When Clement awoke next morning, Sheila had already left the bedroom. He could see that the sun beyond the curtains had resumed its unexpected reign over Rawlinson Road. Making a mental check of his anatomy, he discovered that he was in moderate good health; the pain in his left leg and the slight tremor in his right forearm were distractions of long standing, and not to be considered.
It was Sunday – a week since they left the madhouse in Boston.
He dressed and came downstairs slowly, seeming to float in the dimness, for Sheila had drawn the curtains over the long window on the landing in order to keep out the heat, creating unfocused semi-shadows on the striped wallpaper. From Sheila’s room came the steady click of her word-processor: Kerinth was being reborn and he did not disturb her. His mind was still full of yesterday’s worrying experience.
As he was about to descend to the hall, a sound at the front door attracted his attention. Accelerating his step, he was in time to see a glint of daylight and fingers at the letterbox, as a piece of paper was pushed through. The paper dropped to the doormat. Even as he hastened forward to pick it up, Clement recognized it as a copy of the vindictive review of War Lord of Kerinth, cut from the Guardian, which had greeted them on their return from Boston.
At once, Clement unlocked the front door and flung it open. He ran down the steps and the path to the street. He could see the traffic trundling by on the Banbury Road. On Rawlinson Road, no one was in sight. He went out on the pavement and stared this way and that, clutching the review. He looked into next door, beyond Mrs Farrer’s pseudoacacia. Had someone just disappeared down the sideway? He was convinced that the horrible John Farrer had struck again. Why wasn’t the little bugger in church, praying forgiveness for his sins?
His savage glare at the Farrer roses failed to wither them. Retreating to his own territory, he went slowly inside, shaking with anger, and closed the door behind him.
There were voices in the kitchen. Two of Michelin’s friends had come round to take coffee and Maison Blanc cakes with her. They greeted Clement politely when he entered the room.
Michelin was wearing lipstick for once. This was a detail Clement only later realized he had observed.
He helped himself to a bowl of mixed Shreddies and All-Bran and took it out to eat at the garden table, away from the chatter of the ladies. After a little while, Michelin came out with a cup of coffee for him. He smiled at her and then made himself read the adverse review.
‘… What is disturbing about such fantasies is that they present arrant impossibilities as if they were fact, thus stepping up the power of the drug. In the silly world of Kerinth, a dead race comes back from a million years ago and interferes with present-day activities whenever the plot demands it.
‘None of the characters is surprised at this remarkable phenomenon, because the effect the author is aiming at is sedation rather than enquiry.’
This extract contained several mistakes. Its general air of condescension was also a mistake, in Clement’s eyes. He screwed the scrap of paper up and heeled it into a flower bed, so that Sheila would not see and be disturbed by it again. The sheer malice prompting someone to push this idle squib through the door nearly made him sick.
He imagined doing many violent things to Farrer until the savagery of his thoughts frightened him, and he resorted mentally to Mrs Emerova.
‘If it was that little bugger next door, what does he know about it? He’s no literary critic. Who’s he to agree or disagree with the prick in the Guardian, whoever he is?’
‘How do you know it is the person next door? Why so close?’
‘What’s that to do with it? He’d destroy my wife’s work if he possibly could. I know her books have no stylistic excellence. She’s no Nabokov and doesn’t pretend to be, but they bring her peace of mind and happiness, and delight others, and here’s this little bit of dirt …’
‘Does all this hostility mask your own dislike of Sheila’s books?’
‘Really, you say the silliest things. I’m happy if Sheila’s happy. This little cretin next door can have no real valid opinion of his own. Who’s he to judge what the Kerinth novels are worth? He’s only a sodding little insurance agent. Don’t you agree that this was a low and vindictive thing to do?’
‘Mightn’t there be another way of looking at it? A friend meaning well? After all, the review goes on to say that Green Mouth is mistress of her craft, so it is possible, isn’t it, that someone else might carelessly think of it as rather a favourable review?’
‘Look, he hates the novels simply because they are written in the house next door. He hates them because sometimes Sheila types on a manual in her bikini by the swimming pool, and he can see her at it if he stands on a chair in their spare room and cranes his head out of the window. He hates them because there aren’t any insurance agents on Kerinth. He just hates the thought of creative activity. He even came round once to complain that the sound of the word-processor kept him awake at night. He hates them because they’ve got wrap-around picture jackets with bronzed people on not at all resembling his own little contorted frame.
‘He hates the novels because they are extremely successful. He hates them because you can buy them in airports all over the world, and in Papua New Guinea. Not for any literary reasons. He knows bugger all about literature. He can’t tell the difference between Tolstoi and Trotsky. He probably thinks Gorky is a Park. Who’s he, after all, to defend literary standards? All right, he’s seen Frank Delaney and Melvyn Bragg on television, but that’s as far as it goes. He takes the Reader’s Digest. Do we comment on his fancy insurance policies? Who’s he to comment on Sheila’s prose? Besides, I always check her grammar for her.
‘He hates Sheila and me simply because we are happier than he is, and much richer. He hates us because we’ve got a villa outside Marbella. He hates us because we have the house repainted every four years. He hates us because we’ve installed Victorian fireplaces. He hates us because we have parties. What if a guest once slung a bottle over the wall and smashed one of his cloches? Didn’t we go round next day with a bottle of wine to apologize? When’s he ever come round here with anything? He hates Sheila because she’s bigger than his little mouse of a wife and wears fashionable clothes. He hates her because she gets her photo in Blackwell’s shop window. He hates her no doubt because he secretly desires her. Some hope!
‘He hates other people’s success. He hates me. I don’t have a thing against him. He’s just a little shit who ought to be squashed.’
‘And do you see yourself doing that?’
‘Often.’
The interior dialogue went some way towards cooling Clement’s temper. Draining his coffee, he looked at his watch. He might as well go along to his room in college and work on Adaptability; he liked the silences Sunday brought, with Arthur presumably off taking his nubile little wife out in their Zastava Caribbean to have lunch in Burford or Henley. He felt perfectly well this morning, although the traumatic visitation from his brother remained vivid in his mind. The bar of soap still revolved. He made a resolve not to go over to Acton alone next time.
Before leaving the house, he went upstairs to say hello to Sheila.
Sheila, in her role as Green Mouth, had taken over all the first floor of the house. Of the two front rooms, bedrooms under a previous ownership, one served as a sort of library-lounge-art gallery, while the other was her study – her Room, more simply. It was the powerhouse of Kerinth.
A secretary, who had a small room of her own at the rear of the house, also worked in Sheila’s study. The study was dressed in cream. Being in it was rather like being in a huge meringue. The walls were cream, the long heavy curtains were cream. Even the Chinese carpet on the floor was cream, with brilliant green edges. Her desk was also cream. The chairs in the room were upholstered in cream, as was the large Victorian sofa, on which green cushions were piled.
