WHEN I WAS A LITTLE BOY, Sunday was a visiting day, and Saturday a marrying day. On Monday mornings, I often took a piece of wedding cake in my lunchbox to the village school: this was the spoil of my father’s work on Saturdays. It seemed to me then that my father was constantly marrying and burying people, joining and separating them. In my childish mind the dead and the affianced were equally half-alive; they all entered the vicarage as reputations. Each category was treated in the same easy, genial way. “I have to marry Clendennon’s son,” Peter might announce at the dining table, while I, wide-eyed, legs dangling from the slatted kitchen chair, trying to do my homework, looked on. “He’s gone and got Joanna—you know, Joanna in the pub—pregnant.” Or, once, as he came into the kitchen, with his overcoat on:
“Bill Clemons has died. What on earth am I going to say about him? He only came to church at Christmas.”
“Adele Clemons we know far too well,” said Sarah.
“Oh yes, she is most peculiar. When I went round there just now to offer the usual ‘and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes,’ she gave me a cup of tea, and as I was sitting there I sensed a presence behind me just out of eyesight. I turned and there was Bill Clemons sitting upright in the armchair, the poor fig, utterly dead of course, but staring at me in a rather lively fashion, with a small photograph in his
hand. I suppose Adele called me before calling the undertakers.”
“A photograph? How odd. Adele probably called you both and you just beat them to it. That wouldn’t be very hard. The Pickerings are practically dead themselves.”
“They are their own undertakers!” said Peter.
“With Bill you can always do the Japanese angle,” said Sarah.
“I’d thought of that. Three years as a prisoner of war did him in, that’s pretty obvious.”
Death had no sting in the Bunting household, partly because Sarah and Peter sincerely believed in the resurrection of souls (or “lift-off,” as Peter called it), and partly because death was a technical matter which called for an immediate flurry of organization, and a swift obituary. Most of the villagers discussed were not members of the church, since hardly anyone came to church; the village was Peter’s real church, and had to be. For instance, the couples who came to the vicarage to arrange to be married were often strangers to Peter. I used to love opening the door to them. A young man and woman stood awkwardly. As if in preparation for their life of traditionally divided labour, it was always the young man’s task to say the first words: “Is … is the vicar in, then?”
As shy as them, I asked them inside, and they stood in the hall, their heads bent as if it were raining, and looking around naively at the walls. Peter emerged, bustled them into his study. Then I heard that sound so familiar to me, of quiet conversation behind a door. The house vibrated solemnly as if a doctor were visiting. Behind that door, in father’s extraordinarily untidy study, these people discussed
their weddings. I used to press my ear to the wood, once in delightful consort with Mother, who held my hand as we listened. “This one will be our little secret,” she said. A sentence or two could be heard occasionally: “No, we like the old service, with all them words,” or “A week in Edinburgh is good enough for the two of us.”
The visitors, the visitors! They came up the gravel path, past the graveyard with its look of tidy ruin, to ask for healing of one kind or another. Religion barely entered into it. In that traditional place, the priest was socially elevated. Going to Peter was a modern version of visiting the landowner to collect wages. Peter gave the parishioners the salary of his words, and rich words they often were. With gentle, undogmatic faith, he fit himself around the lives of his flock. Peter believed that most of his petitioners were in search of friendship rather than God. Mr. Tattersall, now long dead, used to come every week on Sunday afternoon when I was a boy. He had a red birthmark like a wax letterseal across one cheek, and always carried a small umbrella, even when it was sunny. Father told me that Mr. Tattersall was “terribly alone.” Mother told me that Mr. Tattersall had driven a bus for many years, the cream-coloured 54 that went every day between the villages. He had had an accident in which he knocked down a pedestrian. There had been nobody on the bus at the time—there rarely was—and Mr. Tattersall had accelerated away. The pedestrian recovered, and Mr. Tattersall, whom no one liked, was not charged; perhaps it was felt that he was already punished by the now shameful symbolism of his birthmark.
Terry Upsher was another regular Sunday visitor, always in the same clothes, as if, like a child, he had been dressed
by a monotonous mother. There was the flat cap, with its dirty softness inside, a collarless shirt pulled tightly over a strongly mapped chest, and trousers that were too short, so that he seemed permanently excited. His face was grey; his high voice quavered loudly, and Mother and I could hear everything he said inside Peter’s study. When Terry’s father was alive, he was adamant that he never came for himself, only for his father.
