It would be the prettiest seaside village in the south-east, if it weren’t for the parvenu that stole its name. The Old Town of Hastings nestles in a horseshoe of grassy hills, hidden from the new town that has risen beside it, beyond the West Hill. The Old Town is a haven of Tudor cottages, with stained-glass surprises, horsemen’s lanes and leafy bowers. Windows are thrown open to views on to the pebble beach, where fishing boats lie amid the black creosoted fishermens’ huts, erect as sentry boxes. Smugglers once staggered ashore here, ankle-high in stones, to slake long-salted thirsts. The morris men still come forth in May, with their blackened faces, and the beardy men dance in front of the pub on the seafront, knocking sticks, lifting their knees and sounding the springtime hoorah. There is a pretty greengrocer’s, a delicatessen, numerous fish and chip shops and a host of bohemian tattoo parlours and vintage boutiques.
Audrey Bury lives in Armada Cottage on All Saints Road, a row of medieval hovels, upper floors bellying out over lower floors, with doorways mottoed to the memory of sometime seafarers. It’s the prettiest street of all, beloved of film crews. They look quaint, those places, but you can’t live in them. The doors are four foot high. You have to stoop. The floor’s not level. Audrey’s mahogany standing mirror on wheels rolls downhill. She keeps hauling it back where she wants it, but it just trundles off again under its own steam, towards the window.
Funny, her parents thought she was up her own arse for moving to the Old Town. In a way, she is; right up it and doubled back on herself. Her back aches all the time. The only time it doesn’t ache is when she’s lying down in her bedroom, but even then she’s like an ogre with her nose against the window. They could only get the smallest of beds up the stairs in segments. It’s her crucifix. There’s just about enough space for a peck on the cheek.
A large woman, she chose this winsome confinement because the area is better than anything else Hastings has to offer; its small homely businesses are run by former Londoners, feminine men and manly women whose deft hands can convert humdrum into boho and who like a drink. You’re friends with them in minutes. Audrey shares with them the knowingness of a forty-something woman; all husky appetite and brawny forearm.
Come the odd day off, she’s outside rather than in. She dithers along the pedestrian thoroughfare of George Street. There’s the smell of weed in the air and rancid fat. The food is a very pale imitation of modern fare; they call them paninis when they’re squashed rolls, and the orange cheese runs like paint. The pubs are dingy. Gormless men congregate there with their shaven heads, a knife in one of their socks, faces pitted like oranges. Outside any pub there’s your standard loser, pulling on the choke chains of four or five bull mastiffs, feeding his dog friends chips from the bin while, in return, they pee over his shoes. Old men with long beards and novelty captains’ hats sit on benches, shaking to the tune of Parkinson’s. The gulls stir the sky, each call and cry a hackle-raising warning.
She sits down outside a bar with a large glass of red. This feels festive at least. Her mobile rings and it’s Roger, her right-hand man and the only other full-time member of staff, and he tells her Ken Goodyew’s in, just sitting, and she says that’s fine, tell him she’ll be in shortly. She drinks up. She looks at the trestle table next to her. The young people have either dyed white hair or dyed black hair. Assembled, they look like a chess set. They are discussing the benefits of being a hermaphrodite. She leaves her glass drained, squeezes past the young people, and goes to get the car.
He’s a nice old boy, Ken Goodyew. He’s a bit of vintage chic himself in his smart clothes and shiny shoes; looks like he left the hanger in his coat. Since his sister died, he’s been in every other day. She let him sit and keep the old lady company before the funeral; then, after she was buried, he just kept coming in. At first it was on the pretext of this or that to do with the headstone, but within a week or so he made her a proposal.
‘My boy Dave’s running the business and I can’t sit twiddling me thumbs. Got to have something to do. It’s a nice family sort of place ’ere, innit? I like to be useful.’
She was short-staffed and so she agreed he could help out, casually. Not that there was anything casual about Ken. He was born to the business with his dress sense.