The secretary, Mrs Florence Flowerbury, also sat at a cream desk, half-concealed behind a four-panel cream screen.
Seeing Clement enter, Mrs Flowerbury half-rose and gave him a gracious smile. ‘Here we are, you see, Dr Winter. How are you?’
It was her little joke that she stuck to Sheila – in a phrase she had once used – ‘through thick and thin’, though very little thin had affected the Green Mouth career.
‘I didn’t expect to see you here on a Sunday, Mrs Flowerbury.’
‘A lot of work to catch up with, Dr Winter. I wouldn’t do it for everyone’ – said with a sweet smile towards Sheila.
The general effect of being in a clotted cream factory was mitigated by a brilliantly painted panel on the rear wall of the room, executed somewhat in the manner of Douanier Rousseau. Amid riotous foliage, lifesize mazooms and crichts, the owl-like inhabitants of Vinto, Kerinth’s moon, gazed down with huge cat eyes on their creator.
Their creator, evidently not yet entirely back to Earth after the adulation heaped on her in Boston, wore one of her striking green embroidered robes. She was working at her word-processor. On a corner of the sofa lay Green Mouth, the lizard-like doll and companion of Sheila’s childhood, much worn by years of infantile caresses, from which Sheila had taken her trade name. The doll was her secret talisman, without which she could not write. It was clear she meant business now. Her somewhat heavy face was set in lines of concentration as she sat, elbow on desk, considerable cheek resting on fist, peering into the screen of her purring word-processor for inspiration.
‘I must get out into the garden,’ she said, absent-mindedly.
On her desk she had gathered, conventionally enough, a series of objects of problematic relationship. They lay strewn beside a photograph, framed in silver, of the Winters’ dead child, who, staring as if deep in thought at a toy ambulance from which protruded the legs and feet of a doll, formed a striking little figure in a short-skirted dress and picture hat. The surrounding objects included a small bell from a Mexican church; a matchbox advertising a restaurant in Bath; a postcard view of the Potala Palace in Lhasa; a block of Duplo Lego; an Italian miniature scent bottle without stopper; a netsuke of a man and woman copulating, gift of an admirer in New York; and a smooth stone, streaked with wafer-thin evidence of bygone geological events, which had been picked up on a distant seashore. It might have appeared – say to an interviewer who came to talk to Sheila Winter in her home – that these items presented some kind of methodical reminder to the author of the so-called real world, necessary while she ventured into the realms of her imagination; but from their casual disposition, and the way in which most of them were half-buried in paper or scribbled notes, or other vital adjuncts of her profession, it seemed they had accumulated merely through an idle acquisitive instinct. Sheila was a conventional woman.
As her husband came closer, she glanced up and smiled.
‘How are you feeling, darling? I was up early this morning. I had an idea.’
‘You must have thought me out of my mind yesterday. It’s ridiculous to say that Joseph’s flat is haunted, but there he was.’ He went to her side, and she took hold of his hand. ‘There he was. It was a real shock. He was washing his hands in the kitchen. I can’t tell you the effect of it all. The hand-washing seemed to be going on for ever … You aren’t about to tell me I imagined it all, are you?’
Sheila half-smiled. She stood up and held his face between her hands. ‘You old silly! “There’s nothing but thinking makes it so.” Isn’t that what you’ve often told me? It’s real to you, so it’s real to me.’
‘Well, it was most extraordinary. Joseph definitely spoke to me. “Everything worked out all right.” It’s a genuine message from the Beyond, isn’t it? How are you feeling? Are you entirely over your jet-lag yet?’
Even as he asked the question, he wondered if Joseph’s supposed appearance had not been a product of his own jet-lag.
‘That reminds me. Mrs Flowerbury, we must ring the Boston committee and thank them for their hospitality.’ She seated herself again on her cream chair, her mind slipping back to her work. ‘I suddenly had a marvellous idea as I was in the shower. An image. It must have been something to do with the milkman. He was delivering yesterday with a new van. When I was a child in the country, the milkman used to go on his rounds with a horse and cart.’
‘Good, yes, well, I’m just off. I didn’t mean to disturb you. Don’t forget it’s drinks with the Fender-Lieversohns this evening.’
‘Good. I had the image of three hooded men galloping at full stretch along a shore. The tide had retreated, leaving miles of sodden sand reflecting the blue sky. Some way out to sea was a small island, volcanic, with smoke rising in a plume from it. A wonderful opening. A wonderful cover. I felt I had to write it down. We’ll see where it takes me. Keep your fingers crossed.’
‘That’s fine. Remember, you don’t need to work on a Sunday, nor do I. I must get the booze for the party from Bottoms Up tomorrow. Well, they’ll deliver as usual, of course.’
‘Don’t forget to order plenty of glasses. I thought this time I’d make more of the Rajjimi, give them a bigger role in events.’
‘I like your Rajjimi. Don’t overwork.’
‘I’m supposed to be Sunday-lunching with Maureen. I might just put her off. She’ll understand.’
He kissed her and they stroked each other’s faces.
He did like the Rajjimi, he reflected as he went downstairs past Sheila’s pictures, among the soothing shadows, hearing the keyboard of the word-processor already beginning to click. The Golden Age of Kerinth lay far behind it. The planet had once been ruled by a noble and powerful race, the Rajjimi. It had disappeared. A quarter of a million years (and not a million years, as the man had said in his Guardian review) of barbarism had elapsed before Kerinth became – at least in part – civilized again. The ruling Rajjimi materialized to the new rulers of the planet, appearing like apparitions from the dead, to advise, to counsel, to warn. Some of the new rulers heeded them, others deliberately flouted the ghostly advice.
At first, the Rajjimi made few appearances but, when their popularity was certain, Sheila began writing them into every book.
Well, it was not such a preposterous idea, Clement thought. Just a post-Freudian idea … We were all ruled by the dead whispering to us. The Rajjimi functioned rather like archetypes.
Juliet’s death came back to him. He closed the front door carefully on the house and its contents.
The car crash had happened in the summer of 1974, thirteen years ago. Juliet would have been sixteen by now, in the fifth at Oxford High School. Instead, she remained forever in his mind – and Sheila’s – at the age of three and a half, delicate, dependent, dear. He had been driving. That was what made it so awful. And the country had been so green and heavy with leaf. The details had always been vague, except that he did not see the other car as it pulled out of a side lane in front of them.
Then he had found himself being carried, and had no idea where he was. He shouted for Sheila. Shouted in a whisper. Things faded. He was in a moving vehicle, prostrate, and Sheila’s face was near his, deathly white. His thought was, ‘I’ve killed her.’ That terrible moment still resurfaced at intervals in his mind. He had not immediately thought of Juliet then. At the Radcliffe Infirmary he had learned that both Sheila and he were relatively whole, but their child was dying. She had been sitting on Sheila’s knee, and had gone through the windscreen during the collision.
