June 1926, St Mark’s Church, Sussex
One mustn’t show the burden, of course. One must keep a stiff upper lip, what? Shoulder your load, button your lip, show the fillies how it’s done, what? Fucking stupid farce. Imagine it the other way round – Jonathan carrying his coffin. There’d be the issue of the arm. He’d only be able to carry on the one side. Would he bring it up with the chaplain first? ‘Apologies, Father, but I need to go on the right side.’ An awkward glancing around, a defiant crunch of the brow – don’t pity me.
Bart fucking well hated funerals. He could remember Tabitha’s – though he seldom let himself. The day had passed like radio static. He’d been in shock and his mind had played awful tricks on him – he’d known she was dead but he kept wondering where his little sister had got to. Like his mind was split in two. Mostly he remembered the weeks afterwards – the household sinking into an awful pit, a sort of sucking pit, where nothing grew properly any more, not even the potted plants, and the air seemed to taste of salt and wood dust. The servants ghosted around with puckered little mouths and darting eyes, his mother and father visibly aged and shrank, their hands moving cutlery around with a sort of desperate precision as they sat for their meals, their nightclothes seeming like shrouds as they stood together in dim hallways at unusual times of the night.
St Mark’s had granted the Wyn Thomas family a special dispensation, allowing Jonathan to be buried in consecrated ground. Because it was the war that’d killed him really. That’s what the pastor said. What he didn’t mention was Monty’s generous contributions to the church. Bart knew of two boys who’d killed themselves after the war, and both were buried in the shadow-tangled wasteland at the rectum end of the graveyard. Both were poor.
The day was bright and blue-skied, the grass dewy. Slippery. He concentrated on his feet as he walked, he concentrated on his burden. Bettina was walking behind with her mother and father. She had a lock of Jonathan’s hair in her fist. She hadn’t let go of it all morning. Magpies hopped around on the grass. Two for joy. Bart wondered what it was about the war that made men want to die afterwards. The killing of other men? That would do it, wouldn’t it? The shattered nerves? Maybe they’d raped or been raped? Étienne had friends, queer friends, who’d fought in the war. One had seen his lover’s face blown off by a grenade. Bart imagined cowering in a trench, cold and shivering with swollen feet and lice in his hair. Étienne beside him, covered in soot and mud and unshaven, but smiling with dimples, a halo of sunlight surrounding his head – no, that was hammy; take away the halo. He stands up to go and ask another fellow for a match and suddenly there’s a whistling overhead and half of Étienne’s face explodes. Brains splashing, blood ribboning, chunks of skull spitting out like shrapnel. His lover flopping to the floor by his feet with only half a head. One dimple.
You have this. I don’t think I require any more.
He didn’t think he required any more? Of course he didn’t – he was about to shoot his fucking brains out!
The selfish cunt. The selfish, serene-seeming, deceptive cunt. Why that night, at her party? Her birthday party? The selfish birthday-ruining cunt. She’d never be able to celebrate her birthday ever again. He was a grief-ruiner too, leaving his family to deal with the shameful stink of suicide.
Imagine he just stepped away from the coffin now, side-stepped away, allowing his corner to tip, to fall to the ground, spilling Jonathan’s body onto the grass, everyone screaming. Imagine that.
Another two magpies. Joy again.
The first funeral she’d ever attended was her grandmother’s, though she couldn’t remember it. Rather, she remembered the bit before the funeral, the waiting bit – the men sitting in the drawing room with wide-open legs, hung-down heads and glasses of amber-coloured booze clenched between both hands, a grim-grey silence hanging over everything like a thickly cobwebbed chandelier. She’d never seen men sit like that before, not gentlemen at any rate. Now, whenever Bettina thought of funerals, her mind would conjure up an image of grey men sitting with extra-long, wide-open spiderlegs, like an illustration from a macabre children’s book. It was funny, the way things came together in the mind.
They were at the reception supper now, trying to eat. Venetia smoked openly, inviting ambiguous glances. Lucille, in solidarity perhaps, took out her own cigarettes, and the pair of them puffed away in unison, their eyes extra-wrinkled and glassy. One surviving child left each. Snap. Venetia sat straight-backed and stiff-jawed, staring vapidly into the middle-distance for the most part (she’d been given sedatives). Monty pushed away his soup early on in the meal and stood up, apologising in a perplexed tone, before going off to the garden to stand, hands in pockets, under the giant oak – which had once held a swing, a child’s swing, that he’d pushed, higher, higher, higher, a pendulous blur of red hair, higher, higher.
Bettina had always known who his favourite was.
But there you go.
