Of course, he said (both of us embarrassed, as I began lamely to produce the family credentials) he would be glad to take the funeral. Was there anything special that I required? A musical service? An organist? Once more that day I found myself thinking, as simply as my mother would have done, of what the old man might have “liked”. He had loved music: yes, we would have an organist. In that case, said the vicar, the service couldn’t happen till early evening on Friday, when the “lady who plays the organ for us” got out of work. They couldn’t afford a regular organist nowadays, he said: the church was poorer than it had been when I lived here, not many people attended, there were no well-to-do members of his congregation. The only one in my time (at least he seemed well-to-do to us) would have been the local doctor. “The present doctors don’t come to church,” said the vicar, with his switched on, acceptant smile.
As I left his house, it was like walking home when I was a child. The church might have become poorer, but the houses – though many of them were the same houses – looked more prosperous: in front of several of them, cars were standing, which, when my mother and I walked that quarter of a mile from church, we never saw. One of my father’s neighbours was trimming the patch of grass between his front wall and the road. Others glanced at me from their windows: they must have known my father, at least by sight, but not me.
As soon as I got back to Mr Sperry, he asked me, in his obsessive, considerate fashion, what I would care to do until the undertaker came. Without knowing why, I said that perhaps I could sit in the garden for a few minutes. At once Mr Sperry let me out, past the barren plum tree which Charles had seen from his grandfather’s window, through the paved yard, down the steps into the garden. There, from a little shed, Mr Sperry brought out a deckchair, and said that he would call me when the undertaker arrived. For the second time, not exactly timidly but like one to whom physical contact didn’t come easy, he touched my arm.
I knew the geography of that garden as well as that of ours at home, which in fact I could see over a couple of low walls, not more than thirty yards away: the apple trees had been cut down, under whose shade I used to sit reading on summer nights like this. Aunt Milly’s garden had always been better kept than ours, thanks to the devotion of her husband. It was this one I had been reminding Martin of, when we returned to the Gearys’ after that lawyers’ dinner in the middle of the trial. It occurred to me that, since I ceased to be poor, I hadn’t had a garden of my own to sit in: that was a luxury (the thought might have pleased my mother) which I had enjoyed only in our bankrupt house.
In the moist air, the smells of the night stocks and roses were so dense that they seemed palpable. For, though Aunt Milly’s husband had been a conscientious gardener, Mr Sperry was a master: which, now I had watched him in action, didn’t surprise me. But I couldn’t remember seeing a garden of this size so rich. Phlox, lupins, delphiniums, pinks on the border, rambler roses on the wall: a syringa bush close to the bed of stocks. The scents hung all round me, like the scents of childhood.
From my chair, looking up at the house, I could see the French windows of my father’s room. They stood dark-faced, the curtains drawn since that morning. It was up the steps to those French windows that I had led Charles, over a year before. I should not go up that way again.
SUNLIGHT shining on the lacquer, the empty hearse stood outside the church. Martin’s car, and the one that I had hired, were drawn up in line. We had arrived early, and had been waiting on the pavement, near the iron palings which guarded a yew tree and the 1908 red brick. Irene and her daughter were wearing black dresses, and Margaret was in grey: Martin, Pat, Charles and I had all put on black ties. The Sperrys, though, who had just walked slowly along the road from what used to be my father’s house, were in full mourning, or at least in clothes such as I remembered at funerals in this church, he in a black suit with an additional and almost indistinguishable armband, she in jet from her hat to her shoes. As they passed us, they said a few soft words.
One or two other people were approaching, perhaps members of his old choir, who had sent a wreath. The solitary cracked bell began to toll, and I took Margaret, our feet scuffling on the gravel (was that sensation familiar to Martin too?) towards the church door. The pitch pine. The smell of wax and hassocks. The varnished chairs. In my mother’s heyday, we used to stop at a row immediately behind the churchwardens’, which she had appropriated for her own. But we couldn’t now, since the church, small as it was, was full of empty space. There were the undertaker and his four bearers. The Sperrys. The seven of the family, walking up the aisle. Three others. I didn’t know, but it might have been about the size of the congregation on Sunday mornings nowadays. With the organ playing, we moved up to the second row: there, all of us except Margaret having been drilled in anglican customs, we pulled out the hassocks and went down on our knees. It was a long time since I had been to any kind of service, longer still to a church funeral. On its trestle behind the altar rails, the coffin rested, wreath-covered, brass-handled, short, unobtrusive.
While the organ went on playing, I glanced at the hymn board, record of last Sunday’s evensong, and began mechanically – as though the boyhood habit hadn’t been interrupted by a week, organ music booming on lulled but uncomprehending ears – juggling with the numbers in my head. Once that game had made the time go faster, helping on the benediction.
The vestry door had opened and shut: the vicar was standing in front of the altar. His voice was as strong as the Clerk of Assize’s at the trial, without effort filling the empty church.
I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.
At one time I knew those words by heart. I couldn’t have told whether I was listening now.
We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away: blessed be the name of the Lord.
I couldn’t have told whether I was listening now. Even at Sheila’s funeral, my first wife’s, though I was ill with misery, I couldn’t concentrate, I was dissociated from the beautiful clerical voice – and yes, from the coffin resting there. Yet this time I half-heard, It is certain we can carry nothing out. Just for an instant, I had a thought about my father. I wondered if the same had come to Martin, whom I had told about his possessions. No one had had much less to carry out.
For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday: seeing that is past as a watch in the night.
In the morning it is green, and groweth up: but in the evening it is cut down, dried and withered.
For when thou art angry, all our days are gone: we bring our years to an end, as it were a tale that is told.