They had been sedated and patched up before they returned to the house. They lived in Chalfont Road, then, in a roomy upstairs flat. They had avoided friends for a long while. How many times had he poured out his guilt to Sheila. How many times had she forgiven. How many times had they both wept. That beastly summer, full of irremediable pain.
Ice-cream. That was all they seemed to want to eat. Endless maple and walnut ice-cream from the new delicatessen in Summertown. And both being all in all to each other. They had endured each other’s silences, each other’s fits of wailing. Somehow they had clung to the idea that they still loved each other, despite a tendency to fly apart, to flee to the other ends of the world to escape from the one person who most reminded them of the dead.
They sated themselves with music as if it were a kind of drug, in particular playing records of Bach chorales over and over. Clement never heard ‘Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ’, in the sombre key of F minor, without recalling that desolate time. Slowly the mania left them, along with the need for ice-cream, as the winter’s rains came down.
Then one day she had started typing on the manual Hermes they shared. ‘I’m going to write a fantasy novel,’ she said.
There had been no dead child in that first Kerinth novel. All had been excitement and sunlight and it had ended happily. But the mysterious Rajjimi had made their first appearance, coming back from death, trailing clouds of a vanished glory. ‘Arrant impossibilities’ indeed …
Clement tried to dismiss the past as he came to the Banbury Road and the challenge of its traffic, dense even today. In a city of obfuscations, the Banbury Road was one of Oxford’s more definite statements, blunt rather than equivocal. For most of its length, say from St Giles to Summertown, it had been built before the age of the motor car, or at least during the mere dawn of that terrifying age. The great houses which flanked it, angular mansions of brick, had been designed for ample families; provision had been made in basement and attic for plural servants. Carriages had conveyed the families into town, to shop at Elliston & Cavell’s emporium. Young rustic men in waistcoats served as gardeners, in response to the Edwardian penchant for rus in urbe.
But the Kaiser had proved too much for stability. Young England had gone first to the war and then to the dogs. Now these Oxford gardens were under-tended and over-grown; models of Darwinism, they had become places where only the fittest plants survived. The houses themselves had been given over to trumpery schools of English or divided into flats where untenanted milk bottles congregated on crumbling doorsteps. The carriages had gone, swept aside by automobiles. Arthur Stranks lived in one of the little flats into which No. 82 Banbury Road had been sliced, and would drive his Zastava Caribbean regularly into the streams of traffic which ran north and south through all daylight hours and long after. This was where Clement and Sheila had once walked in agony, mutely clutching each other’s hands, as far up as Squitchey Lane, after their Juliet was killed. The great houses, behind their great trees, lay back from the thronging cars, blind, wounded, extinct – yet living on, their carcasses turned over to contemporary fashion and lusting estate agents.
Catching a period without traffic, Clement hastened across the road and soon took a side street to College, but his trail of memory persisted.
How vulnerably young they had been then!
It remained a source of pride to him that he and Sheila had seen each other through that period of mourning, although at times her grief had been nearly impossible to bear. The very smell of her had changed for a while. Had anyone ever done a medical paper on that? Changes in Olfactory Signals During Periods of Grief. He had made love several times to her friend Maureen Bowler – looking back, he appreciated Maureen’s immense understanding: she had agreed, he could perceive, not for his sake but for her friend’s. This was in Maureen’s pre-feminist days. The affair, lasting hardly a month, had put him back on the road in running order. He had been more able to look after Sheila. Ever since, they had remained close, devoted, although Sheila would never start another child. They had been examples of the adaptability round which Clement was compiling his record.
Kerinth was Sheila’s child. She had her escape routes. No one could bear too much reality. Even at this moment, she was writing about three hooded men galloping along a deserted seashore on an imaginary planet. He smiled to himself. Good for her.
By an inevitable and painful association, Clement’s thoughts ran to another dead child, his mother’s first-born, born long before he himself saw the light of day. That ill-fated little creature, that ‘steel-engraving angel’, had had a malign effect on Joseph’s childhood, haunting his early years. He recalled Joseph’s strenuous attempts to lay that ghost on the occasion of their mother’s funeral in Nettlesham, three years previously.
It was a suitably bleak occasion. Madge Constance Winter, widow of Ernest Winter, had died one cold April day in 1984. She left behind a wish to be buried beside her husband in the town cemetery of Nettlesham, Suffolk. Her two sons carried out her wishes.
Nettlesham lay in the midst of flat uninteresting country, a market town which had lost touch with its countryside. It stood cold and grey within a ring of treeless new estates. An east wind moved through its streets. Clement, accustomed to the legend of Nettlesham as the old family home, took a dislike to it all over again. Although he and Sheila arrived at lunchtime, the town gave an appearance of obstinate stagnation, like something washed up on an elderly beach. On the outskirts, they had driven through some light industry, kitchen designers, agricultural machinery hirers, bamboo furniture importers, and such. The centre, despite the injection of a hideous shopping centre, had fossilized in a dull bygone time, cramped and crotchety. Young people with red hands ate their lunches from paper bags in the street.
Nettlesham’s one claim to fame remained the poet William Westlake, the minor eighteenth-century figure who had gone mad and died there. In the market place was a Westlake Tea Rooms, which sold postcards and scarves, as well as dusty buns.
Sheila and Clement drove up from Oxford in the Mercedes. Ellen drove up in her Mini with her daughter Jean, even then undergoing a divorce. Joseph drove up in his van. Sheila and Clement had booked to stay overnight at the Gryphon, the only hotel for miles recommended in the Good Hotel Guide, thinking to have a look at the coast the next morning. The others planned to drive home that evening.
Despite the solemnity of the occasion, Sheila and Clement arrived in Nettlesham in good humour, amused at the prospect of seeing some of the family again. Clement had driven; Sheila did not drive. He sometimes wondered about that. She had refused to learn. In many things, she had come to be the dominant partner in their marriage. Above all, fame and the earning-capacity had become hers. Most of the time, he was content enough that this should be so; it was a state of affairs compatible with the times, when women played an increasingly confident role in life. But in the car and in bed with Clement she was content to play a passive role.
They all met by arrangement in the King’s Arms, near where the old Winter ironmongery shop had once stood – new developments had swept the shop away with a lot of the other junk of the past. It now had a fragile existence only in the memory of Joseph Winter and possibly one or two others.
Joining the two brothers later would be Ellen and Jean, and Madge Winter’s two younger sisters, Mary and Doris, together with their husbands and assorted offspring. They had all agreed to meet in the bar for a drink before visiting the dining room for a meal.