“The part of it is, Vicar, me da’s not been champion these last few days. He says nowt, never speaks to us except he says ‘good morning’ when he gets up. Rest of the day he’s dowie, he just watches TV like it was all the one fil’m.”
“And how are you, Terry? How are you bearing up?”
“Me? I’m okay, Vicar, it’s just me da. I’m past meself with worry.”
I used to follow Terry once he came out of the study. I was disturbed by his large, dirty hands; I had never seen anything like them. Terry swung one of those hands onto my head, and then often I accompanied him into the vicarage garden, and sometimes into other gardens, and watched him mend a broken rose, or build a bonfire, or clean a moss-sown wall. Terry was silent in a way my parents never were, except when they were eating. Yes, that was it, Terry worked as if eating through his jobs, with resigned hunger. Silently he did his occasional work in all seasons: in autumn (which he called the “back-end”), when the laburnum shed its poisonous tadpoles; in winter, when the frost candied the grass; in pricking spring and in powdery summer, when each full tree, busy with sanguine birds, became its own forest. And all the while, I looked at Terry’s hands, broad with earthy seams.
I used to think that Terry spoke “funnily,” and one day asked him why.
“I was born here,” he said. “Me da’s the one what talks funny, he has that many clever words from when he was down the pit.” Terry told me that the coal miners had certain words peculiar to themselves, a whole language, and these were called “pitmatic.” I loved this word as soon as I heard it; later, Max and I would name our philosophical group the Pitmatic Philosophical Society, in homage.
“With this strike on, it’s just down at heels for me da now, he’s angry at them in the pits, the miners, for striking, and he doesn’t say much. ‘I’m resigning my membership’—he said that yesterday, and I said to him, ‘What you talking about, you’re not a member of owt!’ But when he talked pitmatic, like, I couldna get half-nowt from him anyway, so whor’s the difference?” I loved following Terry around, brought him a sandwich and an apple from the vicarage. He hunched over his food as if he were crying.
Sometimes I felt I wasn’t welcome. There was an awkward moment once when Terry asked me if my father helped me with my homework.
“Does he write it for you?” He looked strangely at me, closely.
“No,” I said, lying. I could see a tiny straw of sleep in his left eye.
“I reckon he does. I can tell from your face. Well, that’s not allowed, is it? He’s doing it. That’s clodding! You sitting on your honkers, with your da doing it! What’s the capital of America, then, if your da’s not clodding for you?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
I’ve won some of them pub quizzes,” he said, rather
than supply the information. When I was older, I discovered that Mr. Deddum occasionally fiddled the answers so that Terry could win the odd pub quiz. Practically the whole village was in on the deception.
I will always remember that afternoon—I was ten or eleven, still small—when, alone as usual, I walked out of the vicarage, down past the churchyard, and turned left towards a little bridge that mounted the river. As I turned the corner, I saw Terry leaning against a wall, breathing heavily, while another man, a stranger, was trying to shake his hand. Both men looked as if their clothes had been shifted slightly to one side of their bodies. One of Terry’s shoes was lying upside down on the pavement. Terry ignored the man, worried his shoe onto his foot—holding out his shaking hands like a diver as he did so—and walked away, followed by me. He was muttering, “I’ll lace him, I’ll lace him.” I followed him to his house; I had never been there. Old Mr. Upsher was watching the television, a daytime sitcom. “I’m in a fight, Da,” Terry shouted, in his high, nervous, unstable voice. “Good,” replied his father, barely stirring. Before I left, Terry showed me what he called “the special room.” It was sparse—a small table, a chest of drawers, and very thin curtains. They fluttered hopefully as the door opened. He turned on the single light, a bare torturer’s bulb. On all the surfaces, and on the floor, were piles of many objects: boxes of chocolates, small decorative plates, a bar of fancy soap, a silver cannon, a framed antique map. I recognized the map. “We gave that to you,” I said.
“This is where I keep everything what’s given us by people for me jobs,” he said. “I don’t touch owt of this … paraphenayli.” He turned out the light and shut the door.
“Me da’s not allowed in there,” he said, quite happily. “And diwent tell anyone about this.”
