Be Near Me (31 page)

The conversation was ended before it began. The events of the year were already distant to him, one could tell, and his mind was taken up with new ventures and the promise of other people. There was a second when I thought I might say something more, but I simply nodded at him to vanquish the thought, and, like a cold benediction, I made to place some final acceptance before him and before myself. He didn't see it. He would never see it and his days will not be any the worse for that. As I prepared to take my leave from him, I knew that Mark had been many things to me, not least a vision of myself at a young age, a very different version of the person my life had allowed me to be. For a season or two, perhaps, I had wanted to be him, which wasn't really the same as wanting him, but none of it seemed important any more as I watched him spin the wheels of his skateboard. He was a fine-looking, reckless young man, who had answered the call of a moment and the sad old ghosts of self-love.

'Look out for me on the telly,' he said, smiling again and trapping the skateboard under his heel. He disappeared down the aisle and I know I will never see him again. The young man wasn't Conor, but I stood there with a burning in my throat all the same and wished him well, the back of his jacket vanishing past the juice cartons. I can only say it now. At the centre of himself, a man cannot choose whom to love. He can choose how to live and can honour the truth of himself where he may. But he cannot choose whom to love,
any more than he can choose how tall he is or how good. One can take up platform shoes or fine deeds, but the heart will always have the last word, and when the word is love we can recognise, we can respond, we can submit and we can try to ignore, but we can never choose. Love is not a matter of choice but an obdurate fact of surrender.

Three weeks before Christmas, Mrs Poole called me on my mobile as I was walking over the Old Bridge at Ayr. I had some cards and things in a bag, and I put them down and looked at the harbour, listening to her words and hearing a weary slenderness in her voice. 'It's certainly me,' she said.

'But you sound so far away.'

'I've been practising that sound for years,' she said. 'That's the top and bottom of it, Father. I'm a sight for sore eyes. I don't have long.'

'Mrs Poole,' I said, 'you're going to get better.' There was a pause at the other end of the line, a pause much louder and clearer than her ailing voice.

'Stop it, Father,' she said. 'We had words before, you and I, about that sort of talk. I'm not frightened. I want you to help me get ready.'

I went to the Arranview Hospice that afternoon. 'We should have grown vegetables,' said Mrs Poole. 'That's more like it. We could have grown our own lettuce and rhubarb.'

'And radishes.'

'Yes,' she said. 'Easy things.'

The nurses came and went from the room with paper trays and small jokes, smoothing the bedclothes and positioning the morphine button more firmly in her hand. Mrs
Poole wasn't much older than several of them, and she smiled as they did. She was determined to die in her own way. She feared displays of regret or recriminations and wanted in the end to sink, as it were, into that hallowed version of herself that had keened and searched for improvement. It was her higher self, and she tried to arrange for the days of her dying to meet with her rage for quality. She ordered some beautiful stationery and wrote letters to her sister and her son, saying goodbye and asking them not to judge her too harshly. 'I don't expect they will,' she said. 'They are good people. All the better for having each other.'

'You don't want them to come?' I said.

'No,' she said. 'They're near enough to me. I don't want to upset people. We've always tried to be sensible.'

'Are you sure?' I said.

'Yes,' said Mrs Poole. 'We didn't always do things the normal way. But the letters were nice. Family letters, you know? I don't want them seeing me like this when there's other good things to think about. I want them to be busy, Father. I want him to enjoy his life.'

'He will, Mrs Poole.'

'That's all I ever wanted,' she said.

I came back the next day with some elderflower cordial. 'Let me just sniff the nice smell,' she said. 'My stomach can't take it.' I also brought the Bach CD she had asked me to bring, or I thought I had. I put it on and she rolled her eyes in a dark delight.

'Wrong cantata,' she said, smiling through the morphine.

'Really?' I said. 'I could have sworn...'

'Never mind,' she said. 'I can learn this one. Keep it playing.'

I saw her hand go to her chest. She smiled at the ceiling and said a few words I could barely hear, and then I stroked her legs on top of the blanket. 'Take your time,' I said. Her mouth was dry. I took a stick of pink sponge that was sitting in a cup of water and ran it over her lips.

'Don't go away,' she said.

