Authors: Susan Howatch
“… and so there it is,” I said vaguely, not sure what “it” was, but the next moment I was remembering that I still hadn’t answered his question about whether I needed someone to conduct the funeral. “Don’t worry about the service,” I said hastily. “The crematorium people will have a rota of clergymen, won’t they, and I’ll just take whoever’s on duty that day.”
Mr. Hall, who was busy building a pyramid with the crumbs left over from his banana cake, said casually: “Nicholas would conduct the funeral for you.”
I was astounded but somehow managed to say colourlessly: “I wouldn’t dream of troubling him further when he’s already done so much.”
Mr. Hall’s hand halted above his pyramid of crumbs, and as he looked at me sharply I sensed my response had intrigued him so much that he was making a rapid reassessment of my character. It occurred to me then that most women would have given a very different response when offered further pastoral attention from Nicholas Darrow.
“How very considerate of you,” said Mr. Hall pleasantly at last, “but there’s still no need to fall back on a clergyman from the crematorium
rota. I’d be more than willing to take the service if you wish.” And when I hesitated, fearful of being a bore yet tempted to accept his offer, he added kindly: “Think it over and let me know—and think over too what I said about Francie.” Then he asked me if I wanted him to say a prayer before he left.
“No thanks,” I said at once, but this flat refusal struck me as horribly rude, particularly when he had been so nice to me. “I’m very glad you called,” I added in a rush. “Please don’t think I’m not grateful.”
He smiled, not in the least put out by my rejection of the prayer, and taking a card from his wallet he wrote on the back:
MRS. FRANCINE PARKER (FRANCIE).
A series of numerals followed as he added her telephone number.
“I’m glad to have met you, Miss Fletcher,” he said, placing the card on the tray beside the teapot, “and do please give me a call either at the Healing Centre or at the Rectory if you need further help of any kind.”
I thanked him, led him to the front door and watched as he limped down the street to the parking meter at the far end. His car was a dusty red Volkswagen Golf, workmanlike and respectable, but he drove it like a Porsche. I heard the engine roar and the tires squeal as he surged off around the corner into Smith Square.
A very peculiar clergyman.
Drifting back into the kitchen I mechanically began to make another banana cake.
VI
Apparently
my healing, such as it was, had left my compulsion to eat untouched. But what had I expected? A craving for a liquid diet of a thousand calories a day? I might fantasise about losing four stone and winding up with the ideal husband, but at heart I knew this was just a romantic dream which hadn’t a hope of coming true. I did feel a little better about myself now I knew Aunt had genuinely cared for me, but how could I ever feel more than a little better when I was still repulsively fat and likely to remain so? Stress always drove me to binge, and although I no longer had to cope with Aunt I still had to endure the strain of making a new life for myself.
I knew I needed the help Mr. Hall had suggested, but still I hesitated to
phone Francie. I had taken a perverse pride for so long in struggling on alone; the struggle had given me a flicker of self-esteem, and besides, I had a horror of being a burden or a bore and putting myself in danger of further humiliating brush-offs. When I was much younger I had hoped to make friends but there seemed to be no place in the world of the thin for someone like me, and in the end I’d retreated into isolation. Loneliness was painful but at least it was silent, devoid of snide laughter and barbed comments. I was used to loneliness now. I thought of it as a chosen solitude and was only occasionally aware of being unhappy.
But this was a time when I regretted not having a friend. Picking up Mr. Hall’s card I stared at Francie’s number and told myself she wouldn’t want to hear from a fat nonentity, particularly a fat nonentity with all sorts of tiresome problems, but then I remembered again her behaviour in the church. Like Nicholas and Mr. Hall, she had treated me with respect, just as if I was a normal person, and at that point it occurred to me that if Mr. Hall had recommended her she was most unlikely to refuse my request for help.
I finally succeeded in pulling myself together. I told myself that if I didn’t grab this life-line I might turn into one of those embarrassing neurotics who staged suicide attempts in order to win a little care and attention. Pathetic! Whatever happened I had to keep sane, and keeping sane involved taking sensible action instead of cowering mindlessly in a corner.
