A Line of Blood (36 page)

My wife, I thought. Severing ties.

Millicent knew Rose.

If I had gone to Bryce’s funeral I might have discovered that.

My mother met us at the station, dressed for the cremation in a light suit of black wool, fully made up. It was twenty past seven.

‘You didn’t have to come, Mum,’ I said.

‘Aye, I did,’ she said. She kissed me gently on the cheek, then crouched down, spry in the dust and the fumes. ‘Hello, young man,’ she said to Max. ‘And where’s your mother? Not off the train yet? She’s never still asleep, is she?’

Max looked pointedly at me.

‘Millicent’s not with us, Mum. She’s sorry.’

‘Aye,’ she said. ‘I’ve not heard from her since you were last here, Alex.’ She left a pause, which I chose not to fill. What was there to say?

By twenty to eight we were sitting in my mother’s kitchen. Max ate Coco Pops and Frosties from a selection of mini-cereals, while my mother and I drank coffee. I said no to toast, but ate half a sugared grapefruit that she had prepared before she had left the flat, the segments painstakingly separated from the skin with a knife she owned for precisely that purpose. My mother had risen early.

I had considered shaving on the train, but had decided I could do a better job in my mother’s bathroom. By the time I was out of the shower, a towel around my waist, Max was wearing the jacket and trousers he had brought with him, and a white cotton shirt straight from the packet.

‘Is he not smart, son?’ my mother said, her voice pregnant with emotion. ‘I’ve a tie set aside for you, Max.’ She picked from the dresser a dark blue tie with a regimental motif and handed it to him. ‘There’s one for your dad too.’

‘Mum,’ I said, ‘there’s really no need. I have a tie with me.’

‘I just thought, you know, your father … Well, anyway, Max, put it on, then.’

He raised his collar, then draped the tie carefully around his neck.

‘Well then,’ said my mother. ‘Knot it, darling.’

‘Erm,’ said Max. He sent me an imploring look.

‘Oh,’ said my mother. ‘Oh.’ A look of amused disappointment. ‘Alex, does your wee man not know how to tie a tie? What about his uniform?’

‘We don’t wear ties at school.’

‘Come here, Max,’ I said.

‘Aye, maybe just get dressed in the bathroom, Alex, and I’ll help the boy with his tie.’

My mother had arranged for the hearse carrying my father’s body to meet us at the crematorium, and the taxi came to collect us at twenty past eight.

‘Your father could not abide a funeral cortège, son,’ she said, as we drew away from the building. ‘It’s all so solemn and so slow. Stops folk going about their business, because they’ll not overtake you. Terrible waste of time and energy for everyone else.’

‘People just want to show their respect, Mum.’

‘Aye. Maybe. He’d not like the fuss, though.’

She wanted to talk about practical arrangements. There would be a cold buffet back at the flat. The girl would let herself in. Did I think I would like to say a few words at the chapel? And perhaps Max could read some words from the Bible?

‘OK,’ said Max. ‘But I don’t really know the Bible.’

She passed him a sheet of paper with the passage printed out in large text. ‘Just say it slowly, son,’ she said. ‘It’ll be fine.’

Had we really not talked about any of this before now? I wrote a few notes on the back of a piece of paper I found in my jacket pocket. There wasn’t time to think much about my father, but perhaps that was in his spirit.

Max sat between my mother and me in the front pew on the left-hand side, looking down at his piece of paper, quietly mouthing to himself the words of the reading. The chapel was modern, starkly beautiful: angular stained glass, white pillars, a minimum of iconography.

The minister made no pretence: he hadn’t known my father and had no stories to tell about him. I suspected my mother had hired him for his honesty. He told a few gentle jokes, was briskly efficient, spoke reassuringly about God.

When my turn came I spoke for ten minutes. I spoke about the love that I felt for my father, about how he had always let me know that I was loved, about how unusual that was for a man of his generation. I wanted, I said, to take the best of him, and pass it on to my own son.

Perhaps I should have spoken about my father’s war record. There were old men there in uniform, comrades-in-arms. But I didn’t know what to say about his time in Korea, didn’t want to think about that version of my father, didn’t want the image of the dead Korean soldier anywhere near me and my memories – much less the beatings.

The chapel was full, far more friends than family, and people listened closely, nodded in recognition as I spoke about his ambition, his honesty, and the oddness of his sense of humour.

I began to tell my father’s favourite joke: a Scotsman, an Englishman and an Irishman; a bee-keeping competition and a television presenter. The joke built slowly towards its obscene punchline; my father would leave the longest of pauses after the feed line: ‘Isn’t that a very small hive for such a large number of bees?’ He would look around the room from face to face, giddy with the anticipation of what was to come, take a theatrical heave on his pipe, start coughing and have to lay it on the table beside him.

I could feel my mother tensing as she recognised the joke, stiff of back in her spare wooden pew, mortified by what I was going to say.

I stopped speaking, sought her eye. My mother looked away, said something to Max.

‘Mum,’ I said aloud.

‘Aye,’ she said, very quietly.

She looked at me very directly then, and for a moment I knew the truth, that losing my father was unbearable to her, that she would give anything not to be sitting here, in front of these people; I could feel for a moment the anxiety and the grief that she buried beneath her implacable surface.
Sandwiches at ten fifteen. The catering girl has a key.
My father was gone, and with it her world.

