The Jewish dead must be buried within twenty-four hours. Harry has driven to the town hall to get the death certificate, muscling in at the head of the queue – ‘Got to have it now, please’ – because there’s no three-week wait in the stone-cold morgue for the Jews, no visit to the undertaker to choose the coffin from a catalogue of garish wooden overcoats, pricing up brass handles. No invitations, no printed order of service, no consultations about hymns and pieces of music. No open casket and viewing of the body dressed up in her Sunday best to go into the afterlife, as if God is inspecting the new arrivals like wedding guests conforming to the RSVP dress code.
The women of the chevra kadisha are washing the body, wrapping her in a linen shroud, placing it in the simplest pine container with rope handles. Everyone knows Mina Phillips, or knows of her, she’s the last of the last. How come she has lived so long is anyone’s guess, but she has resisted Death’s famous entrance until everything finally has given out. Afterwards the women, Sheila, Lorraine, Jackie, drink coffee and gossip about the funeral. The famous granddaughter, they hear, is already on the train up from London.
Shelley is in fact running late. Paula rang her at eight in the morning with the news, like a starting pistol going off for the day ahead, and she has an overnight bag packed, ready for the Euston dash. Her daughter Zoë is coming with her; being a child of the metropolitan elite she’s interested in the whole scene up in Liverpool, which is somehow the opposite of her do-gooding parents with their tedious principles. Full of relatives who loudly proclaim that Margaret Thatcher saved the country and the Arabs have it in for the Jews and always will.
But the train to Liverpool is held up outside Crewe for an hour and seventeen minutes by an injured swan on the line. The RSPCA has been called to remove it and take it to a place of medical sanctuary, then find the river from which it has wandered and return it to its family. It staggers around the track with a half-broken wing, flapping and straining to gain height. The RSPCA chases it with a large net over into clumps of rosebay willowherb. A footpath follows the line of the railway, and groups of ramblers in dun-coloured anoraks put down their sticks and walking poles to cry out encouraging suggestions. The swan is growing weaker, still it struggles to evade capture.
Everyone is on their phones. Shelley is talking to her mother. ‘We haven’t cut it fine, Mum, we left immediately. As I said, there’s a bloody swan on the line. If we have to we’ll come straight to the cemetery, but I’m sure we won’t miss the interment.’ In the seat behind them a voice at a lower but still audible volume is saying, ‘When they arrive, and they will arrive, probably any minute now, deny all knowledge of a safe. Tell them you never got involved.’ Shelley, the barrister, mimes cupping her hands over her ears.
Zoë is wondering what she is doing on this journey. But Shelley had said, ‘I’d like you to come; I need an ally when I’m at the heart of that family.’
‘That family? Yours, surely?’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘Not really.’
‘You’ll see.’
Zoë quite likes Paula and doesn’t understand her mother’s difficulties with her. But her father has said, ‘Those two are sandpaper and wood. They wear each other down.’
So here she is, travelling towards that ruined port, that Jewish suburb, that clutch of relatives with political opinions the London visitors find crude and uncomfortable. What will she be witness to and what will be demanded of her? It’s hard to predict. Perhaps she will be a bystander, merely an audience for all the sturm und drang of the Schwartz psychodrama. Or maybe some speaking part will be required of her, she has no idea what it might be.
Eventually the swan is taken, netted, in need of medical attention and in the process of being transported back to Crewe in a van. The train announcer conveys the revised and expected time of arrival into Lime Street. They are moving, they are off. Shelley reminds Zoë of the first time she took her to Liverpool when she was a child, crossing the mud flats of the Mersey at Runcorn, pools of river water gleaming glassily under an implausibly strong sun, passing the factories of Halewood, and Zoë saying, ‘Are we in England anymore?’
While they are swan-stalled, Harry is doing his own hustle. They need ten members of what Shelley calls sarcastically ‘the male persuasion’ for the minyan. Women, on this occasion, having prepared her body, don’t count. Nor does Ringo. Every Jew is assigned at birth membership in one of the twelve tribes of Israel and any member of the Kohanim tribe, the priestly caste, as Ringo Schwartz and Leonard Nimoy from Star Trek are, can’t approach the grave. Ringo and Leonard can both make the priestly blessing, the V-shape with their fingers, which Leonard introduced to the world as the Vulcan sign and Ringo kidded his daughter when she was a teenager that he too was a Vulcan, though without the big ears. So Paula, Shelley and Zoë (the swan-delayed pair having arrived in a taxi straight from the station) must stand by themselves with no menfolk to comfort them.
Shelley’s second husband Mike is chairing a tribunal in Nottingham he can’t get out of but will come later, in the evening, and Zoë’s boyfriend Angus wanted to come, but Zoë suspected it was just an anthropological interest. He’s always pushing her to explore her heritage, whatever that is. His previous girlfriend was from Cameroon, and she wonders if he sometimes looks at her and thinks she’s a little vanilla for his taste so she supposes she should play up to the Schwartz side of the family, and play down the Fletchers, generations of Northamptonshire yeoman farmers turned bootmakers in the early twentieth century. How dull is that?