Bart, seated next to her, looked tired and angry. He was refusing alcohol and drank bitter lemon with his meal. Why was he even so cut up? He’d only ever made fun of Jonathan behind his back, pulling his arm through his sleeve to let it hang limply and affecting a jittery, high-chinned air, sometimes to the point of frothing at the mouth and invariably ending with a long, drawn-out fart. Right now, he had his elbows on the table, all decorum vanished, and was pulling his cheeks down with his hands, exhausted. She could see the slimy pink flesh beneath his eyeballs.
‘Do you know what my last words to him were?’ she said, pushing her unfinished food away.
He shook his head.
‘I said, “Blow your nose, would you?” Because he kept sniffing. And that’s … that’s …’ No. She wouldn’t cry. Not in front of everyone.
She felt his hand find hers under the table. ‘We have each other,’ he said, in a quiet voice. ‘You have me and I have you. We need to remember that, because it’s thinking that you’ve got no one that leads to – you know. We have each other.’
She nodded, going in her pocket for her hanky. ‘Now I’m the one sniffing!’
‘Look,’ he said, pointing out of the conservatory window. Monty was still out in the garden, standing under the tree, with this look on his face like he’d tasted something horrible, and Venetia had joined him. He’d taken his dress jacket off and loosened his tie, something he never did in public. The sun started setting behind them – a small blood orange, squeezing its juice all over the clouds. The ends of Monty’s curly hair acquired a fluorescent glow and their shadows grew out elongated and skinny from their feet. Venetia said something and he did a little nod, that horrible taste still pinching his mouth. He allowed her to fix his tie. She pressed a hand to his cheek and held it there and he closed his eyes, and they stood like that for at least two minutes, her velvet-gloved hand pressed to his face, neither of them moving, the sun sinking behind the grasping black hands of distant trees.
‘So when are you intending to start a family?’
Bettina rolled her eyes. ‘Mother, now is not the time.’
‘Now is exactly the time, darling,’ said Venetia. She held a glass of white wine – her third in the space of an hour. A little colour had returned to her cheeks. ‘You are twenty-three for God’s sake.’
‘I meant now is not the time to talk of this.’
Venetia puffed out air and sloshed her wine around in the glass. ‘I repeat – now is exactly the time. Our family is diminishing, dear. Don’t you want children?’
‘Of course.’
‘Well? Isn’t Bart up to the task?’
‘Mother!’
‘Don’t “Mother” me. It’s at times like these that we must learn to open our mouths and say what we mean. Silence is lethal. I’ve learned that much.’ She gripped Bettina’s wrist. ‘You are my last remaining child, darling. I want grandchildren.’ She stared glassy-eyed at Bettina, blinking once like the shutter of a camera. ‘Does that make me selfish? Well, of course it does. And I don’t care.’ Her chin twisted and wrinkled into a monkey-nut shell and her hand fluttered at her face. She glugged from her glass and lit a fresh cigarette. ‘Does he pull out, darling? Is that it? Like the Catholics? Before he—’
‘No!’
‘Then maybe you’re not doing it enough.’
‘I am!’ Tuna and her sisters glanced over nosily.
‘The fact of the matter is,’ said Bettina, in a low, measured voice, ‘I haven’t yet wanted to catch. I’ve not felt ready.’
‘You modern girls. Too much drinking, too much dancing.’ She waved a hand. ‘Oh, I’m happy that you’re having fun, darling. I wish I’d had the chance to have fun at your age. But you don’t want to wait too long. Best have them young, when you’ve more bang in your cannon.’
‘Do you think Jonathan would’ve had children? If he’d never …’
‘Oh, I’m certain he would have. Eventually. He had prospects, you know.’
‘Did he? He never told me that. He carried on like he was a social pariah. An undesirable.’
Venetia shook her head. ‘He wasn’t right in the head, darling. His lens was smudged. Bunty’s daughter was after him, you know.’
‘Catherine Kingsley? Really?’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘But she’s absolutely gorgeous! She’s – all the men say so at any rate.’
‘Well, why not?’ said Venetia. ‘Jonathan was a handsome young man.’ She frowned. ‘This business of speaking of him in the past tense, it feels so unnatural! Was. Was. Bloody hell.’ She covered her eyes with one hand and her shoulders started shuddering. The wine glass dropped from her fingers, soaking the carpet but not breaking. Bettina wrapped an arm around her shoulders. Lucille came over and took the seat on her other side, draping her arm around the opposite shoulder so that hers and Bettina’s crossed over like the carved links of a Celtic spoon.
She found Bart sitting alone in the library. It was lit by electric lamps under green glass shades, although her father, stubborn as always, still used his candles when reading at his desk. The walnut floor was freshly waxed. Bettina abhorred the smell of floor wax – it reminded her of church. Bart was sitting with a slumped back but very straight, pressed-together legs, his bitter lemon resting on his knee. What was it about grief that made men want to sit differently?
She lit two cigarettes, passing one to him. ‘Jonathan liked to come in here,’ she said. ‘He had a special fondness for the Brontë sisters.’
