I asked whether he would miss it at all: but I guessed the answer, for here we were very much alike.
“Who knows?” he said.
Yes, I knew, the places, the times, one was nostalgic for were not the obvious ones, not even the happy ones.
“Anyway,” he went on, “I can always send them home thoughts from abroad.”
A moment later he said: “It will be good to be on the move.”
Then, before we stirred ourselves, he enquired about how we should be getting on at home. Maurice would presumably still be round: he was close to his mother, and that was fine. “He’s very sweet,” said Charles, who, like others of what he called his generation, wasn’t ashamed of what mine would have considered saccharine expressions. He was fond of his half-brother, and sometimes, I thought, envied him, just because he seemed so untainted by the world. What would happen to him? “I wish,” said Charles, “that he could get through his damned examinations.” Was there nothing we could do?
Charles was busy about others’ concerns, joyful, vigorous, since in independence he was setting off on his own. It would be good to be on the move, he had said. I wasn’t resenting the rapacity and self-absorption of his youth, perhaps one couldn’t in a son when the organic links were strong, when one had known in every cell of one’s body what that state was like. I should worry about his remaining alive, until I myself was dead. It was strange, though – not unpleasant, a kind of affirmation, but still strange – to see him sitting there, as much on his own as I was now or had ever been.
AS Margaret and I sat over our breakfast, the telephone rang. Good God, I said, was it Mr Pateman again? – not so amused as Charles had been, hearing of this new addition to our timetable. Margaret answered, and as she stood there nodded ill-temperedly to me: it was a trunk call, from the usual place. Then her expression altered, and she replied in a grave and gentle tone. Yes, she would fetch me. For an instant she put a hand on mine, saying that it was about my father.
“This is Mr Sperry here.”
“Yes?”
“I’m afraid I’ve got bad news for you, I’m very sorry, I’m sure. Old Mr Eliot–”
“Yes?”
“Early this morning. He passed away.”
Again I said yes.
“I was with him when he went.”
Mr Sperry was asking me about the funeral. “I’m doing what I can,” he said. I replied that I would arrive at the house by lunchtime. Mr Sperry, sounding more than ever apologetic, said that he had a piece of business then. Could I wait till half past three or four? “It doesn’t matter to him now, does it? He was a fine old gentleman. I’m doing what I can.”
Returning to the breakfast table, I repeated all this to Margaret. She knew that she would be desolated by her own father’s death: she was tentative about commiserating with me about the death of mine. Somehow, even to her, it seemed like an act of nature. He was very old, she said: it sounded like a good way to die. It was a pity, though, that instead of having only his lodger with him, there was none of us. “I’m not sure that he even wanted that,” I said.
We found ourselves discussing what he would have wanted in the way of funerals. It was so long since I had talked to him seriously – I had talked to him seriously so seldom, even when I was a child – that I had no idea. I suspected that he wouldn’t have cared a damn. I forgot then, though later I remembered, that once he had expressed a surprisingly positive distaste for funerals in general, and his own in particular. He was rueful that if he died before his wife (he had outlived her by over forty years) she would insist on ‘making a fuss’. But I forgot that.
Neither Margaret nor I felt any of that singular necrophilic confidence with which one heard persons express certainty about what a dead relative would have ‘liked’. I had once stood with a party at Diana Skidmore’s having drinks round her husband’s grave, carefully placed near a summer house on his own estate. Diana had been positive that there was nothing he would have liked more than to have his friends enjoy themselves close by: she was equally positive that he would, curiously enough, have strongly disliked golf balls infringing the airspace over the grave.
Margaret and I had no such clear idea. My father must have a funeral. In church? Again we didn’t know. As one of his few gestures of marital independence, he had always refused to attend church with my mother, who was devout. I was pretty sure that he believed in nothing at all. Yet, for the sake of his choir practices, he had frequented church halls, church rooms, all his life. When I rang up Martin to tell him the news, I asked his opinion. Rather to my surprise, for Martin was a doctrinaire unbeliever, he thought that maybe we ought to have a service in the parish church. Quite why, he didn’t or couldn’t explain. Perhaps some strain of family piety, perhaps a memory of our mother, perhaps something more atavistic than that. Anyway, wherever his impulse came from, I was relieved, because I had it too.