She had met her great-grandmother but only in extreme old age. She has been a distant fixture in family life, swaddled in crocheted blankets in a chair in an institution that smelled of disinfectant and gravy. She cannot say that she liked her, let alone loved her, because the old woman was just that, an unpredictable presence who talked on and off about a forest, and Zoë, of course, has heard the old story but assumes it’s just a kind of fairy tale, not something that actually happened because no one on her mother’s side of the family has ever really gone in for Nature. Her dad used to laugh at the Jews walking on Hampstead Heath in Gucci loafers and cashmere scarves and a few in state-of-the-art hiking boots to rustle through dead leaves for ten minutes, then retire for cake at the café at Kenwood.
Harry has successfully rounded up the men for the minyan on the phone and herded them down to the cemetery in their suits and ties lightly brushed with cigar ash. Prosperous old men in their seventies who come to funerals because it’s a mitzvah, a good deed. They’ll be next and some of them are already gone early. This is the thing about funerals, they remind the living that we’re all in it together with the dead.
Looking across the grave they see the famous daughter, Shelley, in a well-cut black trouser suit. There’s a story about how she nearly jumped off the garage roof when she was a teenager having taken LSD and thought she could fly. Nearly gave Paula a heart attack. With her is her daughter, whose name they can’t remember, a young lady with light fine hair and long legs like spaghetti, looking round at everyone, whispering to her mother, ‘And who is that?’
Yes, Zoë is trying to make sense of where she is and who all these people are, and what her grandmother is now – a used container for her being, spirit, soul, identity, she doesn’t know what to call it. When she was five years old she had asked her mother, ‘Why are you a girl and daddy is a boy?’ And, ‘How do people become dead?’ To which her mother replied, too quickly, ‘Well, sometimes they get squished by a car when they’re crossing the road because they don’t hold a grown-up’s hand like they’re told.’ And watched her daughter burst into hot terrified tears.
After the brief ceremonial of the Kaddish, Mina goes down into the earth next to her husband Louis. It’s a pearl-coloured afternoon at the cemetery, they are out in a neighbourhood of the city they don’t normally set foot in, apart from visiting deceased loved ones, and it occurs to Harry like a stone crushing his heart that there are more of the Liverpool Jewish dead now than the Liverpool Jewish living. His two sons have come from Manchester and Gateshead; the younger boy who has taken an orthodox turn, with peyas dangling in front of his ears and a black hat. He thinks his father is a hypocrite, the type of Jew who goes to shul in the morning and the football in the afternoon instead of observing the whole of the Sabbath day according to God’s rigorous commandments.
Benny is in tears, Harry puts his arm round him, ‘You’re going to be okay, kid,’ he says to his younger brother. ‘We’ll always remember her, she’s not gone from our hearts.’
But Benny says, ‘I never told her I loved her. Not in so many words.’
‘She knew, of course she knew.’
‘I stayed away too long. I could have caught a plane back every month, but I liked the beach too much.’
Some linger, some are keen to get out of there, the cemetery is depressing, and when the last Jew has left the city, who will look after the graves? A couple of times a year hooligans climb over the wall and deface the stones with swastikas. No one is ever arrested; it happens at night, with no witnesses, but they’re out there, you could be sitting next to them on the bus.
Next stop is Paula and Ringo’s house, the modernist mansion overlooking the Allerton allotments, there to drink tea or glasses of whisky and eat cake. Zoë can hardy believe her mother grew up in such opulent circumstances when at home it’s all blond oak floorboards, Farrow & Ball off-white walls and leaflets lying in bundles around the hall from the Labour Party waiting to be delivered by Shelley when she has a minute. The Prime Minister is talking about sending her to the House of Lords. ‘My daughter the baroness,’ says Ringo, ‘the yiches in that.’
The house is full with friends, relatives, neighbours. The lapels of Harry and Benny’s jackets have been cut, their faces will be unshaven for a week, the mirrors have been turned to the wall perhaps, Shelley suggests when her daughter asks, so the living can avoid the vanity of their own reflection. The rabbi has brought round wooden chairs with sawn-off stumps of legs for the chief mourners to sit on during the prayers. It all seems to Zoë so ritualised and theatrical, what are these traditions and what do they mean and what’s their purpose?
In the middle of the eating and talking and reminiscing and telling jokes, her grandmother beckons her over to come and sit next to her on the mulberry leather Heal’s sofa.
‘Now, Zoë,’ she says, ‘I need you to do me a favour.’
‘How can I help?’ she replies politely, assuming that there is some task in the kitchen that needs doing, passing round cake, running out to the off-licence to buy more bottles of Johnnie Walker. Maybe she’s going to get to drive her grandma’s Jag.
‘I’ve had one of these new things, an email. Ringo set me up with an account last year and I’ve been on the internet. What a place, eh? Everything is there, and more that you don’t want to know about. I’ve printed it out. Can you go and see her and find out what she wants?’
‘You didn’t actually need to print it out, you could have forwarded it to me.’
‘I know but I didn’t know where to send it. There’s no telephone book for emails, is there?’
‘No, Grandma, there isn’t.’