I picked up the receiver and dialled the number.
VII
“Oh good!”
exclaimed Francie warmly after I’d revealed my identity. “I was hoping you’d phone—I spoke to Lewis Hall this morning and he said he was going to see you.”
I did stammer something about not wanting to interrupt her weekend, but she swept that remark aside, said she was sorry about my bereavement, she was sure I wouldn’t have called unless I was feeling utterly ghastly, and would I like her to come over straight away? She always loved rising to the occasion, especially in an emergency, and no, it was no trouble at all, her children were away at boarding school, her husband was away on business in Tokyo and all she was doing was ironing a table-cloth. Where did I live? Dean Danvers Street off Smith Square? Super! She’d be with me in half an hour.
Exhausted after being befriended in this masterful manner yet more than relieved that someone would now help me reduce the chaos to order, I began to lunch on rum raisin ice cream, but I was no more than halfway through the tub when the phone rang.
The caller was Nicholas Darrow.
VIII
“I’ve
just spoken to Val,” he said as I remained speechless with surprise. “She told me the news. Was it easy at the end?”
I groped for the right words. It helped that the question was so direct. Years of living with Aunt had equipped me to withstand straight talking but to wilt in the face of diplomacy. Finally I managed to say: “Yes, suddenly her breathing changed, then stopped. There was no pain.”
“Good. And how are you?”
“Bloody awful,” I said, discovering in horror that I was unable to switch from being direct to being convoluted in the name of self-effacing good manners. “But that’s okay, I’ll be better soon, Francie’s coming.”
“Francie’s very warm-hearted and extremely efficient, but be sure to let her know when you’ve had enough and need to be alone. Do you want me to conduct the funeral service?”
I did try to pretend to him that any old clergyman would do, but the words which came out were: “Yes, but I don’t want to be a nuisance and take you away from your real work.”
“Funerals
are
part of my real work and asking me to conduct one doesn’t convert you into a nuisance. We’ll discuss the details on Monday when I’m back in town—and meanwhile if you still feel hellish, even after seeing Francie, do please phone my colleague Lewis Hall. He likes getting calls on weekends when the City’s deserted and the Healing Centre’s closed.”
After I had thanked him for this reassurance he said he was very sorry I was going through this difficult time, bereavement was a great ordeal, he’d keep praying for me.
Then he rang off.
Returning in a daze to the kitchen I slumped down again at the table and blotted out all my humiliating romantic dreams by finishing off the rum raisin ice cream.
IX
Francie
was magnificent. She made an appointment with the undertakers to discuss the funeral details, she rang the doctor to find out where the death certificate had to be registered (he’d told me but I hadn’t taken a word in), she made a list of the people who had to be informed (the solicitors, the landlords, the bank and various departments of the government’s bureaucracy) and she drafted a most impressive notice for the “Deaths” column of
The Times.
She even offered to call my mother, but I thought that was unnecessary; my mother and I never communicated by phone. I did manage to write her a three-line note, but this so exhausted me that Francie said she would leave me to rest, a move which I thought displayed perfect behaviour for a Befriender.
She returned on Sunday with some flowers from her garden in Islington and offered to take me to her local church, but when I declined she didn’t argue; she merely asked me to have lunch with her instead. I said no, sorry, I was too tired, and she didn’t argue with that response either. Instead after promising to be with me when the funeral director called, she again excelled herself by leaving me alone.
The funeral director was seen as planned on Monday morning and in the evening Francie returned to the cottage, this time accompanied by Nicholas, in order to review the arrangements. Nicholas talked about the service and Francie talked about the catering. Afterwards I was so exhausted that I barely had the strength to binge. I was also starting to worry about the expenses I was incurring, but I decided to postpone all thought of my dire financial situation until after the funeral.