Directly Clement and Sheila entered the bar, all yellow pine and plastic avocado upholstery, they saw his elder brother there alone, drinking. Joseph sat hunched on a swivel stool, elbow on bar and glass of beer in his hand. He was neatly dressed in a dark grey jacket and black trousers. As Clement advanced, he saw that Joseph’s tie was slightly awry and the top button of his shirt undone. He wore a CND badge in his lapel. Clement smiled and extended his hand.
‘How are you, Joseph?’
Joseph climbed down carefully from his stool. His untidy hair was greyer than when they had last met, and his face more lined. He grinned.
‘Right as a cricket, and no regrets at the prospect of seeing the old girl shovelled under. You’re looking as neat and upright as ever.’
He turned to Sheila and kissed her cheek, standing back to survey her dark dress.
‘Plenty of embonpoint, Sheila, dearest.’
‘I know your preference is for less of that.’
Joseph laughed. ‘Touché. Puissant as always, and selling even better than before, no doubt.’
Clement smiled rather hard at his wife to encourage her to accept this greeting, but she merely said, with a fugitive gleam, ‘I saw a book of yours announced last week in a bookseller’s catalogue.’
‘Oh, that! Let’s have a drink. Same old stuff that no one wants to buy – King Sidabutar of Sumatra, very obscure. Isn’t it amazing that I still keep going over the same old ground? You’d think I’d be discouraged by now, but not a bit of it.’ He laughed heartily, and then changed tack, clutching Clement’s arm in mock earnestness. ‘Well, young ’un, what do you think to this ancient town in which I was born and bred?’
‘Not much. It looks as if it has been ruined since the war.’
‘No, not at all. Improved if anything. When I was a lad, everyone used to go about in creaky boots, with straw in their hair.’
‘I’d grow straws in my hair if I lived here for long.’
‘Where’s Ellen, may I ask? She can’t have thought better of it, can she?’
‘Perhaps she’s staying at home to look after the dog.’
‘She’d better be here, and that pretty daughter with her. Ellie was always mother’s little pet. Can’t plant the old lady without Ellie here to wave her goodbye.’
He’s now fifty-seven, Clement thought, surveying his brother with lively interest. Quite a raffish old man. His skin is rather blotchy, his hair needs a trim and a wash. But cheerful, or at least in his usual sort of bantering, self-deprecating humour. ‘How long have you been here?’
‘Propping up this bar? Not long. I drove over early. Decided to seize on the chance of looking round my birthplace. Don’t ask me why. I don’t suffer from nostalgia. I suppose you take no interest in William Westlake, Clem, renowned author of “The Crippled Goat”? Well, William’s my literary mentor. I had my first orgasm only a semen’s throw from where the old boy lived. He knew the folly of birthplaces.
‘… Pride is in all, e’en in our Birth.
How much we count it where and when on Earth
We happened – though all came by merest Chance …’
He laughed. ‘There was a lot of sense in the eighteenth century, not to mention sententiousness. Yes, I’ve had a prowl around. Went to the cemetery. Revisited some old haunts. Even sought a girl I used to know. Well, two girls in fact. Rosemary and Ruth Tippler. My first loves – or second, or third … They lived over their shop next to our shop. I was twelve when I fell in love with them both. Ever since then, to enjoy two sisters at the same time has been my ideal, but I’ve never come across a pair as lovely as Ruth and Rosemary. ’Course, they’ve been married for years – left bloody Nettlesham, if they had any sense. All very carnal, Sheila, but of course I don’t shock you.’
‘Keep trying,’ she said, and smiled.
‘Worse things happen in Corinth, I bet – or whatever your pet planet is called.’
‘Much worse.’ She was not going to allow Joseph to win a tease. ‘Where’s this drink?’
After a while, Ellen arrived with Jean. Jean was now twenty-two, a pretty girl with dark curly hair and something of the Winter features. Joseph got off his stool, and began to make up to his niece. Clement, while talking to Ellen, observed how much Jean resembled Joseph as he had been when younger, and wondered whether, in her unfortunate love life, she did not also resemble him.
At fifty-three, Ellen looked spry enough in her dark two-piece suit. She dyed her hair. She cradled her handbag in the crook of her left arm and put her right hand daintily on Clement’s shoulder as she kissed his cheek. For Joseph she had a kiss on the lips and a swift hug.
‘Drinking again,’ she said to him. ‘Still, you don’t look in bad shape. You’re a bit thin.’
‘I ran out of money and had to walk all the way back from Bangkok. Those CND marches proved useful at last.’
‘And you’re wearing a suit – almost a suit!’
‘A last-minute bid for respectability. I should always go about togged up like this. Your daughter gets prettier all the time. How are you?’
While they were uttering phatic expressions of pleasure, in came the rest of the party, a man in front, a man bringing up the rear, with Madge Winter’s two younger sisters, Mary and Doris, and their grown-up offspring, in between.
‘This way. Here we are,’ old Claude Vernon was saying, unnecessarily, proclaiming himself leader of the pack, as they entered.
‘What a tragic occasion, dear,’ said his wife, Doris, opening her arms wide before flinging them round Ellen. Doris Vernon’s past history had given her a taste for the dramatic and a tendency to slope to the right which the years had not quenched.
Mary Overton, her sister, managed to look mournful at the best of times. Ellen’s arms being occupied, she took second choice and headed for Joseph. Evading his aunt adroitly, he left her with no option but to collapse into Sheila’s arms, where she managed a creditable spasm of sobbing.
The younger Overtons and Vernons milled about among themselves. Those with initiative rapidly ordered themselves drinks. Last came heavy-bodied Hugh Overton, Mary’s husband, struggling to escape from the clutches of a heavy overcoat. Clement helped him. ‘Always beastly cold in East Anglia,’ he grumbled to the company in general.
‘How’s the shrink trade going?’ he asked Clement. ‘Still sooth-saying to the sexually repressed?’ In his youth, Hugh had gained a small reputation as a wag.
After a reasonable amount of milling about, and résumés of the journey they had just undergone, they all moved together in a crowd up two steps and into the King’s Arms dining room. As they passed through the glazed double doors, Joseph grabbed Clement by the elbow.
‘I know I’m the senior and all that, but I’m not able to go treat, I’m afraid. I can pay my whack and that’s about all.’
‘Don’t worry, Joseph. This meal was Sheila’s and my idea, so we’ll pay for it.’
‘If father hadn’t been so spineless, we might have owned this town by now. Isn’t life a bummer? Full of “might have beens”, along with all the other nasties.”
‘You’ll probably have the lunch to complain about too. I don’t suppose it’s anything special.’
‘Pity we couldn’t have had a curry.’
‘I don’t eat curry, remember?’
