Read An Affair to Remember Online
Authors: Virginia Budd
An Affair to Remember (32 page)
‘What about at the undertakers, couldn’t I see her there?’
‘I suppose so,’ he sounded grudging. ‘Are you coming down? There’s a hell of a lot to be done and I don’t feel too well this morning. It’s been a bit of a shock.’
‘I’ll be down soon after ten a.m. Give me time for a cup of coffee and a shave and I’ll be on the M4 by eight o’clock. OK?’
‘OK,’ he said.
Char had three husbands and five children, but it’s me, her ex-son-in-law, who always takes responsibility for her. Is it because I loved her and they didn’t? No, that’s far too simple an explanation. Perhaps I wanted to have the responsibility and they were only too glad to relinquish it. I just don’t know. ‘I’m leaving you to sort things out after I’m dead, Guy,’ she had said, looking at me witchily over the top of her frightful ‘butterfly’ glasses. ‘You can be a sort of literary executor. My children just don’t care, you see.’
‘And you know I do?’ I held out an ash tray to catch the dripping ash from her cigarette.
‘Yes, darling, I know you do,’ she said. ‘Anyway, you are a sort of historian after all, so going through a few papers wouldn’t be too arduous, would it?’
‘It’ll need more than a historian to sort out your affairs, love.’
Char only smiled. ‘But you will, won’t you, my warrior?’ she said.
‘I suppose so...’
I had an absurd thought while I was stirring my instant coffee in the kitchen, later, after George rang. Should I wear a black tie? Death, after all, was a fairly formal occasion. In the end I compromised and wore my better weekend trousers and the corduroy jacket Char used to like. She said it reminded her of ‘nice young poets in the thirties’.
There wasn’t much traffic on the M4. Thunder was still about and those foul little thunder flies were creeping everywhere inside the car. Black clouds billowed over the Downs and the grass looked parched from the long, hot summer. Where, I wondered, was Char now?
‘D’you want coffee, or something stronger?’ George at the door of the grey stone house in the grey stone street. The house he’d bought for Char when everything was breaking up.
‘Coffee would be great, thanks George.’ The kitchen smelt of cat and something else, hard to define. George looked ghastly, his face, sagging, putty coloured, unshaven.
‘Can’t do a bloody thing,’ he burst out suddenly. ‘It’s Sunday, you see.’ He led me into the long, dark sitting-room. Char’s stuff all over the place: the photo on the mantelpiece of her and George’s wedding just after the War, Char in pre-War shoes and a tiny hat like a muffin perched on her forehead, George in uniform, looking handsome and happy. We sat down.
‘Shall I,’ I asked, ‘make a list of what we’ve got to do?’
‘If you like,’ he said morosely. ‘We have to make a start somewhere, I suppose.’
Later, I walked down the village street to the St Hilda’s Home for the Elderly: fear rolled around in my stomach. Char’s body, by this time, had been removed to the Chapel of Rest. ‘In this weather, Mr Horton, it has to be done quickly,’ Mrs McTavish, the new warden, had said over the phone. The flowers were bright in the cottage gardens; red salvias in tidy regimentation round the car park.
‘Ah, Mr Horton. We haven’t met, but Mrs Seymour spoke of you often.’ Mrs McTavish, jolly, ginger haired, red faced. A smell of cooking Sunday lunch.
‘Wasn’t Mrs Seymour’s death rather sudden? I mean she’d had pneumonia before…’
‘Mercifully quick, Mr Horton, mercifully quick. Your mother-in-law was lucky, believe me. She retained her faculties up to the end. Over eighty and with all the problems she’d had...’
The blue eiderdown on Char’s bed was neatly folded back, the window open. A couple of cardboard boxes filled with books, letters and mangled bits of knitting and those frightful scarlet bedroom slippers she would wear were all that remained of her in the little room. I felt sick.
‘I’ll leave you alone for a few minutes, Mr Horton.’ Mrs McTavish, the soul of tact; no doubt well versed in situations like this. ‘If you wouldn’t mind just going through her things and putting to one side those you want kept, we’ll dispose of the rest. How is the Major coping?’
‘Bearing up,’ I said. ‘What about her clothes?’ I realised suddenly they were still hanging neatly in the deal wardrobe.
