On Beauty (34 page)

Through the grubby windows of their minicab, the Belseys watched Hampstead morph into West Hampstead, West Hampstead into Willesden. At every railway bridge, a little more graffiti; on each street, fewer trees, and in their branches, more fluttering plastic bags. An acceleration of establishments selling fried chicken, until, in Willesden Green, it seemed every other shop sign made reference to poultry. Written in a giant, death-defying font above the train-tracks, a message: YOUR MUM RANG. In different circumstances this would have amused.

‘It gets kind of . . . more crappy down here,' ventured Zora, in the new, quiet voice she had assumed for this death. ‘Aren't they rich? I thought they were rich.'

‘It's their home,' said Jerome simply. ‘They love it here. They've always lived here. They're not pretentious. That's what I was always trying to explain.'

Howard rapped the thick glass side window with his wedding ring. ‘Don't be fooled. There're some bloody grand houses around here. Besides, men like Monty like being the big fish in a small pond.'

‘
Howard
,' said Kiki in such a tone that nothing further was said until Winchester Lane, where their journey ended. The car pulled up beside a little English country church, torn from its village surroundings and dropped into this urban suburb, or so it seemed to the Belsey children. In fact it was the countryside that had receded. Only a hundred years earlier, a mere five hundred souls had lived in this parish of sheep fields and orchards, land that they rented from an Oxford college, which institution still counts much of Willesden Green among its possessions. This
was
a country church. Standing in the pebbled forecourt under the bare branches of a cherry tree, Howard could almost imagine the busy main road completely vanished and in its place paddocks, hedgerows and eglantine, cobbled lanes.

A crowd was gathering. It pooled around the First World War memorial, a simple pillar with an illegible inscription, every single word smoothed into the recess of its own stone. Most people were wearing black, but there were many, like the Belseys, who were not. A wiry little man, in a street cleaner's orange tabard, was running two identical white bull terriers up and over the small mound of remaining garden between the vicarage and the church. He did not seem to be of the party. People looked after him disapprovingly; some tuts were heard. He continued to throw his stick. The two terriers persisted in bringing it back, their jaws clamped round it at either end, forming a new, perfectly coordinated eight-legged beast.

‘Every kind of person,' whispered Jerome, because everybody was whispering. ‘You can tell she knew every type of person. Can you imagine a funeral –
any
event – this mixed, back home?'

The Belseys looked around themselves and saw the truth of this. Every age, every colour and several faiths; people dressed very finely – hats and handbags, pearls and rings – and people who were clearly of a different world again, in jeans and baseball caps, saris and duffle coats. And among them – joyfully – Erskine Jegede! It was not appropriate to whoop and wave; Levi was sent over to fetch him. He came over doing his bull's stomp, dressed in natty racing-green tweed and brandishing an umbrella like a cane. All that was missing was the monocle. Looking at him now, Kiki could not work out why she hadn't noticed it before. Despite Erskine's more dandified stylings, sartorially, Monty and Erskine were a match.

‘Ersk, thank
God
you're here,' said Howard, hugging his friend. ‘But how come? I thought you were in Paris for Christmas.'

‘I
was
– we were staying at the Crillon – what a hotel that is, that hotel is a beautiful place – and I got a phone call from Brockes, Lord Brockes,' added Erskine breezily. ‘But Howard, you
know
I've known our friend Monty for a
very
long time. Either he was the first Negro at Oxford or I was – we can never agree on that. But even if we haven't always seen eye to eye, he is civilized and I am civilized. So here I am.'

‘Of
course
,' said Kiki in rather an emotional way and took hold of Erskine's hand.

‘And of course Caroline
insisted
,' continued Erskine mischievously, nodding to his wife's lean form across the way. She was standing in the archway of the church, engaged in conversation with a famous black British newscaster. Erskine looked mock-fondly after her. ‘She is an awesome woman, my wife. She is the only woman I know who can power-broke at a funeral.' Here Erskine turned the volume down on his big Nigerian laugh. ‘
Anybody who's anybody will be there
,' he said, badly impersonating his wife's Atlanta twang, ‘though I fear there aren't as many somebodies here as she had hoped. Half these people I have never seen before in my
life
. But there we are. In Nigeria we weep at funerals – in Atlanta apparently they network. It's marvellous! Actually, I'm rather surprised to see
you
here. I thought you and Sir Monty were drawing swords for January.' Erskine's umbrella turned into a rapier. ‘So says the college grapevine. Yes, Howard. Don't tell me you're not here for your own ulterior motives, eh? Eh? But have I said the wrong thing?' asked Erskine as Kiki's hand dropped from his own.

