A Coat of Varnish (44 page)

At last Frank Briers was getting to his feet.

‘Ready,’ he said. He looked around him, at the wall, at the floor. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you’ve heard of criminals returning to the scene of the crime. Though, to be honest, I’ve never known one who did. Anyway, this has been a detective returning to the scene of the crime. No one has ever told us anything about that. But this detective has been doing it too much, and he isn’t going to do it any more.’

He went out of the room in front of Humphrey, and locked the doors behind them. ‘There,’ he said.

It felt warmer, out in the Square in the January morning, than inside the house. Briers, active, competent, not so intimate as he had been for the last half-hour, said that Humphrey would receive a formal letter about the new job. Humphrey asked if Betty would like him to call on her again. Briers said: ‘As long as you give her notice. She needs someone to get the house tidy. She can’t do it herself.’

It was businesslike, more so than business usually was, Humphrey thought. In the same spirit, Briers refused, civilly enough, to return to Humphrey’s house. With his quick athlete’s step he was moving off towards his car, behaving like someone with a train to catch or, more exactly, like someone who was leaving a woman for the last time, determined to be free.

It was a quiet funeral. None of Lady Ashbrook’s occasions while she was alive had been as quiet as this. No singing, no organ, the barest of Protestant services. That was an attempt to pay tribute to her memory. She had attended this church because it was suitably evangelical, and there the funeral was taking place.

There were eight acquaintances in the congregation, no more. There were Loseby and Susan, Celia Hawthorne, Humphrey. Her lawyer was there, and a very old woman in an elegant mourning-dress, a dowager contemporary of Lady Ashbrook’s. There were also Kate and her husband. He had made a fuss about coming, Kate had told Humphrey, having to apologise again. Humphrey thought it not inappropriate. Lady Ashbrook in her time must similarly have preserved the forms at other funerals.

The news of the funeral had been quieter than the service itself. There were circumstances which all of them knew, except perhaps the dowager, and some found it fraying to the nerves. It was true, as Frank Briers had told Humphrey, that the old lady had left orders to be cremated; she had also ordered that her ashes should be disposed of by the vicar of this church. But it was also true, as Briers had remarked, that that was forbidden. It was forbidden because of thoughtful forensic rules. If ever someone was charged with a murder, he had a right to his own pathologist’s examination. So that the body was not to be disposed of.

Thus the body of Lady Ashbrook, once desired by a good many men, which had been dissected, reassembled, kept in the refrigerator, now lying in a coffin in the nave, had the chance of going through the same processes again.

Kate, who lived on such good terms with the flesh, had been saddened at the prospect. It was remote, Humphrey told her. There wouldn’t be a charge. But that didn’t soothe her. In her own hospital she had been invited to watch a post-mortem, but it was something she couldn’t take.

It was Susan, who lived on wilder terms with the flesh, who had gone out of her way to watch post-mortems and reassemblies. At the latter, she decided, with a not too pure satisfaction, that the pathologist’s technicians were suitably accomplished – particularly with the bodies of orthodox Jews where the requirements were at their most rigorous.

The great words of the service were being spoken, not loudly, but in a clear voice. To everyone there, they were familiar. Celia had heard them many times in her father’s churches, so many that she didn’t hear them now.

‘I am the Resurrection and the Life…’ ‘Sown in corruption, raised in incorruption.’

Humphrey was taken back to some of Alec Luria’s observations. Jesus was a good rabbi, but Paul was the founder of Christianity, Luria liked to say. Resurrection was a wonderful slogan. Yes, it was a wonderful slogan. People had believed in it, in the simplest, most concrete sense. It was the answer to the human tragedy. It was the ultimate consolation of this mortal life. How many believed it now?

The service was soon over. They went out of the church into the sunshine, chilly but tranquil. The bearers lifted the coffin into the hearse, the undertaker assembled the flowers. There were half a dozen wreaths, the rest of them outshone by a sumptuous gleaming of orchids. The cortège moved off down Chester Row towards the south, members of the congregation driving their own cars. The dowager left; it was time for her to go home now, she said.

