.’
‘Oh, my God. “Do you take this woman and promise her a not intolerable life in sickness and in health?” “Bearable.”!’
‘Well, I’m sorry, but obviously she wasn’t overjoyed at developments.’
‘No.’
James noticed an unopened envelope on his desk. He took a paper knife from the box that held his pens, and ripped it open savagely. The little burst of savagery allowed some of his anger to escape.
‘You’re angry with me,’ said Philip. ‘I’m not surprised.’
‘I’m not angry with you, you idiot,’ said James angrily. ‘I’m angry with myself.’
He pulled the contents out of the envelope as if removing the entrails from a rabbit he was skinning.
The envelope contained an invitation to a capital gains seminar in a hotel outside Pontefract four months ago.
The displacement activity had achieved its purpose. James was calm again.
‘I’ve been thinking about this all evening,’ he said. ‘I’ve been talking and listening and all the time it’s been there in my mind – you, Deborah, me. What I want to tell you, Philip …’, he said very quietly, ‘… and I didn’t intend to say it today, because I wanted to be absolutely sure that it’s what I really think before I told you, but I do know, I’ve thought enough about it this evening, it’s absolutely what I think. I’m so thankful it was you.’
‘What?’
‘I don’t think either of us know what would have happened about all this if Deborah had lived, but it’s a huge consolation to me that at the moment of her death she was happy, she was looking forward to the future, she was … oh, hell, why is this embarrassing, why am I so English, can’t Stanley find any foreign blood in me to loosen up my emotions? … I’m pleased she was dreaming of a life with a good man.’
‘Good God, James.’
‘I know. But I mean it. Really.’
‘Well … thank you … I’m … I’m really touched, James.’
‘And not a hint of it on that mask men call your face. And there’s Charles, awash with emotion most of the time, and how much of it is real?’
‘Oh, some of it, I think.’
James stood up. So did Philip. They approached each other awkwardly, hugged briefly and rather stiffly.
‘I think I’d have come to my senses and fought you for her, and who knows who’d have won, and it might have got nasty,’ said James, ‘but I really do mean it, my old bruv. I’m so very glad that, last Wednesday, it was you.’
And so, as the sun set over Islington, as the day approached its dying fall, James kissed his mum and told her that he and Max would take her out to a restaurant for Sunday lunch.
‘Restaurants!’ she said. ‘Ten per cent service, and half of them don’t speak a word of English. What sort of service is that, I ask you?’
James and Philip shared a brotherly smile. Good old Mum. She had been so sweet today, but it wouldn’t have been right for her visit to end with a polite ‘thank you’.
The two men were careful not to share more than a brotherly smile. They were both acutely aware of Charles, wondering what they had been discussing upstairs and not quite liking to mention it this evening. They knew that, if they gave him a chance, he would ask them. They were aware that this was a new situation in their brotherly relations. James and Philip together, Charles excluded. Something had shifted – for ever.
Charles and Valerie drifted out to their car behind Philip and Mum.
Charles and James kissed and hugged, and Charles said, ‘You’re going to miss her so much, James. She was a wonderful, wonderful woman,’ and James felt guilty at having believed for a moment that it had been Charles she had been driving towards with her red shoes at the ready. It was all words with Charles, perhaps because, in his professional, artistic life, words were so much less important than sounds. ‘She was beautiful, she was kind, she was an angel.’
‘Yes, come along, Charles,’ said Valerie.
As he closed the door behind them, James realised a surprising thing. He didn’t wish he was Charles any more.
He sat at the dining-room table, with Max, amid the wreckage of the impromptu family meal. The light was fading. A tiny corner of the wall was catching the sun as it set in the north-west. The sliver of light just caught the edge of the sideboard and one side of the decanter nearest the window. The decanter glinted and sparked with ever-changing reds and crimsons, while the rest of the room grew slowly darker.
‘Drop more?’
‘Just a drop.’
James knew that Max longed for sleep, and was only accepting more wine out of politeness. They sat there without speaking for several minutes, and this really was a companionable silence.
But as the silence stretched, James began to feel the urge to break it, and to break it with something meaningful, something emotional, something definitive, something that would summarise the state of play between them. But it was too late, he was too tired, Max was much too tired.
‘I thought we might take Gran out for Sunday lunch,’ he said.
‘Sounds good to me,’ said Max. ‘The old Sunday roast.’
Max yawned loudly.
‘Go to bed,’ said James. ‘Don’t worry about me. I’m going out into the garden with my thoughts.’
‘If you’re sure.’
Max stood up, stretched like a dog, hugged James very briefly, and set off. As he opened the door, they could hear Stanley snoring prodigiously.