‘If you could go through them as well, Mr Horton, it would be a great help. Perhaps the daughters might want something. Are they coming down?’
‘For the funeral,’ I said. She went then, shutting the door very gently behind her. I sat on the bed, so pristine and virginal, the bed Char had died in, and cried as I hadn’t done since I was a child.
When I got back to the house, George was on the phone. He sounded conspiratorial: ‘...must go now, ducky. Guy’s back and I’ll have to take him out to lunch, I suppose. I’ll ring later.’ The phone went click and he appeared. By this time he’d shaved and looked marginally better; I felt worse.
‘How about lunch?’ he said. ‘They do quite a good pie and salad at the White Hart.’
‘It’s Sunday,’ I said. ‘I don’t suppose they’ll run to a pie.’
‘Well, I’m sure they can knock up a couple of ham sandwiches. There’s damn all to eat in the house. I was going out, you see...’
In the end, I paid my last respects to Char on my own. Halfway through his ham sandwich and into his fourth whisky, George announced he didn’t feel too good. He thought he’d go home and have another kip.
‘So you won’t be coming to the undertakers, then?’ George looked at a point somewhere over my left shoulder.
‘I don’t think I will, if you don’t mind,’ he said. ‘I’m whacked. I was up most of the night.’
‘OK then,’ I said, ‘I’ll go on my own. The man will be at the Chapel of Rest at two thirty to “open up” as he so delicately put it.’ I was on my third whisky by this time and I have a feeling it was beginning to show. George was silent for a minute or two. Muzak played selections from
South
Pacific
and behind me soft West Country voices discussed Somerset’s chances at cricket. Then he said, ‘You can take those silver candlesticks to put round the coffin. I cleaned them up while you were out.’
‘Alright,’ I said. Suddenly I remembered, years ago when we were all young, sitting round the kitchen table at Maple, Char at the head. ‘When I die, I want six candles round my bier and my children to watch over me all night.
All
night, d’you see?’ I wondered if the old devil had remembered.
‘Mr Horton? The Major’s not coming then?’ Mr Combes, the undertaker, immaculate in dark suit, gleaming white shirt and black tie: you could see your face in his polished shoes.
‘Er, no, he didn’t feel too well.’
‘Only to be expected, I suppose. Do come this way Mr Horton. I’ll just pop the fan on, you can’t be too careful in this humid weather.’ He opened the door of the Chapel of Rest with a flourish; he was obviously very proud of it. I must say it was very ‘tasteful’. Only the noise of the whirring fan brought a slightly venal note to the proceedings. Char appeared to be made of wax. I’d never seen anyone look so dead: only her tobacco-stained fingers resting tidily on the coverlet gave any indication the effigy in the satin-lined box had once been human.
‘Would you like a little music?’ Mr Combes whispered in my ear. ‘It helps, sometimes, when saying goodbye to the departed.’
‘No...no, thank you.’ I bent quickly over and kissed the ‘thing’ that had been Char on the lips. ‘Goodbye, my love. God speed.’ After all, she just might have been around somewhere. The lips were surprisingly soft: somehow I had thought it would be more like kissing a statue. Char, however, was not there.
‘The departed, she retained her faculties to the end?’
‘You could say that, more or less.’
Mr Combes surreptitiously looked at his watch. He had, after all, broken into his Sunday afternoon and undertakers, like everyone else, need to have a day of rest sometimes.
‘I’m keeping you,’ I said. ‘Thanks so much for letting me see her.’ He looked relieved and all at once more human.
‘The thing is, we’ve got the wife’s mother coming over to Sunday tea,’ he said.
‘I understand,’ I said. Then remembered the silver candlesticks.
‘By the way, the Major wanted these put round the coffin. Will that be alright? Something of hers, he thought...’ I held up a plastic carrier bag from Tesco’s. ‘They’re in here.’
He looked doubtful. ‘We provide our own furnishings,’ he said austerely, ‘and of course there’s always the risk of theft...’ In the end, however, he relented, albeit reluctantly, and took the bag I was holding out as a sort of limp offering.
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ he said.
‘Thank you again,’ I said and shook him by the hand. Not at all, Mr...er, er...at your service any time. Always remember, life must go on.’
The door slammed behind me in the empty street. It had started to rain again.
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