England's Lane (46 page)

The funeral of Jane … that, thank the merciful Lord, at least now may be said to be over and done with. It was, of course, I who in the end had to attend to all of the dealings with the undertaker—because Stan … well, where to begin with the state of him, poor man …? And quite simply, there was no one else. But Levertons, I must say they did behave quite thoroughly professionally: not, as I had feared, remote and cold-bloodedly mechanical, but suitably
consolatory to the useless widower, while incidentally quite wholly comforting to me, simply by means of their confident demonstration of ability. During my very labored endeavors to pry from Stan so much as an atom of information concerning her nature, it transpired that Jane, during the long distant days when actually she had dressed herself and then walked out into the street, had been a practicing and semi-devout Catholic. For many years she used to attend High Mass at St. Dominic's Priory each Sunday morning at eleven o'clock, as well as an occasional Benediction on a Wednesday evening. Stan did tell me though, during one of his rare quite lucid and rather more loquacious interludes, that it had to be a lifetime since her last confession. No service was held for her, however, for there was no one to attend: no parents, no siblings, no cousins, no friends. At the graveside in Hampstead Cemetery, there stood quite awkwardly only Stan and dear little Anthony, Jim, myself (both very much still the walking wounded) … and then Doreen, of all people on earth—I simply can't imagine why: I meant to ask her afterward, but she already had drifted away. Edie had wanted to be there, but was vexed to be unable to find anyone that morning to cover for her absence from the Dairies. I had not thought it suitable for Paul to have to witness such a thing as a funeral at so early an age … and when Jim—yes, I suppose quite inevitably—had begun to prevaricate over his previous quite strenuous, though whisky-fueled, promise to without a doubt be there, I was forced to put my foot down. And so with great reluctance, he placed in the window of the shop a hastily scribbled notice stating that he was “Closed Due To Bereavement,” this causing me, by simple recourse to my presence before them, the considerable embarrassment of days thereafter spent earnestly reassuring everyone in the Lane that I hadn't, in fact, quite recently passed away. And during the brief and ugly … well, what might one call it …? Ceremony? No, I think
not: hardly that … anyway, it rained. I had known that it would. Levertons had conjured up for us a priest, from whatever place it is that would appear to be brimful with clerics who are rentable by the hour. This balding, corpulent and, according to the thickness and virtual opacity of his tortoiseshell spectacles, seemingly purblind most holy reverend father—in prior exchange for a five-pound note (this, he rushed to assure us, to be contributed to the coffers of causes most dear to not just Jesus, Joseph and Mary, but all of the other saints as well)—had told us in solemn, evidently specious and I thought quite preposterous tones that our dear and departed sister would be absolved of all her sins that had been committed on this earth, and would at last find peace on the right hand of God. At which point Stan was heard to mutter quite bitterly Oh Christ Alive …! … before sinking to his knees into the black and boggy ground, scattering upon the coffin lid first a clod or so of mud, and then a colorful selection of chocolate bars and sweets, each of which once, he was adamant, Jane had greatly favored. Anthony had seemed quite perfectly detached about the whole affair—as if simply he were patiently awaiting the arrival of a bus. I beamed at him several times in what I hoped was a sort of collaborative encouragement, though simply he looked back at me blankly.