‘Umm . . . I guess Mom and Carlene were pretty close,' murmured Jerome.

Erskine held a hand dramatically to his breast. ‘But you should have stopped me speaking out of turn! Kiki – I had no idea you even knew the lady. Now I am very embarrassed.'

‘Don't be,' said Kiki, but looked at him coldly. Erskine was paralysed by social friction of any kind. He looked now as if he were in physical pain.

It was Zora who came to his rescue. ‘Hey, Dad – isn't that Zia Malmud? Weren't you guys at school with him?'

Zia Malmud, cultural commentator, ex-socialist, anti-war campaigner, essayist, occasional poet, thorn in the side of the present government and regular TV presence, or, as Howard succinctly put it, ‘typical rent-a-quote wanker', was standing by the monument, smoking his trademark pipe. Howard and Erskine quickly made their way through the crowd to say hello to their fellow Oxonian. Kiki watched them go. She saw vulgar relief paint itself in broad
strokes all over Howard's face. It was the first time since they arrived at this funeral that he had been able to cease twitching, fiddling in his pockets, messing with his hair. For here was Zia Malmud, in and of himself nothing directly to do with the idea of death, and therefore able to bring welcome news of another world outside of this funeral,
Howard's
world: the world of conversation, debate, enemies, newspapers, universities. Tell me anything but don't talk of death. But the only duty you have at a funeral is to accept that somebody has died! Kiki turned away.

‘You know,' she said in frustration, to no child in particular, ‘I'm getting really tired of listening to Erskine bad-mouth Caroline like that. All these men ever do is talk about their wives with contempt. With
contempt
. I am
so
sick of it!'

‘Oh, Mom, he doesn't mean it,' said Zora wearily, as once again she was called upon to explain how the world works to her mother. ‘Erskine loves Caroline. They've been married
for ever
.'

Kiki restrained herself. Instead she opened her purse and began searching through it for her lip-gloss. Levi, who had resorted to kicking pebbles in his boredom, asked her who the guy with all the big gold chains was, with the guide dog. The Mayor, Kiki ventured, but couldn't be sure.
The Mayor of London?
Kiki muttered assent but now turned again, getting up on tiptoe so she might see over the heads of the crowd. She was looking for Monty. She was curious about him. She wanted to see what a man who had so worshipped his wife looked like once he was deprived of her. Levi continued to badger her:
Of the whole city? Like the New York Mayor?
Maybe not, agreed Kiki tetchily, maybe the mayor of just this area.

‘Seriously . . . this is
weird
,' said Levi, and yanked his stiff shirt collar from his neck with a hooked finger. It was Levi's first funeral, but he meant more than that. It did seem a surreal gathering, what with the strange class mix (noticeable even to as American a boy as Levi) and the complete lack of privacy that the two-foot perimeter brick wall afforded. Cars and buses went by incessantly; noisy schoolchildren smoked, pointed and whispered; a group of Muslim women, in full hijab, floated by like apparitions.

‘It's pretty low rent,' dared Zora.

‘Look, it was
her
church, I came here with her – she would have wanted the service in her church,' insisted Jerome.

‘Of
course
she would,' said Kiki. Tears pricked her eyes. She squeezed Jerome's hand and he, surprised by this emotion, returned the pressure. Without any announcement, or at least not one the Belseys heard, the crowd began to file into the church. The interior was as simple as the exterior suggested. Wood beams ran between stone walls, and the rood screen was of a dark oak, plainly carved. The stained glass was pretty, colourful, but rather basic, and there was only one painting, high on the back wall: unlit, dusty and too murky to make anything of at all. Yes, when you looked up and around you – as one instinctively does in a church – everything was much as you might have imagined. But then your eyes came to earth again, and at this point all those who had entered this church for the first time suppressed a shudder. Even Howard – who liked to think himself ruthlessly unsentimental when it came to matters of architectural modernization – could find nothing to praise. The stone floor had been completely covered by a thin, orange-and-grey capsule carpet; many large squares of fuzzy industrial felt slotted together. The pattern therein was of smaller orange boxes, each with its own sad grey outline. This orange had grown brownish under the influence of many feet. And then there were the pews, or rather their absence. Every single one had been ripped out and in their place rows of conference chairs – in this same airport-lounge orange – were placed in a timid half-circle meant to foster (so Howard envisioned) the friendly, informal atmosphere in which tea mornings and community meetings are conducted. The final effect was one of unsurpassable ugliness. It was not hard to reconstruct the chain of logic behind the decision: financial distress, the money to be had from selling nineteenth-century pews, the authoritarian severity of horizontal aisles, the inclusiveness of semicircles. But no – it was still a crime. It was too ugly. Kiki sat down with her family on the uncomfortable little plastic chairs. No doubt Monty wanted to prove he was a man of the people, as powerful men so often like to do – and at his wife's expense. Didn't Carlene deserve better than a small ruined church on a noisy main road?
Kiki felt herself quiver with indignation. But then, as people took their seats and soft organ music began, Kiki's logic flipped all the way around. Jerome was right: this was Carlene's place of local worship. Really Monty was to be commended. He could have had the funeral somewhere fancy in Westminster, or up the hill in Hampstead, or – who knows – maybe even in St Paul's itself (Kiki did not pause over practicalities here), but no. Here, in Willesden Green, in the little local church she had loved, Monty had brought the woman he loved, before a congregation who cared for her. Kiki now chastised herself over her first, typically Belseyian opinion. Had she become unable to recognize real emotion when it was right in front of her? Here were simple people who loved their God, here was a church that wished to make its parishioners comfortable, here was an honest man who loved his wife – were these things really beneath consideration?