It was a Sunday rule that someone from the village join my parents for lunch. Often these lunches were full of mishaps and misunderstandings. Peter and Sarah were exquisitely courteous, but in such a way that they imprisoned their guests. Father compensated for his shyness by making his questions refined and ornate. He adopted this manner only at the dining room table, almost as if he had been taught it by his parents.
“And your fair niece, whom I once met … Ah, is she still sans husband? She should hurry. You know that line from the poem, ‘Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart.’ I always thought her eminently marryable, however.” Muriel Spedding, to whom this question was once addressed, lost all her customary jauntiness and muttered into her soup. Mother’s task was to translate her husband for others, so speedily and instinctively that many never noticed it. Peter might ask of a guest: “Are you talking about that oddly uncherished little path that bifurcates the top field?” and my mother, sensing that the visitor was lost, would insert: “You mean Pilgrim’s Path, by Harrison’s farm?”
In my memory, these Sunday guests were always single, middle-aged women, hungry for company but made clumsy by Peter and Sarah’s obvious fulfilment in marriage. Demurely they stood in the hall, fiddling with coats whose buttons seemed too large for their fingers, their screenlike spectacles magnifying their anxious eyes into bullets of panic, their long, obscuring skirts a kind of lay equivalent of Peter’s chaste cassock. Only their thick grey strong metallic
hair, simply cut by the one salon in the valley, seemed to be in its prime, greedily nourishing itself at the expense of the soul.
On the Sunday of my visit a year ago, Susan Perez-Temple, who was not at all shy, was the guest. Everyone knows about Susan because of the exoticism of her background. Her father was a valet in the royal court in Madrid, and she grew up practically in the palace. She arrived in her usual lemon coat and a string of huge, flamboyant amber beads which had been given to her mother by a Spanish nobleman.
“How’s my favourite philosopher?” she said, offering her dry cheek to me. And then to Peter, “How’s my favourite vicar? Don’t overdo it, Peter. There was absolutely no need for you to take the service today.”
Susan is highly conservative. She carries with her a constant suggestion that she might at any moment complain about something or other, because her favourite conversational gesture is “Don’t get me started on …” “Don’t get me started on South Africa and Mr. Desmond Tutu”—she would snap his name as if she were teaching numerals to stupid children. “Don’t get me started on the United States of America,” spelling out the words as if the union were a recent chimera. But in fact she never does “get started” on any of these controversial subjects, and I’ve decided that this is perhaps the unconscious strategy of a shy woman with strong private opinions, in the way that a small country might boast about the power and professionalism of its army without often deploying it.
As we sat down to lunch, she said:
“Imagine, Sarah, I was sitting in the village hall last Thursday. Actually, I was thinking about you, Peter, stuck in that
awful hospital in Durham. Don’t get me started on the hospital! You remember that a string quartet were playing? Before the concert, the schoolchildren had had a tea party, and it was a dreadful rush to get them out in time. During the concert, I became aware of a very strange smell, an odour really, and I began to look around, and couldn’t see anything. Well, then I saw the radiators: on every one of them there was a large, wet, dirty tea towel drying out! Can you think of anything more primitive? Really, this village! The hall isn’t some kind of nomad’s tent, it is not a yurt—do you know the yurt? I sat in one last year on my Mongolian trip.”
Susan had just come back from Uganda, where she had seen twelve corpses, all from the same family, laid out on the grass. No one would tell her what had killed them. The authorities had arranged them as a series, according to height, from the tallest to the shortest.
“They were a bit like those cheap nests of Russian dolls I once saw on my trip to Moscow. I imagine it was some kind of virus, because they were immediately buried, and then all of their belongings were set on fire.”
The image powerfully struck me.
“Christ,” I said, perhaps too enthusiastically—and saw out of the corner of my eye Father’s disapproval of that blasphemous invocation—“what an amazing and awful notion. The absolute destruction of everything, and the completely irrelevant fate of losing everything after one’s death, when one is already totally extinguished.”
“But in fact not totally extinguished,” said Susan. “The Ugandans, so I was told, have a word for the grave which translates roughly as ‘hiding place.’ So they may consider
themselves to be hanging around after death. Anyway, they are usually buried with some of their favourite objects.”