‘Don’t want nothing for it,’ he says, but she gives him a tenner here and there. He’s been with her to a nursing home and the hospital to pick up the deceased. Far from being squeamish, he’s practical and interested in every aspect of the work. He praises the way they refer to the deceased as if they were still living: Mrs Edmondson, Mr Dixon and so on. ‘I appreciate the way you do that, Audrey,’ he says. He likes the way they dress smart and have clean hands. He likes their quiet voices and good manners.
‘I say, Audrey,’ he said one afternoon, sitting in reception having a cuppa, ‘when I come in ’ere, I feel myself.’
Roger had given her an old-fashioned look and she’d had to stop herself smiling.
In his spare time, Ken likes to pore through the funeral plan.
‘’Ere, I say, Audrey, it’s like a menu, innit? It’s like ordering off a menu. Bet you don’t get many of your punters come in and book up this way, do ya?’
‘I wish we did. It would make it much easier, Ken.’
‘Cremated or buried? Audrey? What would you ’ave?’
‘Well, it’s according to your religious views, Ken. Do you believe in the Resurrection?’
‘Oh, I dunno about that one, Audrey,’ he whistles, ‘dunno about that one . . .’
‘Well, it’s like with a holiday; there are options. It’s how you want to travel. Whether you want to go club class somewhere or whether you’d prefer to go economy nowhere.’
‘I don’t believe in ’olidays,’ was all he said.
Later on he said, a-quiver with the giggles, ‘I say, Audrey, I’ve got time to think it through, ain’t it? I’m not kicking it tomorrow, am I? Eh? Eh?’
‘I’ve never had anything like it,’ she’d mused. ‘A groupie.’
‘He’s sweet on you,’ said Roger.
Ken had been in every day for three weeks by then.
‘It’s that or he’s a necrophiliac.’
He had a schoolboy’s sense of humour, Roger. He got a clout one afternoon from Audrey for typing up an old joke on the coffin plaque for Joyce Haynes, who died a spinster. ‘This one returned unopened’.
‘Blimey,’ said Ken, ‘that ain’t right.’ And he cast Roger heavily critical looks.
‘There’s nothing wrong with a touch of levity, Ken,’ she said to him. ‘I like to confound people’s expectations of a funeral director.’ Her parents never used to say what they did for a living. If you told people what you did when they had a hand in your bag of Revels, they’d whip it out quick as a flash, drop the chocs. They’d never take a cup of tea from you. Other times they’d ask you about the handles and whether you half-inched them.
‘Have you worked with anyone we’d know?’ a woman gushed at a house-warming party.
‘I don’t know. Do you know a lot of dead people?’
‘Oh. I thought you said you were a film director!’
Ken preferred his own jokes. ‘’Ere, Audrey, tell you what, you’ve got an advance booking from Ken Goodyew. Oy, the living are queuing up for your services! I don’t mind if you want to use it in your publicity. Get a nice picture of me. ’Ere, Audrey, listen – “Wanted dead or alive”. Eh? Eh? Get it? How about that for a caption? Tell you what, I’ll let you buy me dinner in return for using my mugshot. ’Ere, Audrey, you ever taken out an old geezer like me before?’
‘I have, Ken, but he’s been in a shroud.’
Her mother warned her not to let on about what she did for a living until she’d seen a chap a few times. Other girls were getting warned not to sleep with a man on the first date, but she was told to crack on with it. They’d been few and far between, though, and here she was forty-odd, with a clothing rack of black, a fridge full of Müllerlights, and an eighty-year-old for a suitor. It was a rum do.
She drives at a dignified speed down through the Old Town, but makes quite an impact on the traffic. In front, cars pull in, pull over; across from her, they slow down, their drivers look away; and behind her, cars slow and lengthen the distance between them. At the traffic lights, an elderly man stops, assumes a military bearing and removes his cap.
When the lights change, for the hell of it, Audrey floors it along the seafront like something out of The Dukes of Hazzard. She hits fifty as she passes the pier. She cuts quite a figure in a speeding hearse.