This was a Wednesday, still mid-June. Martin’s family would all travel the next day, and so would Margaret and Charles. The funeral had better be on Friday, if I could arrange it. That was what I had to tell Mr Sperry, as we sat in Aunt Milly’s old ‘front room’ that afternoon – the room where, with indignant competence, she laid down the battle plans for the teetotal campaigns. But I couldn’t tell Mr Sperry about the funeral at once, for he had a good deal to tell me.
It was a dank close day, and when he opened the door he was in his shirt sleeves. As though he wouldn’t have considered it proper to speak of ‘the old gentleman’ dressed like that, he immediately put his jacket on. The Venetian blinds in the front room were lowered, a crepuscular light filtered through. Mr Sperry gazed at me with an expression that was sad and at the same time excited by the occasion.
“I’m very sorry, I’m sure,” he said, repeating his greeting at the door. I thanked him.
“Of course, it has to come to us all in the end, doesn’t it? He had a long innings, you’ve got to remember that.”
Yes, I said.
“Mind you, he’s been a bit poorly since the winter. But I didn’t expect him to go like this, and I wonder if the doctor really did, though he says it might have happened any time.”
From his first words, he had been speaking in a hushed whisper, the tone in which my mother always spoke of death. In the same whisper, he went on: “There was someone, though, who knew his time had come.”
He said: “The old gentleman did. Himself.”
“When?”
“Last night.”
He paused. Then, more hushed: “I was just getting in from a job, I had been looking after Mrs Buckley’s drainpipe, it must have been getting on for half past six, and I heard him call out, Mr Sperry, Mr Sperry. He had a good strong voice right up to the end. Of course I went in, he was lying on his sofa, it was made up to sleep in, you know, he said, Mr Sperry, I wonder if you’d mind staying with me tonight. I said, yes, Mr Eliot, of course I will if you want me to. I said, is there anything the matter? He said, yes, stay with me please, I think I’m going to die tonight. That’s what he said. So I said, do you mind if I go and get a bit to eat. He said, yes, you have your supper, and I went and had a bit of salmon, and came back as soon as I could. He said, I wonder if you’d mind holding my hand. So I stayed there all night. I kept asking him, do you want anything else, but he wouldn’t say.”
I asked, was he in pain.
“He didn’t say much after I got back, he didn’t seem to want to. Sometimes he gave a kind of shout. I didn’t think he was going, but he did. I wish I’d sent for the doctor sooner, Mrs Sperry and me, we blame ourselves for that. His breathing began to make a noise, then the sun came up. I’m sorry to say–”
I said, “You did all that anyone could do.”
“It was full light before he went. The doctor got here a few minutes after.”
He added: “I got her (Mr Sperry didn’t explain who that was) to lay him out this morning. He didn’t look very nice before, and I didn’t think you’d want to see him like that.”
He said: “I never heard anyone say a bad word about him.”
That was a formal epitaph, such as I used to hear in my childhood in that road. But Mr Sperry, as well as keeping his sense of propriety about a death, had also been totally efficient. The death certificate had been signed: the undertaker would be calling to see me later that evening. At last I had the opportunity to tell Mr Sperry that we wanted a church service. Mr Sperry was ready to cope with that. It meant that I ought to go round to the vicar’s and fix a time, before the undertaker came. All the old gentleman’s “bits of things” had been sifted through and collected in his room. So far as Mr Sperry knew or could discover, he had not left a will.
“Why should he?” I asked. Yet, in fact, he owned the house: it was dilapidated now, not worth much, a thousand at most. Anyway, whatever arrangement Mr Sperry had with him (I later found that Mr Sperry was paying £2.2.6 a week), that must go on. Mr Sperry would not have brought up the subject – certainly not until after the funeral – but he was relieved.
He said: “Now you’d like to see him, I’m sure.”
He took me into the hall, opened the door of my father’s room, touched my sleeve, and left me alone. As I crossed the threshold into the half-dark, I had a sense, sudden, dominating, of
déjà vu
. I could just make out the short body lying on the sofa, then, though all the superstitious nerves held my fingers back, I switched on the light, and looked at him. Strangely, he appeared much more formidable than in life. His head had always been disproportionately larger than the rest of him: as it lay there above the sheets, it loomed strong and heavy, the clowning all gone now that the spectacles were off and the mild eyes closed. His moustache had been brushed and didn’t droop any more. It might have been the face of a stranger – no, of someone bearing a family resemblance, a distant relative whom I hadn’t often seen.
