-Ellie-
The bed is empty. It’s still dark. I look at the clock. 4am. Will must have gone to the bathroom. At any moment there’ll be the familiar pull of the chain and the dozy stumbling back to bed. That used to be my domain, in the first months of having little Leo in my belly – the sudden stumbles to the bathroom, the groggy return. But things have settled down, now, for me. Still I wait. And wait. 4.20am. I guess in a few months’ time I’ll probably consider six hours’ uninterrupted sleep, preceded by oddly arousing sex, to be a very good deal. So, out of bed, let’s find out what’s going on. Opening the bedroom door, I head to the bathroom. The room is dark and empty; no Will. Through the frosted window there’s a faint glow. If I just stand on tiptoes to look through the non-frosted upper section, I can see out into the night.
Fire! OK, so that’s the sleep gone. Will is standing in the garden surrounded by fire. I scrabble with the sash lock on the window and throw it upwards. Yes, there he is – great orange flames in front of him.
“Will!” I shout out of the window. “What are you doing?”
But he doesn’t reply. Maybe he can’t hear me over the sound of the flames. I pull my dressing gown from the hook on the bathroom door and run downstairs as quickly as I dare. Mustn’t trip; mustn’t hurt the baby. I slip on some shoes, unlock the back door and run out into the garden.
“Will!”
Now that I’m out here, the flames are both less and more alarming. Less, because I can see they’re coming out of the leaf incinerator, so he’s not actually randomly setting fire to the lawn. More, because of their roaring intensity, and because of Will’s expression staring into them. His mouth is twisted into a mixture of sadness and anger. His eyes do not blink, but from them escape tears.
He doesn’t seem to have noticed me appear in the garden. So I walk to him, round the flames. I put a hand on his shoulder.
“Will?” I ask, as gently as I can, like I’m dealing with a small boy, even though inside I’m screaming ‘What the fuck are you doing?’
He jumps a little and looks round at me. He smiles slightly and holds up one hand.
“Hey,” he says, in greeting. “You’re early.”
“For what?” I ask.
“The funeral.”
Oh. Of course. The dawn funeral. But there is not yet any sign of the sun in the sky.
“I thought I’d get the pyre and everything ready, for when you were awake,” he continues.
The pyre? Jesus. “What are you going to burn, Will?” I ask.
“The old life,” he says. “Or the new life. Whichever way you want to look at it.”
New life. I hug my arms protectively around my belly and foetal Leo.
I see Will notice the gesture. He looks up from my belly to my face, his eyes wide in alarm.
“Do you think I’ve gone mad?” he asks. “My old life, the imagined life, with my father. The life of sitting under his grand piano while he hammered out tunes overhead. The life of the musical tour.”
Oh. I see.
“I know,” I say. “I was just cold.”
Will stares at me. Then he moves on. Fine. He’s accepted the lie.
“If you’re awake, we can make a start, if you like?” Will asks.
“It’s your funeral,” I shrug. “Sorry, that sounded flippant, I didn’t mean…”
“No, I know. Remember, though, Ellie. This was your idea.”
Yes, but not the pyre. Not the flames at 4.30 in the morning. Still, how like Will, to do something properly if he’s going to do it at all.
So I nod, and squeeze his shoulder. “It’s the right thing to do, Will. I’m proud of you.” All the things a mother would say. See, I can do this.
“Good. Right. I’ll make a start.”
He moves off out of the firelight. What other props does he have out here? He comes back with a small CD player. Of course, music. And yes, there in his other hand is the familiar CD case.
“Only quietly, Will,” I warn him. Bit naggy, maybe, for this nurturing style. But I’m thinking of the volume at which he usually plays Max Reigate. “We’ll wake the neighbours.”
Will nods, and presses play on the CD player. Sound blares out. Will had obviously anticipated playing the music loudly. He bends down and adjusts the volume. It is quieter now, almost inaudible above the crackle of the flames. But I can imagine the sounds even if I cannot hear them. Feel them in me, after last night. Those three familiar chords, setting the beat, the beat to which Will made love to me. Fucked, says a little voice in my head, not made love. And his father. Not you.
Shut up, brain.
“Are you going to say some words, Will, or would you like me to?”
He smiles. “I’ve plenty of words,” he says. “But we need to get the coffin ready to lower first.”