This was said as Clement surveyed the dining room. It was an old room. One might have suspected that, the arts of hospitality having been practised on this site for three or four centuries, tippling, gluttony, gossiping, and other gregarious human failings having filled its spaces to the rafters since the times of Good Queen Bess, something bonhomous might have remained in its atmosphere. But it had been redecorated in the nineteen-sixties, and now was merely an old room.
‘I say, our niece Jean looks good, doesn’t she?’ said Joseph. ‘Divorced so young … Pity she drove her husband away – nice chap, I thought.’
The guests came to the table in clusters, with feigned or real reluctance, and Clement directed where they should sit, making sure that his brother sat next to Jean.
‘I’m glad you’re in command, Clem,’ said Ellen, waspishly.
He grouped the younger people of the Overton and Vernon clans at one end of the table, so that they could make cryptic remarks among themselves. The older members sat at the other end, assembling themselves rather moodily in their unfamiliar clothes as Sheila said, ‘We can be happy together, although it is a sad occasion. Madge wouldn’t want to see us looking miserable.’
No one answered her, although Joseph glanced across and gave her a nod of approval before plunging back into conversation with Jean.
They kept their voices low. The chilly atmosphere of the dining room got to them. The table had been laid with a white cloth. Withered white carnations drooped in two silver-plated vases. There were white bone china side plates and paper napkins, and white china salt and pepper pots in the shape of imitation igloos. The impression was of a table set more for an ice age than a meal.
Sheila began talking calmly and remorselessly to Doris Vernon and her husband sitting next to her. Launching out on the price of vodka in various Oxford shops as compared with the Duty Free shop in Heathrow, and taking relative proofs into consideration, she moved easily into the psychology of flying long distances, pointing out that motivation as well as the basic technology was needed. With this example to encourage the party, a thin trickle of talk emerged from them; good humour developed as a thin waiter poured a thin red wine.
April rain came scudding down outside, an element twinned with the clear soup served inside. Jean laughed at Joseph’s jokes. Someone in the kitchen was having a violent fit of coughing.
Both Mary Overton and Doris Vernon resembled their dead sister. They had been tall, although now they were beginning to crumble, gazing out on what was left of their world through thick spectacles. In repose, Mary’s face had a mournful expression of surprise, as if she was saying, inwardly, ‘Oh dear, that’s what’s happened, is it?’ The younger of the two, Doris, looked rather more formidable, although still mournful when not imbibing the soup; her expression inclined more towards, ‘Well, don’t let this happen again.’
These two slightly differing expressions, etched on their respective faces with increasing emphasis over the years, owed much to the influence of their spouses. Hugh Overton, Mary’s husband, was known as a moody man who had long outgrown any notoriety as a card; with the years, his jests had turned to jibes and his jibes had turned against his wife, perhaps because she excelled him in an area where he had expected little competition, intelligence. He had conducted a furniture business in North London; now, in the years of his retirement, he haunted secondhand shops and auctions, making occasional purchases which Mary neglected to polish.
Doris’s fate had been more dramatic than her sister’s. Her husband, Claude Vernon, had been a young lawyer in Bury St Edmunds. After she had borne him three children, he had run off with one of his clients, a South American lady called Dolores Beltrao do Soares. They had fled to a small island in the English Channel, Elbit, the property of Dolores’s uncle, to escape the lady’s husband. There it had been love among the sheep, until the husband arrived by motor launch with a rifle, in a well-sustained jealous rage.
The intruder had threatened to shoot both his wife and Claude, but they had somehow fallen to talking, possibly about sheep-breeding, with such intensity that Dolores, whose interest in sheep was at a low ebb, had snatched the rifle and shot her husband. He had been taken to a hospital in Weymouth, where he died; Dolores was arrested for murder. The trial, with its romantic ingredients – lust, weaponry, small island, adultery, and sheep – had received wide and sensational coverage. Claude Vernon had been expelled from the Bar. Dolores got a two-year sentence for manslaughter.
Claude went back to Doris and the three children. Far from being apologetic, his attitude was that of a man who had instigated high and desperate adventure. He persuaded Doris, at least temporarily, to take the same point of view. She accepted him back into the family home.
But the high and desperate adventure, coupled with difficulty in finding a suitable job, had unsettled Claude’s disposition. Doris’s mood of acceptance slowly changed to one of resentment, coupled with some envy. She gradually withdrew herself from her husband and children; rheumatism had taken her like a rusted weathervane and frozen her in that attitude. She walked and now sat at the table with a perceptible tilt to starboard, leaning away from what she loved and hated.
Although this adventure had taken place in the late thirties, when such affrays were as common as record-breaking flights across the Atlantic, and when Doris and Claude were in their early thirties, the mark of it was still on them, half a century later – and upon the relationship between the sisters; for Mary’s life, despite the jibes and the furniture, had been very dull. She still showed some envy of her sister, whose photograph had appeared in the Daily Graphic and other newspapers, as if Doris had been the one run away with rather than from. Doris, too, was able to luxuriate in her brief fame, when not punishing her husband for it; so that the pleasant sibling friendship they had enjoyed as children had long drained away. In Mary’s presence, Doris came more than usually to resemble the celebrated Tower of Pisa.
Stepping up the ‘Well, don’t let this happen again’ expression, Doris now addressed the company in general, saying, as pallid translucent strips of fish were brought in on cold plates, ‘Madge’s was a long widowhood. She was a gentle creature who deserved better of life, in my opinion.’
‘I wonder what God’s opinion was,’ said Jean, and then looked horrified at what she had said. ‘I mean, granny wasn’t at all what you would call religious. She never went to church.’
‘She went to church a lot when she was young,’ replied Doris.
‘We all had to go to church then, Doris,’ said her sister, speaking in a reproving tone as if for the entire C. of E. ‘If you can remember those days.’
‘And she went to church a lot after she married Ernest,’ said Doris, in a conclusive way, ignoring Mary’s remark.
‘That would be when her first child died, wouldn’t it?’ asked Joseph. ‘I mean, that poor little thing, which would have been my elder sister …’ He looked poker-faced at Jean as he spoke. ‘Mater remained heart-broken about that until Ellie was born. The Almighty is a bad listener and made the mistake of sending her a boy – me – as replacement first time round.’
‘That’s no way to speak, Joe, really,’ said Doris. ‘Madge cried her eyes out for that poor little darling.’
‘Prayer should be an end in itself,’ said Joseph. ‘It’s an end, not a means. The Buddha knew that. If you get an answer, it comes from yourself, and it’s a miracle.’
‘Well, it would be a miracle if you got an answer from yourself, wouldn’t it?’ said Hugh Overton, with a laugh. He was not attending much. Senility was setting in and he was assisting it with an overdose of the thin wine. Clement summoned the waiter for another bottle.
