Quilt (7 page)

– Are you family, my dear?

– No, I’m not, the girl replies.

So who is she? Not going to get a satisfactory answer there either. Something about the man wavering over the standard deals we offer, service in the church or service at the grave.

– Will it be a big event? Many coming? Was your father well known locally? I expect he had a lot of friends.

And the son feels impelled to inform her that his father was a Buddhist who practised no recognisable form of Buddhism, unless you count smoking rhododendron leaves, and his mother was an atheist of the sublime party, and then to complain about the apparent impossibility of setting up a decent burial in this God-bemobbled country, if she’ll excuse his language, unless it is a good Christian burial conducted by a bona fide priest such as he takes her to be, and the vicar feels impelled to ensure that she is not dealing here with some strange species of satanist, for there is after all just a flicker of doubt in her bones, she won’t call it by name but the chap’s chemicals are sending out warning signals. Proceed with caution. Consign to unconscious exorcism.

And the son would like to point out that ‘satan’ is a rich and beautiful word that indeed need not be invested with a capital letter but can be understood in a sense cut free, if he may put it this way, from all religiosity, as a noun in its older or, perhaps, more pristine sense meaning simply an adversary, someone who opposes or plots against. Not forgetting also of course that the word has been used of some of the funniest characters in literature. Think of Falstaff, that old white-bearded satan.

But she wants to know now what extracts from the Bible and what hymns his father liked, if there is anything
special the son wishes to have in the service. Otherwise she’ll be happy to suggest something.

Yes, the bog-standard programme, he thinks, with the lord as my shepherd and an excerpt from Revelation he almost starts reciting to her on the spot, And I took the little scroll from the hand of the angel, and did eat it; and it was in my mouth sweet as honey; and when I ate it my belly was embittered; no, don’t wind the woman up, she’s only doing her job.

So he is havering, yes, she can tell there is something not to be trusted about the bereaved man.

– I’d like to be able to think about this and perhaps suggest a passage or two, perhaps read a poem and say a few words of my own if that is OK, he says.

– Yes, she says hesitating, that would be perfectly all right, so long as it is in keeping with the occasion.

And as for in the church or at the graveside, he says quite firmly:

– By the graveside.

But later he phones her and changes this, having considered the possibility of rain and elderly or less able mourners obliged to stand at length in the graveyard, and would the sound carry, he wonders, in the event of a hymn or reading ‘in keeping with the occasion’? What would be the point of it if no one can hear anything?

In the event the rain holds off and they proceed to the side of the double grave standing in grass unmown for weeks, following his reading of Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ inside the church, he repeating in himself, to the syllable, the as if satirically stern, always surprising force of his father’s rendition, its loudness so much at variance with his diurnal taciturnity, a storming on the heights as at school
carol services when the son was a boy, blindly cherubic with unbroken voice blushing in a sea of voices, buoyed up by his father’s among them.

Then there is the vicar and the frog. At the omega of her call, at the denouement of what is to be the vicar’s first and last visit, all pleasantries ending, without quite going so far as to say lovely to meet you look forward to seeing you at the funeral, he opens the front door, there’s plenty of space for her to pass through, but then she retracts more fully the porch door already sufficiently ajar, and he detects a slight sound absolutely out of place, a faint crunch. She hears or seems to hear nothing, evidently too busy in the world of her own virtuous thoughts and feelings, or thinking about lunch, but he knows he hears something. Only after she has driven away does he look down and see in the jamb, close by the rusty hinge, a frog, or what remains of a frog, with possibly a final throe, the throe as he goes to touch, no, not a throe, a cast of the light, a fantastical last contraction. The vicar killed the frog as she was leaving.

What is the frog’s place in the yarn? What is this leap of faith into the door jamb and wait for the final crunch, as if that frog is indeed another forgery, a hopping mad music or rhythmic throe, like slime, like a caul, over eyes and ears, like the rhapsody of sky and shadows at the bus station or the feeling of being a mollusc under someone’s descending shoe?

And all the while leaping backwards, in an analepsis of ranarian lucidity, through the entire entraining of
funeral arrangements and making the downstairs of the house clean and tidy enough to accommodate the reception after the service, at every turn and totting up of post-mortem preparations the bereaved man and the girl-stranger are, merely on his say-so, his implacable, irrefutable position on the topic having become evident to her over a series of evenings following her arrival, his laying out of the design, the vision he has, in order to do what has to be done, on his insistence they are at the same time making way for an impressively large aquarium, to be installed in the dining room. It needs to be longer than it is high, four by two metres and just sixty centimetres deep, the desirability of a pool as large as possible scarcely requiring specification, not only from an aesthetic point of view but in practical terms: if one of the creatures should die, it has far less effect in a large space. Inevitably, in the case of a small aquarium, products of decay from a decomposing body contaminate the water and can rapidly bring about the death of other creatures, but if you think big, if you reckon on the worst with a big showcase space, you can have one be dead and decaying for twenty-four hours or more and it have no unduly adverse effect on the life of the other inhabitants.