Yep, right, the coffin. Excellent. Sorry Leo, I mouth internally, about your mad father. Seems like the undertaker coffin incident wasn’t a dream. Goodness knows what the man had thought, or if he’d wondered if we were harbouring a dead body. Maybe Will had explained what would be inside it. Not that I know what will be inside it. That is still to come.
I turn to see Will approach. As I’m turning, I think he must be dragging it over the grass; it must be heavy, a full-grown coffin. Goodness knows how he thinks it will fit it into the leaf incinerator. But then, when I turn round fully, I see he is not dragging it. Then I see why. And I almost scream.
It is a child’s coffin. Smaller, even, than that. It must be designed for a baby. I inhale and rub a soothing hand on Leo’s stomach home. It’s all right. Daddy is just being practical. No point paying for a large coffin when there’s no body, and you can’t burn it on a DIY pyre. But, seriously, how can Will bear to think of dead children, when I’m carrying one inside me? Oh God – no, not a dead child. I hope. A live one. Or one that will still be live. The coffin looks like a terrible jinx, a suggestion of an event that should never be discussed.
“I thought this size would be appropriate,” says Will. “We’re not just burying my father, you see. We’re burying the little me, too. The other me, that might have lived, with him.”
I nod mutely. Thankfully, my words don’t seem to be needed. The beat of the music prevents an awkward silence.
Will puts the coffin down on the ground near to the fire. He lifts off the lid. I almost can’t bear to look inside, unsure what Will can have put in there. But I know it’s expected. Must show an interest in the little boy’s games. So I force my head to tilt down and look.
I exhale. Maybe too loudly, but Will lets it go. Inside it is only a picture. Max Reigate, printed from Wikipedia, in black and white. But no, hold on, there is something else. I start to kneel down. Will sees my interest, and brings the coffin up to me. There is another picture in there. It is a red crayon picture of a man and a boy. The crude lines and colours have the appearance of a child’s drawing. Underneath is the scrawl ‘Daddy’. I think I’ve seen this before. I look up at Will.
“It was in the keepsake box,” he says. I didn’t know he’d even been looking through the box. Usually that’s something we’d do together. Reminisce, about happy (happier?) times gone by.
“When I drew it, when I was six or whatever, it was meant to be John, of course,” he explains, looking at me. “It was such a jolly little picture, I asked John to let me keep it, when I came across it years ago. Reminded me of all those after-school trips to Sainsbury’s with him. But it would have been Max, if he’d still been there. That picture would be us on our way to a concert hall. I’ve got to bury both of those lives.”
I open my mouth to speak, then close it again. What do you say on such an occasion?
“What?” asks Will. “Too much, you think?”
“You don’t have to close off your whole heritage, you know,” I opt for. “That doesn’t have to be lost to the flames too.” How would he feel if little Leo rose up and burned him in years to come? Obliterated his daddy and all the love he’s felt?
There is a silence.
“But that’s what I’m mourning, Ellie. The idea of my father. It turns out I’ve never really known John. And I didn’t know Max. Or at least, I must have done. But I don’t remember him. I don’t have those little snippets of memory. I don’t know why. So I’m not mourning him. I’m mourning what we might have had. That’s the idea I have to grieve.”
“The memories will come back,” I tell him, “now you know who Max is. Don’t bury that idea, let it come out. Let it live.”
Will does a movement with his head that must be a nod, because he takes the drawing out of the coffin. He folds it up without looking at it and puts it in the breast pocket of his pyjamas.
“Fine,” he says. “Let’s just bury him.”
Here’s hoping that’s the right call. It is Will’s grief, he knows what he has lost. I could tell him to throw in the picture too, consign it to the flames, repress all thoughts of being fathered by Max Reigate. But you’ve got to exercise authority, with these little boys, haven’t you? And there’s nothing that undermines authority like changing your mind. Besides, he’s already lining up nails in the lid of the coffin. And there he is, picking up the hammer meant for Leo’s crib. Before Will got a new crib from his dear departed father.
Will hits the first nail. Bang! The sound ricochets off the fence posts. Will moves on to the next nail. As he raises the hammer, I see his hand is shaking. Bang! It goes again. He drops the hammer.
“Will, are you all right?” I ask.
He nods, and picks the hammer up again. He delivers a third blow, and this time when the blow is struck he not only drops the hammer but leaps back from it, and falls down flat on the grass.