There were no last speeches from Mrs Poole. The following afternoon she made a stab at the sign of the cross. I took out my oil and slowly began giving her the last rites. Her lips opened for a second as I put the crucifix to them and she sighed into its glinting brass. Mr Poole was there and he spread the fingers of her hand over the bedsheets and kissed each one in turn, holding her wedding ring against his cheek as her breathing grew thinner still and the candle burned.

'Goodbye, Anne,' I said.

Her husband got onto the bed and put his head next to hers on the pillow and closed her eyes with his fingers. Then he took her hand. I looked at them for a moment from the foot of the bed, then went out of the room. The nurses led me through the patio doors to the cold garden and one of them brought a cup of tea out to where I stood on the grass. Through the trees one could see the River Garnock, the water flowing out of sight towards Irvine harbour and the Irish Sea. Fifteen hundred years had passed since the saint had changed the direction of the river, and there it was that day in December, sparkling between its banks, a crowd of seagulls floating slowly down on a cracked sheet of ice, moving past
the trees and the town and the Arranview Hospice towards the salt water and the waves. I imagined the ice melting before it got to the sea and the birds being sent high and far into the air.

She got the burial she had wanted. Her husband asked me if I knew what to do and I said yes, the papers were to be found in their kitchen cupboard above the kettle. It was a red biscuit tin—'She always liked a box of good biscuits at Christmas,' he said—and in it I found the papers from a company called Native Woodland. They were held together with a blue paper clip, and fastened to the top, torn from a greetings card, was a cartoon of a happy penguin with the words: 'Get Well Soon.' Mr Poole rang people to tell them about his wife's death, giving them the plans for the funeral and spelling out the address. 'Let's no' go off the deep end,' he said. 'Anne liked things quiet.'

The forms showed that Mrs Poole, some years before, had purchased not one plot but three, for a price of £2,025. In her tidy handwriting she specified 'burial, not ashes'. She had filled in the column for the second plot with all her husband's details; the third was blank. I said nothing when I saw this but simply pointed it out to Mr Poole. 'That was just like her,' he said, his hand hesitating over the page. 'She liked to be ready.'

'For an emergency?'

'That kinna thing,' he said.

The tin contained other documents: advice about her garden and a brochure for a green papier mâché pod. The brochure had a Post-It note stuck to the front saying 'this one' in faint pencil. I returned to the Native Woodland contract and paused over the small print. 'Except for approved trees and shrubs, all memorials, headstones, kerbs, wreaths, flower vases and any other forms of memorial shall not be permitted on the grave or within the site.' Beside this warning Mrs Poole had drawn with the same pencil a small smiling face.

Hundy Mundy Wood is in the Scottish Borders, not far from the old towns of Kelso and Melrose. On the way down, Mr Poole drank whisky from a paper cup and stretched his thin neck away from his tie to see the further removes of the Lammermuir Hills. Father Michael had let us bury her out of St Mary's in Irvine. He said the Bishop had nodded to the request that I be allowed to stand at the altar and said no more about the matter. The cars behind us were filled with people I had never met, relatives of the Pooles on both sides, including Irene, Mrs Poole's sister, who came down from Glasgow with the four boys. One of them undoubtedly had Mrs Poole's small features, the same timid nose, and I guessed he was Toby, the son. When we arrived there, he stood to one side of the cars and stared at the ground and the scattered leaves, as if seeking for a moment to know what the ground knew.

'She was too young for this,' said Irene. She wiped her eyes. 'Forty-three. Far too young for the like of this.'

'Yes,' I said. 'Though she never admitted to being young.'

'That's right,' she said. 'She was like that. She always wanted to be older than she was. Always that way. She wanted to be more.'

'Well,' I said, 'I suppose she was more.'

Irene just pursed her lips, a show of restraint, before sniffing and pressing a tissue up the sleeve of her coat. She took a breath and exhaled most of it in a long, wavering sigh.

The grass crackled under our feet and the pines were frozen as the boys and two gardeners carried Mrs Poole. 'This area is managed for the benefit of the plants and wildlife,' said the man from Native Woodland. 'There are notable vascular plants here: Musk Mallow, Maiden Pink. You should see it here in the summer months. Just colour.'

'And good for birds?' I said.

'Tree sparrows, yes,' he said. 'Barn owls. Yellowhammers.'