‘I don’t want to talk about Jonathan any more.’
‘You’re angry with him.’
‘Aren’t you?’
‘No. I just feel very, very sad. Empty.’
Bart leaned back, relaxing his legs. ‘I’m just far more comfortable with anger.’
‘Hmm. You remember learning about humourism? The four humours?’
Bart nodded. ‘You’re going to say that I would be diagnosed as being a choleric and you’d be a melancholic.’
‘That is what I was going to say, actually.’
‘It’s all horseshit.’
‘Of course it is.’ She plucked a slice of lemon from Bart’s glass and chewed it. Grimaced. Placed the rind on the armrest. ‘If this was a party at our house, someone would be lying under that table over there with their knickers around their ankles.’
‘This isn’t a party.’
‘I know. I’m just saying.’
His cigarette trembled between his fingers. ‘I don’t want any more of those parties.’
‘Me neither.’ She kissed his forehead, her thumb automatically swiping away the lipstick mark. His eyes were spilling tears, turning his grey-green irises to quivering puddles. Bart had always been fairly comfortable crying in front of her. It was at odds with his character.
‘I was just starting to get fond of the bastard,’ he said.
‘You liked to play cards with him,’ she said. ‘I always wondered what your conversations were like.’
‘Pretty one-sided for the most part.’
‘I can imagine.’ She lit another two cigarettes. ‘Bart? Can I tell you something?’
‘Of course.’ He wiped his eyes, blinking, and pulled a hanky from his pocket to blow his nose.
‘I think I want children.’
He stared at her, the hanky over his nose.
‘Bart? What do you think?’
He balled up the hanky and looked at it with a curious frown. ‘I’ve been sitting here this whole time thinking the exact same thing. Isn’t that the—’
‘Really?’
‘Really. Well, that and unsolicited flashing images of your brother’s corpse. Death and life, death and life, blah blah.’
‘It is rather predictable, isn’t it?’
He shrugged. ‘It’s not always a bad thing to do predictable things. Nothing makes death easier to bear than new life. It’s why everyone started fucking like rabbits after the war.’
‘I don’t know how we’ll carry it off though,’ she said. ‘Physically, I mean.’
‘That’s partly what I was thinking about actually, just before you came in.’ He started picking the skin off his lower lip. ‘Suppose we tried it in the dark? The pitch dark? Minimal contact? Imagine having to face each other when the lights come on after. Can you imagine?’
‘Maybe it would be funny,’ she said. ‘Maybe we could make it funny.’
He grinned. ‘I could dress like a clown.’
‘I could honk your nose.’ She reached out and squeezed an imaginary nose. ‘Barp.’ And they fell to sudden laughter – it was loud and ferocious and it filled the huge room with echoes. They leaned into each other, gasping. ‘I could – I could put clown’s noses on my – ha! I don’t want to say it – oh sod it: nipples! I’d have clown’s noses on my nipples and you’d …’ She whipped her head back, shrieking, all her teeth showing. ‘You’d – ha! Oh dear, oh dear. You’d …’ She reached out again and enacted the imaginary squeezing with both hands. ‘Beep beep.’
‘I’m glad someone’s having a jolly time.’ Lucille. In the doorway. With a cigarette and a tumbler of booze. ‘I hope you don’t behave like this at my funeral.’ She tossed back her drink and eyed them with a look that Bettina could only describe as rancid.
‘Sorry,’ muttered Bart, fanning his face with his hanky. ‘We didn’t mean any disrespect.’
Lucille nodded. ‘Of course you didn’t. Of course you didn’t.’ Her words slurred. She came into the room, almost stumbling on the edge of the rug. She looked down at the floor, her legs firmly planted as if she were in a boat, riding a storm, and waved a finger at the slippery rug. ‘Stay,’ she said to it.
‘Oh, Christ,’ whispered Bart.
‘Go and help her,’ whispered Bettina.
He shook his head. ‘She won’t let me.’
‘What are you two collaborating about?’ Clabuhratin. Lucille lurched over to the sofa and dumped herself between Bart and Bettina, her wide behind pushing the two apart. ‘Thick as thieves, you two. Always were. Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Such good friends, such good friends.’ She swung her head in Bettina’s direction. ‘When are you going to give my son a child?’
Bettina glanced at Bart. He shook his head: not yet.
Lucille took a long drag of her cigarette, her eyes gunky crescents; mascara and eyeshadow had gathered in the corners, liquid black seeping into the tributary network of wrinkles. Her usually light-green irises were dull as hay. ‘Are you withholding, dear?’ she said, her head nodding. ‘Would you like me to order you some whores? They could stand at the end of your bed and wiggle their udders to get you in the mood, then maybe you’ll open your legs for my son.’
Bettina’s mouth snapped open.