‘We haven’t any more,’ said the waiter.
‘What do you mean, you haven’t any more?’
‘What I say. That was our last bottle.’ The waiter spoke as from a deep sense of injury, and sucked his mouth in, as though he would say much more, were he so minded, and were it not so chilly.
‘Bring us something like it, then.’
‘Well done, Clem, but don’t over-tax the local resources,’ Joseph said, nodding across the table. ‘Remember, this country lapsed into barbarism when the Romans left and has yet to recover.’
‘Of course, you’re a socialist, aren’t you?’ said Claude, scowling. A cheer came from someone at the other end of the table.
Silence descended. In due course, the beef was got through, and they were served something called ‘gateau’. This was the first time they had warm plates. The gateau was white in some parts and brownish in others, rather like decomposing flesh, with a grey imitation marble topping which broke into gravestone-shaped segments when tackled, thus preparing the diners for the ceremony which was to follow after the meal.
‘Nice wine,’ said Hugh. ‘Some brandy would help fend off the cold.’
‘Brandy at the bar,’ said the waiter, over the guests’ heads, rattling the dirty plates as he started to clear away.
The Nettlesham cemetery, like the King’s Arms dining room, held little comfort for the living. Nor did it reflect much credit on the dead, who might be reckoned indifferent to ecological niceties. Unlike the great mortuary enclosures of France and Italy, little grandeur flourished here, and no sense of occasion. The monuments raised were mainly skimpy and conventional, pocket having triumphed over piety in the minds of the recently bereaved. Neither flowers nor stones were deployed with imagination. Instead, the defunct had been interred within little oblong prisons like disused men’s toilets, outlined by curbs the colour of frozen pig’s liver. The memorial stones carried only names and dates – rather less information than an identity card. It was hard, looking about Nettlesham’s windy cemetery, to imagine that anyone buried there had been much loved, or that anyone attending their burial had been much moved. The more recent the stone, the more this seemed to be the case.
Madge Winter’s coffin went down into the gravelly ground close to where her husband lay. Clement stood clutching Sheila’s hand. She gave a great sob.
He also felt close to tears which the bitter Nettlesham wind encouraged. His parents’ history was now closed. His father had decided to stay in Cornwall when war broke out, for safety’s sake, fearing that in Suffolk they would all be bombed. Such property as he held in Lowestoft had to be sold for a song. Such money as he had had been invested in a small newsagent’s and tobacconist’s business in Bude. The family lived in cramped conditions over the shop, putting up the blackouts every night.
Ernest Winter worked and scrimped throughout the war, growing more taciturn as time went by. The lady now being lowered into the gravel, however, had flourished. In the shop she was always able to find someone to talk to. She began to organize things about the town. She became, in a small, parsimonious way suited to the times, a social success. Clement remembered her from that period, when he was still in short trousers, as delightful company, full of jokes and stories. His mother had also been a good cook. The war served as a challenge to her culinary expertise. By using the barter power of the shop’s stock, some of which was on ration, she could procure for her family prime hams, salmon, turkey at Christmas, and a regular stream of eggs. Barter was a joke to her. Everything that happened in Bude could be turned into a joke in Madge Winter’s reckoning. This was her manic phase. After the war, she ran out of steam.
The shop flourished in a meagre way throughout most of the fifties. Ernest Winter bought a small bungalow nearby, in which the family could live more comfortably. Anchored in the thirties as it was, the shop and its trade did not survive the sixties. Ernest sold up and retired. His wife, missing the company, got a job in the large newsagent’s shop, one of the chain which had put them out of business. Ernest was furious. The couple lived for some years on bad terms. By that time, Clement was doing psychiatric work in London, and rarely made the journey down to Cornwall to see his parents. His father died in 1969 – ‘in a bit of a huff’, Joseph had said. His widow again managed a new lease of life, and went to live in a flat near her sisters, where she took harmlessly to drink. Latterly she had shown little interest in her sons, though her old affectionate link with Ellen was maintained.
The sisters, Mary and Doris, wept in chorus as the coffin went into the hole, perhaps foreseeing that their turn was next. Ellen also cried for her mother – the person in the world who had doted on her most – but in silence, as Jean held her hand.
The parson went through the traditional service, a cleverly compiled series of condolences and veiled threats. Afterwards, Hugh Overton took a photograph of them all, just before they began to straggle towards the distant yews and lych-gate which marked the cemetery entrance.
Joseph caught up with Clement and Sheila, thrusting his hands deep in his pockets for warmth.
‘Well, that’s seen both of them buried,’ he said. ‘Whatever the rights or the wrongs of the case, they’re gone, and now it’s our generation in the firing line.’
‘Go easy on the relish,’ said Clement, grumpily. ‘Let’s at least get out of the cemetery before you start sneering.’
‘Don’t go pious on me, please.’ After a moment, Joseph said, ‘You notice anyone missing in the roster of the dead, Clem? Perhaps you have no cause to recollect, as I certainly have, that our dear deceased parents spawned four children, not three. There was also the little steel-engraving angel, their first child, who died after six months, remember? Aren’t you a mite astonished to find no stone raised to her, considering the misery her death caused mother at the time?’
Clement looked curiously at his brother, whose tone contained both jocularity and bitterness. The chilly breeze had blown Joseph’s hair across his eyes, giving him a desperate look.
‘I never thought about it.’ Not for the first time, his brother’s intensity made him uneasy.
‘Grandfather and grandmother are buried here. Mother and father are buried here. This is some far corner of a foreign Nettlesham that is forever Winter. Where, then, is the little steel-engraving angel buried?’
‘Why do you call her that?’ Sheila asked.
‘Old associations. She’s the prime cause of this pilgrim’s regress. And because as far as I know the little paragon never had a name. Or mother kept it secret.’
They dawdled while this conversation was taking place, so that Ellen, dry-eyed now, and Jean, could catch up with them.
‘There’s a bird singing,’ Jean said. ‘Isn’t that in rather bad taste?’
Joseph turned and took Ellen’s arm.
‘That little dead sister which had such an effect on our lives when we arrived reluctantly on the scene – what was her name?’
Ellen looked puzzled. ‘Oh, I don’t know, Joe. Does it matter after all this time? I know you’ve always had this kind of grudge against Mum and Dad, but they did the best for us they could, by and large. It’s an awful subject. I think so. Always blame the mothers … Mothers are only human like the rest. I keep telling Jean. Mothers have their troubles too. You ask too much. We all meet with disappointments. Here we stand … If Mother’s poor dead baby had a name, she never spoke it to us. Perhaps she never spoke it to Dad, either. Perhaps if she spoke it at all she’d have burst into tears.’
She clutched her coat to her thin frame and looked reprovingly at Joseph.