Standing by the sofa, I stayed and looked at him. It took an effort to move away, as I went to inspect the other side of the room, where Mr Sperry had neatly stacked my father’s “bits of things”. There were a couple of old suits: a bowler hat: a few shirts and pairs of long woollen pants: another nightshirt, as well as the one his body was dressed in. An umbrella, one or two other odds and ends. No papers or letters of any kind that I could see (he must have destroyed all our letters as soon as he read them). A couple of library books to be returned, but otherwise not a single book of his own. The two clocks – but they had not been moved, one still stood on the mantelpiece, presentation plaque gleaming, the other in the corner. That was all. He hadn’t liked possessions: but still, not many men had lived till nearly ninety and accumulated less.
I went back and looked at him. All of a sudden, I realised why I had had that overmastering sense of
déjà vu
. It wasn’t a freak, it was really something I had already seen. For it was in that room that, for the first time in my life, at the age of eight, I had seen a corpse. My grandfather, when he retired, had lived in this house with Aunt Milly, and he had died here (it was early in 1914). I had come along on an errand for my mother. I couldn’t find Aunt Milly, and I ran through the house searching for her and rushed into this room. Just as when I entered today, it was half-dark, chinks of light round the edges of the blinds: there lay my grandfather in his coffin. Before, afraid, I ran away, I saw, or thought I saw, the grey spade beard, the stern and massive face. He had been a man of powerful nature, and perhaps my father’s comic acts, which lasted all his life, had started in self-defence. And yet in death – if I had really seen my grandfather as I imagined – they looked very much the same.
When I put the room into darkness again, and rejoined Mr Sperry, he asked me: “How did you like him?”
“Thank you,” I replied.
Satisfied, he gave me the vicar’s address. They couldn’t afford to live in the vicarage nowadays, said Mr Sperry. That didn’t surprise me: the church had been built after I was born, the living had always been a poor one. The vicar I remembered must have been a man of private means: he and his wife had lived in some state, by the standards of the parish, and he shocked my mother, not only by his high church propensities (he’s getting higher every week, she used to whisper, as though the altitude of clergymen was something illimitable) but also by rumours of private goings on which at the time I did not begin to understand. Parties! Champagne, so the servants reported! Women present when his wife was away! My mother darkly suspected him of having what she called an ‘intrigue’ with one of the teachers at the little dame school which she sent me to. My mother was shrewd, but she had a romantic imagination, and that was one of the mysteries in which she was never certain of the truth.
There was nothing of all that about the present incumbent. He was living in a small house near the police station, and politely he asked me into a front room similar to Mr Sperry’s. He was a youngish, red-haired man with a smile that switched on and off, and a Tyneside accent.
I told him my name, and said that my father had died. At once, both with kindness and with the practice of one used to commiserating in the anonymous streets with persons he did not know, he gave me his sympathy. “It’s one of the great losses, when your parents go. Even when you’re not so young yourself. There’s a gap that no one’s going to fill.” He was looking at me with soft brown eyes. “But you’ve got to look at it this way. It’s sad for you, but it isn’t for him, you know. He’s just gone from a nasty day like this–” he pointed to the grey cloud-dark street – “and moved into a beautiful one. That’s what it means for him. If you think of him, there’s nothing to be sad about.”
I didn’t want to answer. The vicar was kind and full of faith. Young Charles, I was thinking, might have called him sweet.
I went on to say that, if it could be managed, we should like the funeral in two days’ time, on Friday. “Excuse me, sir,” said the vicar, “but could you say, have you any connection with this parish?”
That took me aback. Without thinking, I hadn’t been prepared for it. My mother, hanging on to the last thread of status after my father’s bankruptcy: her stall at the bazaar, her place at the mothers’ meeting: she had felt herself, and made others feel her, a figure in that church until she died. Yet that was long ago. He had never heard of her, or of any of us. When I mentioned my name, it had meant nothing at all.