‘Mother!’ said Bart. ‘You shut your mouth!’
That awful head swung around in the opposite direction – it was like some mossy gorgon-like figurehead, lurching as the ship got battered by a sea storm. ‘No! You shut your mouth!’ She hit Bart around the head, bracelets jangling, sparks flying out of her cigarette. ‘How dare you tell me to – I’m your mother!’ Her head flopped back to Bettina. ‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Bunch of women, bunch of whores, pulling down their knickers for you. I know girls like you – I’m not stupid, I’ve heard stories about you. I know girls like you.’ She was jabbing her cigarette at Bettina’s face, the lit end coming close enough to warm her skin. ‘Tell you what, pudding’ – and here she affected a simpering, kindly tone – ‘I’ll get that she-man who runs the public house in Hove; I’ll go and fetch her and maybe she can get you warmed up for my Barty. Great big bull-dagger with man’s muscles and a clit like a blessed bell! You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’
She glared at Bettina, her head dipping and rising – a gentle tide now for the gorgon mast. Bettina’s hand was balled up into a pearl-knuckled fist. She held Lucille’s gaze and said, arctic-cool, ‘I think I would like that, Lucille. Very much. What a kind mother-in-law you are, to go to such lengths for me.’
Lucille’s frown twitched as she processed this. Bettina focused on the sloppy black crud in the corner of her mother-in-law’s left eye. Bart was perched on the edge of the sofa, his hand clamped to his mouth, eyes screwed shut. And then Lucille’s face collapsed and a great huff came out of her chest and she was crying, really crying. Bart plucked the cigarette out of her hand, tossed it in the ashtray and wrapped his arms around her, saying, ‘There, there,’ and giving Bettina traumatised glances from over her jittering head.
She pulled a hanky out from between her cleavage and blew her nose. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry.’ Sniffing, she turned to Bettina and grasped her wrist. ‘I do like you, Bettina. I haven’t always shown it, but I’ve always liked you, in my way. And there’s nothing wrong with it!’ She smiled in a way that was both sweet and gruesome and shook Bettina’s wrist, her jewellery tinkling like a bell in a shop doorway. ‘Nothing wrong with it.’ She grabbed Bart’s wrist too and held them both, like Jesus reassuring his apostles. ‘Nothing wrong with it,’ she said again, to Bart this time, still smiling that crooked, bittersweet smile. ‘You think I haven’t lived?’ She looked back and forth between the two of them. ‘You think I haven’t tried it?’
‘Dear God,’ said Bart, under his breath.
‘I just want you to be happy,’ continued Lucille. ‘And I want you to have babies, lots of babies. There are methods, dear. I know. There are ways around it. The man puts his spendings into a receptacle and the lady inserts it with a syringe. Even the royals have done it this way. Even the royals.’ She burped quietly. ‘Pardon me. And if it’s good enough for the royals … you see?’ She looked at Bettina with gushing, motherly love and stroked her cheek. ‘I’m so sorry for my evil words.’ There was a smear of mucus on her cheek. ‘Do you forgive me?’
Her true meaning, of course, being, ‘Will you tell your mother?’ And Bettina would not. She forced a smile and patted the woman on the back. ‘Perhaps you ought to lie down?’
Lucille nodded gratefully. Bettina pulled her shoes off (a hole in the foot of her stocking, a white toe poking out like a mushroom) and Bart fetched Monty’s smoking jacket from the rack on the wall, draping it over her. ‘Poor, poor Jonathan,’ said Lucille, closing her eyes. ‘Poor, sweet, sensitive boy.’
‘A sick bowl, perhaps?’ Bettina whispered to Bart.
Bart shook his head. ‘She’ll just pass out. I doubt she’ll remember any of this.’
‘I wish I didn’t have to.’
Bart shook his head, blowing out air from his cheeks.
Lucille curled her knees tighter to her chest and wriggled her head into the armrest. Eyes still closed, she raised a finger in the air. ‘Even the royals … I mean, it’s just a means to an end, it doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter, there’s nothing wrong with it, my lovely boy.’ Her mouth sagged open and almost immediately her breathing slowed and deepened.
Bettina looked at Bart. ‘Well.’
He shook his head slowly, darkly. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘I’ll laugh about it tomorrow. I almost want to laugh about it now. Just a bit shocked still.’
‘She was horrible to you. I’m so, so sorry, Betts.’
She waved her hand. ‘I can take it. I suppose. Anyway, she’s the one who’s come off the worst. I wonder who she tried it with? Not my mother, I hope.’
Bart grabbed his hair with both hands. ‘Nooo. Please don’t ever mention that again. Oh my God. I’m fucking mortified. I need a drink.’ He held out his hand and she took it. ‘You had her though. You shut her up. What a good sport you were!’ He squeezed her hand. ‘You absolutely had her.’