By the time we had all got back to the Lane, it was to a milling scene of truly great ructions—an ambulance and a police car a little way down, with everyone—Miss Jenkins from Moore's, Mr. Bona, Edie, Sally from Lindy's … my hairdresser Gwendoline from Amy's, she was there, and so was old Mr. Levy and the new woman from Marion's … even poor Mrs. Dent—somehow, and doubtless horribly painfully, even she had managed to hobble along: all in the doorways of their shops, together with animatedly excited clusters of locals and passers-by, all of them chattering eagerly and arching their necks in the direction. Mrs. Goodrich I saw standing at the rear
doors of the ambulance with her arms very firmly crossed beneath her always rather daunting bosom, this not remotely diminished by a very ample Harris tweed coat—it was rather as if she had been appointed the official custodian of this vehicle, and should anyone think to approach without due and rigorous authorization, then rest assured she would have a formidable deal to say upon the matter. I have to admit that at first it all did seem rather strange and unnerving to me … because the four of us—all dressed befittingly soberly—had been driven to England's Lane in one of Levertons' very glorious, lush, and almost impossibly glossy black Rolls-Royces, the bodywork dappled by a shivering of globular raindrops, and whose wings and running boards I thrillingly had thought to be a true and almost voluptuous delight. And now, of a sudden … the talk in the Lane was of nothing but death. It appeared that Mr. Effingham, the man in Curios—that rather odd little old furniture and bric-a-brac shop—had less than an hour earlier been found in the customary stoopedover position in his rocking chair, the habitual curved pipe firmly jammed between his teeth, and the newspaper folded to the crossword on his knees before him—all perfectly usual—while seemingly staring vacantly into the cluttered and overwhelmingly brownish and ochre interior, quite as he has done every single weekday ever since I or anyone else can remember … although on this particular morning, however, he had ceased to breathe. Everyone agreed that there was considerable irony in his discovery by a gentleman—a stranger to the area, who had just happened to be driving down the Lane on his way to visit Karl Marx's grave up in Highgate, is what someone later on had been telling me—when an African mask of some sort, I think it was, had glancingly caught his eye in the window. He had parked his car directly outside the shop, entered, asked to know the price of the mask—if mask it truly were—and after rather too much silence being the only forthcoming response, had gently
tapped the man's shoulder, whereupon Mr. Effingham—very alarmingly, I should imagine—had tumbled immediately to the floor, in a very heavy heap. The irony of course being that no one could recall the last time anyone had so much as thought even to walk through the door of that shop, let alone been desirous of actually making a purchase: none of us ever did understand how Mr. Effingham managed to cope with his overheads. It was his heart, apparently: just stopped. Jim said to me—Blimey, dropping like flies: wouldn't bother with the Christmas party if I was you, Mill—this rate, won't be nobody about left to bleeding come to it. I considered the remark quite typically gross and insensitive … though, I have to confess, not utterly devoid of a fairly grim humor. It did not altogether surprise me that tacitly I had granted him this modicum of indulgence—for it has become increasingly plain to me quite recently that generally speaking—and initially, I confess, very much to my confusion—I am finding Jim, as each day passes, to be very slightly more, well … tolerable, I suppose is more or less what I am meaning. No … not what I am meaning at all: I see now immediately that this, of course, very considerably understates what it is that I am feeling … for while his countless very awful foibles, discourtesies and irritations still remain quite wholly undiminished—they coalesce, you see, into the very construction of the man—his attitude toward the current quite extraordinary situation in which we two now find ourselves … has been nothing short of overwhelming.

When, so gradually, I came fully to realize—and now I can but marvel at how unconscionably slow I was to see it—that just everyone in the Lane and doubtless beyond was thoroughly aware of at least the bones, if not the fleshed-out actuality, of my erstwhile relationship with Jonathan Barton … well then of course I was compelled to come to terms also with the inescapable fact that Jim, despite his determinedly ostrich-like manner, his proudly stubborn insularity
 … that Jim, well—he must know too. And—being Jim—he had not said so much as one single word upon the matter. And I really do believe, you know … that did I not find myself in this physically altered, new, and glorious circumstance, that I should certainly and forever have maintained a parallel silence. For it is so often the way, I find: to insistently ignore quite implacably any little discomfort, a fleeting pain, a passing concern—to quell them, to deny them space to grow nor air to breathe, before quite coldly snuffing them out … it is more often than not quite wondrously effective: because after time, as well we know, all things must pass. As will my own much garlanded scandal: the brand will become less furious, though of course the very faintest scar will forever be upon me. But yes—my crime, if crime it truly were, will be superseded by the next great thing that comes around: before me there was the advent of the negroes; the suicide of Jane and the death of Mr. Effingham can do me little harm.