I rush to him, and put an arm round him. What’s going on? “Will, what’s wrong?”
He looks up at me. He is white and shaking. It’s his eyes that are the worst, though. For in his eyes, there is fear.
“I don’t know, I just can’t,” he says. His voice is wavering. Tears don’t sound far away. “It’s really weird, it’s like…” But he shakes his head and doesn’t continue. “Could you finish…?”
So, these are my duties now: hammering nails into the baby coffin of a dead pianist in the garden before dawn, while my mad husband lies on the lawn. And they say motherhood throws challenges at you – be a wife, anyone?
“Of course.”
I pick up the hammer and make to bring it down on one of the remaining nails.
As I’m bringing it down, I hear Will shout.
“No! No!” He has his hands up to his temples, clawing at them. In his eyes there is an expression of terror. Then he rushes at me. “No, no, you mustn’t!” He grabs the hammer from my hand. “Stop!”
I let the hammer drop. Will stares at it, breathing heavily, then stares at me. It is a look of pure hatred. I step backwards. My heel comes into contact with the side of the CD player and oh, my footing, it’s gone, I’m going to trip. Not a fall. Please, not a fall, on my stomach!
But Will seizes my arm, rights me. The fall doesn’t happen. I am safe. I think. I look up at Will. He is white and shaking again. I don’t know if his tremors are about the hammer or about my almost fall.
What is going on? Was I wrong about the funeral? Has it pushed Will over some kind of edge that neither of us knew was there?
“Let me get you a chair,” he says. He rushes off down the garden, and brings back one of our wrought-iron chairs. We were proud of them when we bought them, complete with pretty daisy-print seat covers. They’ve become a bit less pretty, with time. Never mind that now. I sink into the chair.
“That could have been…” I start to say. Horrible, tragic, awful, are the words in my mind.
“A memory, I know,” says Will.
So. The shakes were about the hammer.
“Yes, quite a memory,” I say, bitterly. “Of the fall. If we’d lost the baby. Will – what are you playing at? A memory of what?”
Will bends to kiss me. I feel his tongue in my mouth, like an invader. It is a deep kiss, a passionate one. “The baby is safe,” he says, as he pulls away. “Our future is safe.”
OK. Maybe he’s right. I nod. It was a scare, nothing more. Everything is fine. The sky starts to lighten and I see the first hints of the sun come over the horizon.
“Will, what memory?” I think back to what he was saying the other night, before I cracked open the valium. About blood clots, talk and die, blunt instruments. But it was all just burbling. It meant nothing.
“Don’t worry,” he says. He seems excited. The fear-shakiness has gone. It’s been replaced by some kind of adrenaline rush, it seems. He’s too alert, too keen to please. “I’ll finish this quickly now,” says Will. “Never mind the hammer, I’ll just lower the coffin into the fire, say a few words. Then we’ll have some breakfast, OK?”
I nod. “OK.” Maybe Will was just having some kind of grief-fit, a low blood sugar moment. Bloody weird. Frightening. But maybe now he’s through it, he’ll move on from whatever dark place took him there. Maybe he’ll need a little less looking after. Be all set for fatherhood. The funeral idea is proving a success. How clever of me, intuiting what he needed. I wish we’d stuck to the dawn timing; it feels much less noir now the sun is breaking through.
Will begins lowering the coffin into the flames. Then he’s doing his speaking thing, his funeral address.
“We do this in memory of Max Reigate, a gifted and talented pianist, who I’m sure, had he lived, would have been a gifted and talented father, to me, his son. There were four years; I am sure they were happy. Somewhere within me, I will treasure them. Perhaps they will re-emerge. But I will take them with me to a place of contentment, in the future.”
The flames rise up and seize the coffin. The lid slides open and Max’s face is revealed. Will stares into the fire as the black and white face slowly curls, and then disappears into the heat of the flames.
When he speaks again, there is more emotion in his voice.
“Max Reigate, a father much missed.”
“And a husband,” I contribute. “He was a husband, too, don’t forget. Your mother – your real mother, Sophie – will have missed him too.”
Will looks up. The sun, not quite fully risen, is covered by a cloud. I shiver slightly.
“A husband he may have been,” says Will. “But we don’t know if he was missed.”