‘Oh, Christ,’ Jean said, and sighed.
Joseph brushed his hair back from his eyes and looked at the distant memorial church.
‘You’ve given in, Ellie. I haven’t. I have a surprise for you. In fact, I know the answer to the questions I’ve just been asking. I’ve almost laid the ghost of that little steel-engraving fiend. Just this morning I did it, before lunch …’ He struck his chest with an open hand. ‘“Art thou weary, Art thou languid, Art thou sore oppressed? Come to Me, said One, and, coming, be at rest …” That doesn’t mean what you may think,’ he said, with a sly look at Jean, standing next to him. ‘I’ve been busy laying demons to rest which have been torturing me for half a century and more. I’ll tell you all about it if we can go round to your hotel, Clem and Sheila, and get a civilized drink. Failing that, we could have an uncivilized one at my van, where I have a bottle of whisky stashed. How about it?’
They stood in a rather English way, indecisively on the gravel, discussing what the chances were that the Gryphon would provide drink at three in the afternoon. They said goodbye to Mary Overton and Doris and Claude Vernon and their relations in a way indicating warmth of heart without enthusiastic liking.
‘We want to get away from Nettlesham just as soon as we can,’ said Doris, as if condemning those who stood chatting at the entrances of graveyards. ‘This is a chilly part of the world.’ She gave them a farewell wave. Hugh straggled after her, still trying to deal with his ill-fitting coat.
‘See you next funeral,’ he said, as he passed Clement.
‘Well, what are we going to do?’ asked Jean, with a touch of impatience. ‘I support Uncle Joseph. I vote we go to the Gryphon and see how we get on. The least they can do is give us a cup of tea.’
Agreeing that funerals made them thirsty, they moved on, and drove in their three vehicles to the hotel.
There, because the manager was agreeable and Sheila was carrying the Good Hotel Guide, they were served a round of drinks in a snug back parlour, the manager himself presiding.
He was a small rotund man, built round a tomato nose cleverly underlined by an upwardly mobile moustache. His blue eyes, also round, peered out on his little world with nervous intensity. He had evidently decided that, despite his build, he was the stuff the military are made of, since he sported commando-style boots, cavalry twill trousers, and a club tie on a white shirt under what appeared to be an old deflated life-jacket. He spoke a strangulated English pepped up with the odd French word, to indicate the tone of his establishment.
‘I’m without auxiliary assistance this p.m., malheureusement, life being what it is. But don’t let the thought decommode you. Think of me as entirely à votre service, n’est-ce pas? Enjoy yourselves, drink away.’ Snatching a covert glance at Sheila’s Good Hotel Guide, he addressed her more particularly. ‘Your wish is my command. Give me a bell and I shall appear toute suite from the nether regions.’
He disappeared. They heard him scuffling behind a curtain. Next moment, muzak filled the room.
They looked at each other round the table, said ‘Cheers’, and drank.
‘I didn’t think Claude looked at all well,’ said Ellen, stealing a glance at her watch. ‘We mustn’t be long before we start back, Jean. I’m worried about the dog. He hardly said a word over dinner.’
‘Is it true he once ran off with an Argentinian woman?’ Jean asked. The company understood that Claude Vernon was under discussion, rather than Ellen’s dog.
‘Brazilian, and only as far as the Channel Islands,’ Sheila said, and all but Ellen laughed.
‘Well, Joe, are you going to tell us about this ghost you’ve laid?’ Sheila enquired, putting her head on one side and managing to frown and smile at him at the same time. ‘I’d like to hear a good story.’
‘Yes, what’s the mystery, uncle?’ asked Jean. ‘What have you been up to?’
Joseph hung over his drink. He shook his head slowly. ‘This won’t mean as much to Clem and Sheila, or you, Jean, my girl, as it will to Ellie and me. Every family has layers of history – little dark corners where others can’t penetrate. I’ve had to hug some bits of my early life to me in secret for years, and I’m glad enough to get rid of them. You might think they’d be buried, but no, they go on and on. Every so often, one surfaces, as today.’
He looked rather challengingly at them. The only one to speak was Jean, who showed lively interest.
‘I’m longing to hear what you’re going to tell us. Surely it’s true that every time someone dies some awful secrets spring out? I’d hate to think I died with a totally unblemished record, as if I’d been a nun. Wasn’t granny married, or something dramatic like that?’
Joseph turned smiling to her. ‘Madge got married right enough, and to Ernest, your grandfather. They were spliced, as the expression used to have it, just after the end of World War I. Nine months later, they had a baby – a girl.
‘It still pains me to talk about that child. It received the affection I never got, like a sponge that sucked up all the nourishment available before I appeared on the scene.’
Ellen said, ‘Joe, I wish you wouldn’t talk in this way.’ She tapped the table, as if in a feeble attempt to bring her brother to order. ‘I know you suffered a hurt, but – well, it doesn’t do any good to go on like this.’
‘Oh yes, it does. It’s a relief just to talk about it. For too many years I kept silent. I never said anything to you when we were kids, close though we were. I was too ashamed. Why did I suffer guilt for their negligence?’
As he was taking a drink, Jean patted his hand.
‘What about this child, then?’
Joseph turned back to his sister. ‘You remember how that child was held up to us as a paragon, one that could never be excelled? How good it was, how it never cried? Remember all that crap?’
‘No, I can’t say I do exactly.’
‘I had four years more of it than you did … Anyhow, Ellie, you surely remember that we lived with the legend of the good darling daughter who died tragically at the age of six months?’
‘Oh, I remember that. Of course mother was sad about it.’
‘Six months, right? How the creature died we were never told – how she went to join the angels, in mother’s immortal phrase. Somehow, I used to imagine her carried off by autumn winds, turning blue and blowing away …’
Sheila said, as Joseph paused, ‘What year did this unhappy child die? You have no need to grieve about it any longer, surely, Joseph? Can’t you put it behind you?’
‘I hate the child, Sheila. I always did. It stole my happiness. My parents didn’t want me, because they yearned for it.’ He covered his face briefly, and then said with forced cheer, ‘Can’t we get monsieur to drag up some more drink? A bottle. Une bouteille, nicht war? You see – I don’t know how I can explain this. Well, old Westlake, that great neglected bard of Nettlesham, had the right idea. His mother died young – i.e., she forsook him, just as mine did. William went mad in the end, but not before knocking out the immortal couplet
Grief unlike Joy ignores the tick of clock
’Til later generations feel its shock.
‘If this cherished little wretch lived for six months, then it must have been christened and given a burial in Nettlesham churchyard. Presumably a stone was raised to it by its inconsolable parents. When I turned up here early this morning, I had a snoop round the churchyard. What we military types term a recce … No sign of any stone. Not a marble angel in sight. Ah, monsieur, another round, and turn off the muzak, if you please.’