Some of Aunt’s friends were still alive and no doubt there were numerous former pupils who remembered her, but during the long illness when she could no longer write, many had ceased to keep in touch. No more than thirty people turned up at the crematorium and less than twenty came back to the cottage, where I had spent many therapeutic hours preparing an elaborate buffet. I had been uncertain what to do about drink. Francie had said I shouldn’t feel obliged to serve alcohol, but providing only tea or coffee seemed an inadequate way to revive people after the grisliness of the crematorium, and in the end I had splurged at the supermarket on some white
vin de pays.
The thought of lapping up the surplus after the guests had gone had
cheered me considerably. The only reason, I was sure, why I never normally drank to excess was because I could never normally afford to do so.
To my relief my mother had decided not to attend the funeral but had spoilt this wise decision by sending the most vulgar wreath adorned with a revolting message. (“Dearest Aunt Bea—In undying gratitude for all your great kindness to Darling Alice—all my love, the memory of your goodness will never fade from my memory …” And so on and so on. It really is disgusting what sentimental depths people will plumb when driven by a guilty conscience.)
I myself had ordered a small bunch of cut flowers, since I knew Aunt would have disapproved of any tasteless floral extravagance, and on the ribbon encircling the stems I pinned a card inscribed: “In memory of a woman of integrity. A.” I felt no need to drivel on about love and gratitude. Aunt had hated people stating the obvious. Aunt had hated so many things, funny old bag, but she would have liked the quiet, brief, dignified little service which marked her death. In the end the Church of England didn’t let her down in delivering her precise version of the great British tribal rite which she valued so highly.
Nicholas read some sentences from St. John’s Gospel at the start of the service, and later he read a longer excerpt. He had picked the excerpt himself and I had approved the passage without bothering to read it because I’d felt sure he would make the right choice. That was why, when I was finally listening to him reading the passage, I received such a jolt. “ ‘Let not your hearts be troubled,’ ” he urged, “ ‘
neither let them be afraid
,’ ” and as those words rang out in the chapel I saw he was looking straight at me with his clear light eyes. Then I found I wasn’t afraid, even though I had no job and no money and would soon have no home; I wasn’t afraid of the future because Nicholas was there in my present, and as soon as I realised this I thought longingly: if only he could be in my future too! But that was just another of my futile romantic dreams, I knew it was, just as I knew I was only toying with such a fantasy because Nicholas was looking so attractive, so compelling, and I hardly knew how to bear the fact that soon I would see him no more.
He worked hard that day. He not only gave me a lift in his car to and from the crematorium but he also paused at the cottage afterwards to mingle with the mourners. On the outward journey we said almost nothing, but to my surprise I found the silence comfortable
and I suffered no nervous urge to break it. On the way back I did speak, chattering inconsequentially as I savoured my relief that the ordeal was over, but finally I screwed up the nerve to stem my verbal diarrhoea by asking: “Is there really a life after death?”
“All my experience suggests the alternative is too implausible.”
“But if Aunt’s now ashes, how can one talk of a resurrection of the body?”
“ ‘Body’ in that context is probably a code-word for the whole person. When we say ‘anybody’ or ‘everybody’ or ‘somebody’ we’re not just talking about flesh and blood—we’re referring to the complex pattern of information which the medium of flesh and blood expresses.”
I struggled to wrap my mind around this. “So you’re saying that flesh and blood are more or less irrelevant?”
“No, not irrelevant. Our bodies have a big impact on our development as people—they contribute to the pattern of information, and in fact we wouldn’t be people without them. But once we’re no longer confined by time and space the flesh and blood become superfluous and the pattern can be downloaded elsewhere … Do you know anything about computers?”
“No.”
“Okay, forget that, think of Michelangelo instead. In the Sistine Chapel he expressed a vision by creating, through the medium of paint, patterns of colour. The paint is of vital importance but in the end it’s the pattern that matters and the pattern which can be reproduced in another medium such as a book or a film.”
I tried to work out how Aunt would have replied. She had always held that life after death was nonsense. “I’ve heard it said,” I ventured cautiously, “that religion only came into being because people were so afraid of dying that they needed an excuse to believe life would go on afterwards.”
“Oh, that myth’s been disproved by modern scholarship! It turns out that religion was around for a long time before the concept of life after death evolved.”