These are not his words but she extrapolates them, in ironic form, from what he tells her.

Not to mention the possibility of an electrical fault, say a heater or pump breaks down, and you don’t notice because it happens in the middle of the night, or you go away for the day, and come back to find the calamitous aftermath of power failure: with a large aquarium everything is more survivable, changes in temperature
or pH level more gradual, salvation is plausible and no creature need die.

– What creatures? And how many are we talking about here? she not surprisingly wants to know.

– Four, he replies, South American freshwater stingrays:
Potamotrygon motoro
.

There is no certainty as to which variant of the type. They might come from Peru, Brazil or Colombia. Many of these species remain unnamed, even undescribed in the scientific literature, but they are distinctive for the beautiful eyespots on their backs, like leopards, peacocks, chameleons or butterflies, and their bellies white as ghosts. He shows her some photographs.

– I’ve already ordered them, he says.

They are due to be collected on the eve of the funeral and, as if for children to be adopted and brought home to a house where nothing is prepared, with winter coming and no wood chopped or food laid up, they must work like demons to ensure a welcoming environment.

Sometimes he says they, sometimes we, he says things, she notices, that fray or slide off at the edges, splashes of grief paint, verbal splay, semantic bubbles, mimosaturated existence popping before you can adjust your vision to see inside. In the evenings when there is nothing to do besides sit in exhaustion, dusty fusty musty in the twilight of the increasingly empty drawing room, dining room or kitchen, or outside on the garden bench to no sound besides sheep in the field above the house and a washing vaguely up of distant traffic on the road running like an unseen wound along the valley below, they discuss at great length the materials required to be ordered or purchased the following day. Gradually they
clear and clean, emptying the dining room sufficiently to paint it.

– We are getting ready for them, he says laughing, slapping it on.

She is surprised at how many of the materials are available locally or at short notice from elsewhere, and at his passion to have the thing done, the rigour of his researches and enquiries, the forays to builder's merchants and aquarium shops in nearby towns,
sea-life
centres strung along the coast, online companies for aquaculture supplies and aquarium systems.

– I never dreamed we’d custom-build a ray pool, did you?

He makes her face light up with laughter. He works out the volume in cubic inches, divides by 231 to establish how many gallons of water: 2,078. He insists on making the thing out of acrylic, not glass, despite the drawbacks. Acrylic sheets are more easily scratched but they don’t crack or break so easily and, in any case, it’s much simpler to drill acrylic. When it comes to installing an individual filtration system the last thing anyone wants are
dead-spot
areas of water. Lack of circulation means anaerobic conditions. The spillway design is likewise crucial. We need to make sure there are appropriate corner overflows to take away the protein waste that tends to collect at the surface. Despite the fact that acrylic constructions come with a significant lip to help prevent any creature escaping, we really need a covering. Of this last he explains:

– No problem. I’ll just cut it from egg-crate plastic.

Putting together the frame he shows an expertise and dexterity she has not anticipated in him, forcefully snapping together, securing, screwing, drilling the
construction of the stand, taking care to ensure sufficient space inside to enable work on the filter as and when required, tilting and adjusting and finally firmly bedding down the acrylic plates. It makes her laugh at least once a day with an absolutely unexpected pleasure, as if this were really how to live, what to do.

And then everything is ready, as if fairies have been in labour, the day breaks, the downstairs of the house is clear, everything that needed to go to the tip has gone, everything that could be put out of sight in this or that cupboard has been put out of sight, the drawing room and dining room and kitchen and downstairs toilet have been cleaned and vacuumed and scoured and washed. The dining room in particular has been especially arrayed for the occasion, the table moved off into one corner, the candles, cups and saucers, glasses, plates and napkins set forth, the wine, soft drinks and food all in preparation. Everyone who could reasonably be expected to have wanted to know knows this is the day, the church at two o’clock, friends of his parents and family arriving from far and near. He has written his speech and the two of them are ready, he dressed in the black clothes he bought on the morning of the death and she in black picked up on a later outing to the town. They stand clasping one another in the dining room clad in black amazed at what it seems they have done, disbelieving, as if supernatural forces or forgeries must have been at work; it is time to walk down to the church.