They were proceeding to the old Fulham cemetery. Since Lady Ashbrook, insisting on being cremated, had made no provision for a grave, this had been another trouble. It had been dealt with by an agent, who, to Lady Ashbrook herself only the previous summer, would have seemed a profanation.

The agent was Tom Thirkill. Sheer outrage she would have felt, that such a man should have controlled her own funeral. And yet he had been the master of it all. It was he who had dictated that it should be as clandestine as could be. There might still be leaks about his son-in-law’s dealings. There was to be no publicity, he ordered. He wouldn’t attend the funeral himself. The movements of a Cabinet Minister were public property. The lordly wreath came from him but without a card. No announcement of the funeral. Loseby was given his instructions. Thirkill paid his debts, was keeping him out of the courts. Loseby didn’t ask him about arrangements; he existed to do what he was told. In this, Susan was at one with her father.

It was the two of them, father and daughter, who had picked on a burying-place. The Pevensey churchyard wouldn’t do, what with the detested first husband and the detested home. They couldn’t take her there. Susan might be ruthless, but she had too many qualms for that. But Susan was revealing some of her father’s lust for detail. She had tracked down the records of another family, that of Lady Ashbrook’s second husband. The name had been Jones before he emerged as a politician, and in due course became Lord Ashbrook. The Joneses had been steadily successful printers in the City of London. They had acquired a family plot in the Fulham cemetery. There had been no burials in the cemetery for years, but Lady Ashbrook had a tenuous claim, and neither Thirkill nor Susan was too proud to be fastidious. Influence had its uses. So that morning the tiny party stood round the clear-cut grave.

The mourning scene was as still as a photograph. The grass didn’t stir. The weather was at peace. After the howling winds, there were hours of an anticyclonic lull, sky pale and without a cloud, air without motion.

As they stood round the grave, there were glances straying as they listened, without hearing, to the words rubbed smooth with time. Down in the grave, there was a glint from the coffin plate. Another glance saw couples, elderly couples, sitting placidly on the garden benches. Away to the river, the verticals of the great new hospital were in harmony with the uninflected sky. Words went on in the calm unassertive voice… ‘has but a short time to live and is full of misery…in the midst of life we are in death…’

One of the bearers had taken a handful of earth from the mound nearby and was standing ready. ‘…suffer us not, at our last hour…for any pains of death, to fall from thee…’

Earth rattled on the coffin. That was the noise all of them had heard at other burials. It was the noise of finality or of the last contact. Sometimes it was too final to be borne. Not so that morning. The death was far away, there was nothing immediate to those standing, spectators in the static morning.

With dignity, the words went on. ‘Our dear sister, Alexandrina Margaret (unlike the words of the service, those struck strange)…sure and certain hope…’

It was a quiet end. It was a quiet end, quieter than her life, and like the rest of us, Humphrey thought, on his solitary way home, she would be soon forgotten.

A life, any one of our lives, was disagreeably like the day’s weather, a spasm of light between the dark before and after. But was she going to be so totally forgotten? Was this truly the end? Perhaps not. Paradoxically not. Not for any reason for which she might have chosen to be remembered. No one would be interested that she had once cut a figure in a little world. No one would be interested in what, as a human being, she was like. Personalities did not have ghosts. No, she would be remembered because of the grotesque nature of her death. For some time, there would be speculation about how it happened, who had killed her, why. Chapters would be written in accounts of famous crimes. There would be theories, ingenious and complex like that thought out by Celia and Paul, which Humphrey remembered Luria telling him about when they dined on Christmas Day. Now he thought, if those two, who were clear-minded and knew everyone concerned, got it wrong, what were the startling prospects in the future? It would be a perverse way for Lady Ashbrook not to be forgotten.

Published by House of Stratus

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