The days of our age are threescore years and ten: and though men be so strong, that they come to fourscore years: yet is their strength then but labour and sorrow, so soon passeth it away, and we are gone.
That was being said over my father in his late eighties. It must have been said also at the funeral of Eric Mawby, aged eight.
First Corinthians Fifteen. By this time I was scarcely trying to listen, or even to follow the words in my prayer book. At school I had studied Corinthians for an examination, and I couldn’t keep my mind from drifting to my father’s forebears, who had listened to that passage, there was no escaping it, generation after generation for hundreds of years.
The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.
Not my grandfather. That deep Victorian agnostic had never been inside a church after he left school at the age of ten. Yet – one couldn’t trust a child’s memory, I might be romanticising him, but I didn’t think so – he was pious as well as agnostic, he had a library of ninteenth-century religious controversy, and then decided, just as Martin might have done, that he didn’t believe where he couldn’t believe. He would have made a good nineteenth-century Russian. I was sure, and here I did trust my memory, that he was a clever man. He would have got on with his grandchildren and with Charles.
What advantageth it me, if the dead rise not? Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.
But his father and grandfather: they hadn’t had the education he had hacked out for himself. He believed, he told me when I was five and could read quite well, that that was more than they could do. So far as he knew, his grandfather could only make his mark. Yet, he insisted, they were strong, intelligent men. He was bitter about them, and the muteness from which they came. Small craftsmen one generation: then back to agricultural labourers (not peasants, for England had had no peasants for long enough), no history, no change, further back than the church registers went. There was none of the social moving, the ups-and-downs, that had happened on my mother’s side. The Eliot families must have gone to the funeral services in the village churches, and listened to this Pauline eloquence for at least a dozen generations. Some of that gene pool was in us. Gone stoically, most of them, I thought. As with us, phrases stuck in their memories. As with me as a child, the rabbinical argumentation washed over them.
Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is they sting? O grave, where is thy victory? The sting of death is sin: and the strength of sin is the law.
How old was I, when I first became puzzled by that last gnomic phrase? We had all listened to it, the whole line of us, life after life, so many lives, lost and untraceable now.
The vicar led the way out of church; following him, the bearers’ shoulders were firm under the coffin. Margaret and I walked behind, then Martin and Irene, then the grandchildren. As the coffin was slid into the hearse, windows so clear that there might have been no glass there, the undertaker stood by, rubicund, content that all was in order, holding his top hat in a black gloved hand. “Easy on,” muttered one of the bearers at the last shove.
Slowly the little procession of cars drove down the side street into the main road. On the pavement people passed casually along, but one old man stopped in his walk and took off his hat. The parish church, being so new, had never had a graveyard: and in fact all the parish graveyards in the town had been full for years. My mother had been buried in the big municipal cemetery, and it was there, along the sunny bus route, cars rushing towards us and the suburbs, that we were driving. But my mother, as she had died young, had not arranged to reserve a grave beside her: and that was a matter to which my father would not have given a thought. So his coffin was carried to the opposite side of the great cemetery, new headstones glaring in the sun, flower vases twinkling, angels, crosses, such a profusion of the signs of death that it gave an extra anonymity to death itself: as in one of the wartime collective graves, where all that one took in was that the victims of a siege were buried here.
In a far corner, a neat rectangle had been marked out, and below the edge of turf, one could see the fresh brown earth. Wreaths away, coffin lowered (again one of the bearers muttered), and we stood round.
There were no prayer books to follow now. Rich voice in the hot evening.
Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery.
In the midst of life we are in death.
I had noticed which of the bearers was holding bits of earth in hand. At the end of the appeal he was waiting to hear
suffer us not, at our last hours, for any pains of death, to fall from them
. Promptly he stepped forward and, with a couple of flicks, threw down the earth upon the coffin.
Opposite to me, across the grave, Charles’ mouth suddenly tightened. He had not heard that final sound before.
For as much as it hath pleased Almighty God of his great mercy to take unto himself the soul of our dear brother Herbert Edward here departed: we therefore commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life
…the voice went on, it was soon all over, the collect and the blessing.
We were very near one entrance to the cemetery, and before long were standing there, shaking hands. Our voices, which had been so subdued as we waited for the bell to toll and on the road to the cemetery, suddenly became loud. I heard Martin’s, usually quiet, sound hearty as he thanked the vicar. I shook hands with the undertaker and the bearers, one of whom kept rubbing his hand on his trousers, as though he couldn’t get rid of the last particle of earth. Margaret was telling the Sperrys, once again, how grateful we were for their kindness.
Thanks given and regiven, we stood about, not knowing what to do. No one wanted to make a move. Pat’s face, more labile than any of ours, was suiting itself to sadness, just as it did to a party. Charles, tall by his cousin’s side, politely answered questions from Mr Sperry. The truth was, we were at a loss. I had made a mistake, or forgotten something. After funerals such as this, my mother and her friends had always departed to a meal, spending on it often much more than they could afford. Singular meals, so far as I remembered – ham, chicken (bought for this special occasion), blancmanges, jellies, cakes. Port wine. When I was Charles’ age, that seemed to me as naïve as it would to him. Yet maybe it was wise. It made an end. As we stood about at the cemetery gate, this was no sort of end.
Glancing round with bright, apprehensive eyes (the same treacle-brown eyes that one could see in her son and daughter), Irene said: “Well, perhaps we ought to be thinking of–” her voice trailed off.
Martin, once more over-hearty, was saying to the Sperrys: “Now are you all right for transport? Are you sure you’re all right? Or else I can get you home–” The vicar and the undertaker assured him that they had room for the Sperrys.