I still do though feel so very foolish in imagining that all that might have reached the ears of Jim were Mrs. Goodrich's mistaken and perfectly ludicrous assumptions concerning myself and Stan. Stan …! I ask you …! While all that time, the I suppose quite lurid reality had long been common knowledge. Rather interestingly, none has rushed to judge nor spurn me, which in turn has made me wonder. In the eyes of some women, I do detect the very outer edge of not maybe quite contempt, but certainly the mark of their own superiority—and at the edges of their lips, a hesitation that has all the makings of a sneer to come (while in Mrs. Goodrich, both are open, animated, and quite unashamed). And all this has led me to contemplation. Must some women wonder what such a thing can be like …? The illicit extramarital affair. Can others be remembering their own past indiscretion? Reveling in the memories of its blood-heat? And might not one or two secret liaisons yet be vibrant
and alive? Or am I really the only woman in London throughout the whole of the nineteen-fifties to have done such a thing? Are women simply divided into those whose dalliances have been cruelly and shamingly exposed … and those others who thus far have eluded detection, camouflaged by the walls of the truly innocent, and so remaining for the present tightly swaddled within the impregnable warmth of decency? And during those days when my violated eye had shifted in shades from indigo to crimson before mercifully fading into a mild tangerine, how enthusiastic had been the debate over the identity of the inflictor? Could it have been the outcome of passion from the virile lover? Or merely impotent recrimination from the woman's outraged and cuckolded husband, momentarily moved to violence? With the aid of such tinder, rumor is readily inflamed. And do not people so love to gorge on the burst of such bittersweet juice from the one and only forbidden fruit? Whereas in reality, of course, Jonathan … I always found to be gentle almost to the point of femininity—and Jim, not once has he ever raised a hand to me: a claim, I suspect, that few wives might honestly make. And for some reason I still am struggling to explain, I never did anticipate a confrontation with … you know … Mrs. Barton. His wife. I never envisaged such a scene, and nor has it manifested. But all of this—and even that—is no more than periphery. There remained just the one matter that was truly of the essence—and, painful though it would be for him, it was Jim I had now to talk to. I very much had to. He and no one other. And he sensed it, I could tell. He would hurriedly pass through a room with shoulders hunched, as if to deflect the sudden swooping down of me, or at least be more prepared for when I did it. He did not know, you see, what next I had to tell him: nor did he want to. Yes yes—I was well aware of all of that: but still, though … but still, though … it simply had to be done.

“Jim … don't go out just yet. You know I've been wanting to talk to you …”

“Yeh well—just were thinking I'll stretch my legs a little bit …”

“Well you can do, Jim—but afterward, yes? It won't take long. Not long. It has to be now Jim, because there just isn't any other time, is there? Either you're in the shop or you're going down to the pub—or else Paul is still up and about. And it shouldn't be really, but it does seem even harder now that Anthony is here, and everything …”

“How long he staying? I ain't saying I mind, nor nothing. Just asking.”

“Well—it's quite hard to know. Not too long, I don't suppose. But the doctor did say that Stan has to have a complete rest. Utter exhaustion, apparently. I think he has undergone what they term a ‘breakdown,' I think that's what it is. Like a motor car, I suppose: needs an overhaul. That would explain why he's been behaving really very oddly. And sometimes they just, you know—snap out of it. And other times, well … it can take rather a while, I gather. But he's no trouble, is he? Anthony. Poor little mite. I can't imagine all that can be going through his mind. All of a sudden, his mother's dead … his father's gone away. It must be so dreadfully upsetting and confusing for him. Mustn't it? Don't you think? I've tried to talk to him, but he doesn't seem to be very communicative. Responsive, you know? I've asked Paul what he talks about, and he says he's just like he always was. Well I don't know what to think, if that's the case. Because bottling it all up … well that can't be a good thing either, can it? Oh dear. Anyway—we'll do anything we can for him, obviously. I just have to remember about all his various ointments, and everything … I think I've got the hang of putting those awful things on to him, now …”

“He won't be too happy about the shop, will he? Old Stan. I should bleeding think not. Week off of Christmas time, and he gone
and shut the bloody sweetshop! Dear oh dear. Were me, I cut my throat. And up the Washington, they got a penny a packet extra on your Senior Service: couple days, you down a tanner. I says to Reg there—it only criminal, what you doing: taking advantage. He just laugh …”