The manager of the Gryphon did a slow scuttle to the table and bobbed his head. ‘Enchanté, of course. Just as you wish. And may I say that cakes and tea will be available from my good wife within the next few minutes, for those desirous …’
‘That is odd,’ agreed Clement, diving back into the conversation as soon as the manager had rolled away. ‘The child must have had a stone. Would it – she – have been buried anywhere else?’
‘Where else?’ asked Joseph.
‘Oh, she would have been buried here,’ Ellen said. ‘Where our parents worshipped. They were devout churchgoers at the time, as most of the middle classes were until the war.’
They looked at Joseph.
‘Yes, I solved the mystery,’ he said. He lit a cigarette and sat back, tilting his chair back with him. ‘Since I drew blank at the churchyard, I went to the Town Hall and asked to check in the parish records. I enlisted the aid of a helpful lady clerk who dusted off the register of burials for the year 1920. We know our little angel was born in March of that year, so it should have died six months later, in September. But no entry in the records. Not a sausage. I began to wonder if the little horror had existed at all, if she wasn’t just some ghastly hoax that the parents had decided to play on me, to rob me of the dubious honour of being their first-born.
‘The clerk lady was resourceful. She thought to look in an old ledger they had preserved in which were logged payments to gravediggers. The Burial Fees book. This will all sound like Victorian England to you, Jean. To be honest, it does to me too. The book was quite a Victorian relic. Entries in ink, in copperplate … Well, it was sixty-seven years ago. Another age.’ He sighed, then turned the sigh into a laugh.
‘So what did it say in the book?’ Jean asked.
‘I found it: “Stillborn female child of Mrs Madge Winter, 6 The Square, Nettlesham. Entry No. 5115. Fees taken: Board Fee, 1 shilling, Grave Digger, 1 shilling.’”
For a moment they were silent, and then all started talking at once. ‘Stillborn!’ exclaimed Ellen. At which point, the manager rolled back with the tray of drinks and an enquiry as to whether they required la musique to be switched on again.
‘Stillborn,’ repeated Joseph, when he had left them. ‘And the date of the entry – 20th March 1920. And attached to the entry was a certificate signed by a doctor to show that the delivery of the child had taken place on 18th March, 1920, at 6 The Square …’
‘So it didn’t live six months,’ Sheila said.
‘Mother always claimed it lived for six months,’ said Ellen. ‘I remember she had preserved a little pink nightdress it was supposed to have worn. You’re sure you’ve got this right, Joseph?’
‘At that time, it appears that stillborn infants were buried without a funeral. Because they had not been christened. Great, eh? They could be buried in the cemetery, but only in unconsecrated ground.’ He shook his head in disbelief at some profound wickedness. ‘Do you wonder she haunts me? Unconsecrated ground! And the graves were unmarked. I suppose they just shovelled the little corpse in under the chestnut trees … In a box, I suppose …’
‘Oh, uncle, I’m so sorry …’
‘No, Jean, I feel all the better for knowing. To know is like laying a ghost.’
Ellen said, ‘So they lied to us about the child …’
‘They? Father never lied. Father never said anything at all about the child. It didn’t exist as far as he was concerned. It was mother who kept on about her.’
‘But why lie?’
‘It doesn’t require much psychological penetration to see why she lied. What do you think, Clement? You were too young. By the time you were born, long after Ellie had come along to console everyone, that storm was all over.’
‘I wouldn’t call it a lie,’ Clement said thoughtfully, looking at Sheila. ‘I’d say it was a fantasy. A protective fantasy. Mother was editing her past in order to make it bearable.’
He caught something in Sheila’s expression, and stopped speaking. They looked into each other’s eyes. Sheila said, ‘Yes. Not a lie. A kindness. Her child was born dead, but in retrospect she could give it six months of life and a Christian burial. That would mean that at least she had held it alive and kicking in her arms, and sucking milk …’
Joseph rose from the table. He went to the window and stood with his back to it, drawing on his cigarette. ‘Sorry, I realize this is a tender subject for you, Sheila. I’d forgotten for a moment how you lost Juliet. But I’d say you’ve hit the nail on the head. That six months we always heard about, in which little Blank was such a paragon, was an invention, a protective device. Pathetic, really, wouldn’t you say?’ He looked round challengingly.
‘Touching would be my word,’ Sheila said. ‘Tragic.’
‘Oh, well, you’re a popular novelist. So that was my discovery today. I discovered that my little steel-engraving angel was truly dead and gone. The knowledge slightly abates some of the torture they put me through …’
‘Joe, you are a bit unfair to them,’ Ellen said. ‘They weren’t that bad, were they, Clem?’
‘Oh, to you they were great,’ Joseph said. ‘You were the little spoilt apple of mother’s eye. Couldn’t do a thing wrong, got everything you wanted—’
‘You’re jealous! You’re still jealous!’
‘Not a bit. Ellie, honestly, I pity you. It’s almost worse to be spoilt than neglected. Look how you grew up. Nothing ever satisfied you. Then you married Alwyn, who treated you as if you were his baby rather than his wife. And poor Jean here – haven’t you spoilt her rotten, so that her marriage collapsed after a couple of years? Jean, that bloke of yours was okay. You ought to go back to him and leave your mother to sort out her own problems.’
‘You bastard!’ Jean exclaimed. ‘It’s none of your bloody business why I ditched Bob. He was no good, wasn’t he?’
‘I daresay if you told him he was no good often enough, he came to believe it.’
Ellen stood up, steadying herself with one hand on the table. ‘If that’s really the time, then Jean and I must be on our way. Joe, I’m sorry you see fit to spoil a pleasant occasion …’
He laughed. ‘Mother’s funeral – a pleasant occasion! You said it, I didn’t. Sorry, Ellie, you know me, can’t keep my mouth shut.’
‘You should learn to. Silence is golden, especially in families. How else can they stick together? I’ve certainly had my troubles and I’ve learned not to complain.’
‘You sound like the Mater,’ he said coldly.
Ellen and Jean went round the table, kissing Clement and Sheila. She then turned towards Joseph, hesitated, and held out her hand. ‘I don’t want to quarrel, Joe. It’s been a trying day for all of us.’
He took her hand. ‘I’ll give you a ring some time. You know you were always the favourite of my two sisters …’
‘Come on, Mum,’ Jean said, and led the way past the manager, who bobbed out with a quick au revoir, into the street.
Clement and Sheila sat where they were, clutching their glasses and looking downcast.
‘That’s what happens when you seek wisdom and completeness,’ Joseph said, sighing heavily.
He went and sat down next to his brother, putting a hand on Clement’s shoulder. ‘Shall we get this joker to bring us another round?’