Peter started at this, and as he moved, so a long arm of ash broke off his cigar, suddenly, and fell on to the large blue tablecloth. It made me think of a sailor who has walked the plank and suddenly fallen into a blue sea. I laughed to myself.
“You know, don’t you,” Peter asked, and looking bemusedly at me as if I were a little strange to be laughing at this moment, “that the locals have a word not dissimilar for the grave? They call it a lair. A northern and Scottish word. It is not applied to the grave per se”—he pursed his lips—“but to one’s slot in the graveyard, the place you book with me before you die.”
“Why are you sounding quite so jolly?” asked Sarah, with a smile in her voice.
“Well, it’s interesting, isn’t it? Obviously a lair suggests that the dead are waiting down there to rise up again and attack the living, like bandits. Awfully pagan really, I ought to discourage it, but they all use it. It’s important that they book now, because we are running out of space.”
“I’m already booked,” said Susan.
“So you are, in the northwest corner, I believe, with me!” said Peter. “Just as New York can only expand upwards, our churchyard can only expand downwards. We don’t have the room to put man and wife next to each other. No, now we have to rebury old corpses further down, and then put a new corpse on top of the old one.”
“So, ‘lair’ is actually more precise than ‘six feet under,’” said Sarah.
“It’s more like twelve feet under. For instance, Dr.
Braun. Now, his wife, remember, died, what, ten years ago? Anyway, Braun has booked a lair—of course he doesn’t use the word—in the same grave as his wife. But there is no space alongside. So when old Braun pops off, we will have to rebury Mrs. Braun farther down, and then put her husband on top of her. It’ll be tighter still for Terry when he dies, because both his father and mother are down there already. Braun is much better off in that respect.”
“No democracy, even in death,” said Susan with satisfaction.
I shuddered at all this blithe talk of burial and reburial, because at that point in my life I had attended only one funeral, my grandmother’s, at which I behaved very poorly. I was six when my granny, Peter’s mother, died. Father took the service, said “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” and threw soil down into the pit. I could make no sense of anything. Why was he doing that? My friend Richard threw gravel at my bedroom window in the same way, to get me to wake up early so that we could go and play behind the big tree on Pilgrim’s Path before breakfast. Was Daddy throwing soil to get Granny to wake up? Down the path from the churchyard I saw a man in a grey cap polishing with an invisible cloth the doors of the hearse. It looked like he was writing playful letters on the car. I envied him; he had escaped our miserable responsibilities. Daddy sternly intoned the words of the funeral service, and everyone looked very intelligent, staring and frowning at the coffin, as if it were Granny’s fault she was dead. Suddenly I broke away from the mourners and ran fast towards the hearse—why, exactly, I don’t know. I fell on a tree root or stump of stone, twisted my ankle painfully, and cried out. Behind
me, my father, dressed from head to toe in a black cassock, a column of night, strode towards me with a furious look on his face. Furious. Simultaneously, the driver approached, and the two men, converging, picked me up, each holding one of my arms. The driver started to ask me if I was all right, but Father spoke over him. “Come back to the grave,” he said, still frowning like everyone else gathered there. I stood next to him at the graveside throughout the rest of the service, and his black cassock thinly brushed me.
I could never forget my father’s stern face as he strode towards me. After that disgrace, I had a recurrent nightmare, in which my father, dressed again in his black robes, walked angrily towards me, and my grandmother then woke up from the dead, pushed open the coffin, pursed her lips as my parents did, and began to whistle a horrible tune—it was the hymn “Crimond,” which we sang in church. I wanted to tell my parents about it, but they seemed so happy, and I didn’t want to spoil their happiness. I was silly, because if I had told them I am sure my parents would not have been cross, as Peter once was when he caught me telling a lie. “Now, my little man,” he said very solemnly, gripping my arm firmly with the pincers of muscular Christianity, “we won’t have lies in this house. We absolutely will not have lies in this house.”
I was so shocked that I cried, and Mother came to comfort me.
“Oh really,” said Peter, “if you indulge his tears, he will become as bad as Saint Ignatius—weep, weep, weep.”
“Was Ignatius especially tearful?” asked Mother, interestedly, turning away from me.
“My hat, yes. Saturated in tears. Endless tearful self-punishments. Ignatius couldn’t get up in the morning without challenging the day to a weeping match.”
And, as usual, my parents drifted off into their charmed world, their happy involvement with each other.