We got to a place where an eighteenth-century folly stood at the edge of the wood, the motionless, grey sky appearing through its windows. The man from the company kicked the soil off his boots and smiled into the daylight. 'It's a Gothic folly,' he said. 'Built by the great William Adam. Lines up directly with Mellerstain, the home of the 13th Earl of Haddington.'

'I want to say a few prayers,' I said.

'Here we are,' he said. 'This is the excavation.' He clasped his hands and lowered his head in a nice, agnostic way.

'Goodbye, Anne,' said Mr Poole. He said it to the small group of people around the place where she was laid, as if he were saying goodbye to the notion of others altogether, and then he looked at the opened space between the dead leaves and blew a kiss into that soft ground where his wife lay silent in her paper pod and where all their hours and all their secrets lay down among the soil. The boy came over and shook Mr Poole's hand. A fresh wind blew from the west and
poured through the windows of the folly at Hundy Mundy, and a feeling most hopeful, the echo of something real, came with the good, clean air as we made our way back through the trees to our cars.

The night my father died the house was flooded. It was a burst pipe, a gusher, the man said, and the water froze all over the ground floor at Heysham. The pipe was above the sink in my father's office, so the worst of the water poured onto his private papers and medical books. My mother and I almost dared ourselves not to live once we knew that nothing good was ever guaranteed, my poor father caught short of breath in the middle of the night with so much before him. But in time his death awakened us.

Can a song be a ghost, and, if so, can it be 'Blow the Wind Southerly', which brought my father's service to a close and wanders yet in my memory through the darkened rooms of that house? The winter freeze lasted for weeks and we went there, my mother and I, to the house, to survey the damage and weigh our future prosperity. I recall the damp smell and the bitter cold at the ends of my fingers. I opened a drawer and saw his vests and shirts, an array of knitted ties, frozen in pipe water. Each drawer was a perfect block of ice. His trousers now trapped in amber. The lamp in his study was stiff with ice and the carpet crunched as I walked about the room. His medical certificates were unreadable behind mottled glass, his typewriter had locked with the cold and a slither of ice had jammed the roller, as if to silence for ever his remarks and reports about progress in the field of the human heart. His desk
must have contained gallons of frozen water. And down at the bottom of the deepest drawer, I could make out, and can still make out, the submerged, magnified face of the pianist Dinu Lipatti, smiling from the cover of a Chopin album.

St John Ogilvie was bright with candles. It was Christmas Eve. People came to Midnight Mass who never came to Mass all year, and there they stood in the pews and along the back wall under the stations of the cross, the Catholic people of Dalgarnock, their cheeks pink from the cold. I entered the church and passed the nativity scene—life-size, the sheep's devoted eyes turned to the doll in the dusty manger—and immediately I detected frankincense floating through the smell of damp coats. There was a space in the corner and I stood with my back to the wall, watching the altar and the gestures of the crowd as they mumbled and lifted up their hearts. It occurred to me that the earth may be everything of heaven we shall ever know.

Some of the people had come from the pub. I could see them standing in their own shadows and shielding their cans of lager, the faces of men and women I had known. I have to say, there was something lovely in their smiles. Each of them wanted a world of cheer, and for that night only the altar gave them that very thing, its golden chalices glinting like their home tinsel as the Bishop kissed the Book of Psalms. I saw Lisa and a pale young man with blond hair holding hands. I watched them smile, and the notes of Joseph Mohr's old Christmas carol fell softly down from the choir to bless the occasion:

Sleep in heavenly peace.
Sleep in heavenly peace.

Silent night, holy night.
Son of God,
Love's pure light.
Radiant beams from Thy holy face.
With the dawn of redeeming grace.

I could smell the wool and the frankincense and see hope among the faces, even the drunken ones, the hope that masked a thousand uncertainties, a hundred measures of panic and bitterness, all belonging to the day after tomorrow. I could feel their eyes as I joined the line for Communion. They followed me as I studied the trail of wet boots to the altar, the voices of the choir still gracious under the roof beams. From behind me, from the line of men standing against the back wall, there was a single shout. 'Oi,' he said. A skirl of whispers spread under the song. The line moved forward and eventually the whispering died away. I could feel my hands shaking as I clasped them in front of me and stepped before Bishop Gerard. I saw him wetting his lips as I approached; not to speak but so as not to speak. But then he said the words we'd been trained to say, and the expression on his face showed that he feared I might cause trouble.