‘Mom,' hissed Zora, pulling her mother's sleeve. ‘
Mom
. Isn't that Chantelle?'

Kiki, thus separated from uneasy thoughts, looked obediently to where Zora was pointing, although the name meant nothing to her.

‘That can't be her. She's in my class,' said Zora, squinting. ‘Well, not exactly
in
it but . . .'

The double doors of the church opened. Ribbons of daylight threaded through the shady interior, tying up a stack of gilt hymn books in their radiance, highlighting the blonde hair of a pretty child, the brass edging on the octangular font. All heads turned at once, in an awful echo of a wedding, to see Carlene Kipps, boxed in wood, coming up the aisle. Howard alone looked up into the simple concameration of the roof, hoping for escape or relief or distraction. Anything but this. He was greeted instead with a wash of music. It poured down on his head from above, from a balcony. There eight young men, with neat curtains of hair and boyish, rosy faces, were lending their lungs to an ideal of the human voice larger than any one of them.

Howard, who had long ago given up on this ideal, now found himself – in a manner both sudden and horrible – mortally affected
by it. He did not even get the opportunity to check the booklet in his hand; never discovered that this was Mozart's
Ave Verum
, and this choir, Cambridge singers; no time to remind himself that he hated Mozart, nor to laugh at the expensive pretension of bussing down Kingsmen to sing at a Willesden funeral. It was too late for all that. The song had him.
Aaaah Vay-ay, Aah, aah, vay
sang the young men; the faint, hopeful leap of the first three notes, the declining dolour of the following three; the coffin passing so close to Howard's elbow he sensed its weight in his arms; the woman inside it, only ten years older than Howard himself; the prospect of her infinite residence in there; the prospect of his own; the Kipps children weeping behind it; a man in front of Howard checking his watch as if the end of the world (for so it was for Carlene Kipps) was a mere inconvenience in his busy day, even though this fellow too would live to see the end of his world, as would Howard, as do tens of thousands of people every day, few of whom, in their lifetimes, are ever able to truly believe in the oblivion to which they are dispatched. Howard gripped the arms of his chair and tried to regulate his breathing in case this was an asthmatic episode or a dehydration incident, both of which he had experienced before. But this was different: he was tasting salt, watery salt, a lot of it, and feeling it in the chambers of his nose; it ran in rivulets down his neck and pooled in the dainty triangular well at the base of his throat. It was coming from his eyes. He had the feeling that there was a second, gaping mouth in the centre of his stomach and that this was screaming. The muscles in his belly convulsed. All around him people bowed their heads and joined their hands together, as people do at funerals, as Howard knew: he had been to many of them. At this point in the proceedings it was Howard's more usual practice to doodle lightly with a pencil along the edge of the funeral programme while recalling the true, unpleasant relationship between the dead man in the box and the fellow presently offering a glowing eulogy, or to wonder whether the dead man's widow will acknowledge the dead man's mistress sitting in the third row. But at Carlene Kipps's funeral Howard kept faith with her coffin. He did not take his eyes from that box. He was quite certain he
was making embarrassing noises. He was powerless to stop them. His thoughts fled from him and rushed down their dark holes. Zora's gravestone. Levi's. Jerome's. Everybody's. His own. Kiki's. Kiki's. Kiki's. Kiki's.