The chapel was silent. No one so much as coughed. I tried to send her a thought:
This will be OK, Mum. Trust me.

I could see my mother biting back tears. Max leaned into her, put his arm on her back. She nodded, looked down at her hands for a moment, then looked up again and half-smiled. I continued the joke, but cut out before the punchline.

‘My mother and I would like you to join us for coffee and a light lunch after the service. And by the way, and I’m sorry, padre, but …’ I nodded in the minister’s direction, then mouthed the words ‘… Fuck the bees.’

The minister looked discomfited. Here and there people suppressed laughs.

‘You heard me, ladies and gentlemen. Fight the bees.’

It wasn’t funny, but it broke the ice. People laughed far more than the joke deserved. Even my mother laughed a little.

Everyone in the chapel had heard my father tell the bee joke. Even Max. No one ever found it remotely funny, but my father would sit in his smoking chair, his pipe upturned on the occasional table, crying with laughter for minutes on end until eventually you would start laughing too. (‘It’s the bees, you see, son. He just doesn’t care.
Fuck them!
He just wants to win the competition.’)

I spoke then about regret, about how sorry I was that I had not always shown my father the love that he deserved, about how sorry my wife Millicent was that she could not be there. My voice faltered slightly as I explained that Millicent had been detained by a pressing personal issue; I implied, without lying, that it was medical, said we were all hoping for a positive outcome.

Max, I said, had asked me to talk about fishing. I had many happy memories of fishing with my father, I said, and I would forever miss sitting with a rod and line and talking about not very much. I hoped to create many more memories fishing with my son. I spoke about how fishing linked my father and the family’s past with my son and the family’s future.

It wasn’t strictly true: my father and I had not fished together. But it was a funeral, and it seemed like the right thing to say, and when my voice caught and it seemed for a moment as if I could not go on, I looked up and discovered that people were crying. It contained a truth, of sorts.

The minister asked Max to come to the front, and he stood beside me at the lectern and looked at the expectant faces.

‘Love suffers long and is kind love …’ he read, his voice loud and clear.

He stopped for a moment. ‘Is that slow enough, Dad?’

I bent down beside him, whispered, ‘That’s brilliant, Max. You’re doing brilliantly.’

‘Does not envy love does not …’ he said, ‘… parade itself is not puffed up.’

He turned to me.

‘Dad,’ he whispered, ‘everyone’s looking.’

‘I know, love,’ I whispered. ‘Just look back over the tops of their heads. That way they think you’re looking at them, but you don’t get distracted by their eyes. They’re all on your side. Everyone’s on your side.’

‘OK.’ He turned back towards the ranked pews. ‘Love does not behave rudely love does not seek its own is not … provoked love thinks no evil.’ He paused again. ‘Is that what you mean, Dad?’

‘Yes,’ I whispered, ‘no one can tell.’

‘OK. Does not … rejoice in … in-iqu-ity but … rejoices in the truth bears all things … believes all things hopes all things … end-ures all things.’

My mother was mouthing the words under her breath as Max read them; she was composed now, regal almost. Wasn’t this a passage you normally heard at weddings? Still, it made sense at a funeral.

‘Love never fails but whether … there are … pro-phe-cies … they will fail whether there are tongues … they will cease; whether there is knowledge … it will vanish away.’

We went back to our pew. Someone – an army comrade of my father’s, I think – said, ‘Good boy, Max.’ I wondered if he, too, had suffered from untreated trauma. How many more were there like my father?

We stood to sing the twenty-third psalm.
The Lord’s my shepherd, I’ll not want.
Max didn’t know the words, but my mother handed him a hymn book turned to the correct page. I thought about school assembly, and laughed inwardly. Our bald head teacher in his black suit and umbrella, his compensatory moustache and his sadistic punishments. He liked to belt seven-year-old boys found snickering during the service. By the age of eight I was a confirmed atheist. The Lord was not my shepherd.

It had been easier to hate our head teacher than my father. My father had not been a sadist. He had not enjoyed hurting me. And he had stopped: he deserved credit for that.

Max sang sweetly, if a little loudly; my mother gave him an approving little smile and patted his hand. Two women in the row behind were singing a descant, high above the main melody. Max looked around, then mimed putting his fingers in his ears. I realised suddenly that I was struggling, that I had started the song too low; I tried to go up an octave, missed several notes, then finally found the key again.

The organ cut out for the third verse, leaving our voices starkly exposed, reflecting back at us from the white-painted stone.

Yea, though I walk through death’s dark vale

Yet will I fear none ill

I don’t know why the tears came then. Perhaps it was the defiance of the words, the idea of a soul, unbearably alone, refusing to be afraid. Perhaps it was the chapel full of people. We were thinking one thought, it seemed to me then.

My father was gone.

I managed to sing as I cried, the other voices bearing me along as I struggled to get the words out. When I looked round my mother was weeping into her cotton handkerchief. I pulled her tightly to me, held Max close with my other arm, forced myself to keep forming the words.

For thou art with me, and thy rod

And staff me comfort still

I felt only the lack of my father. He was gone.

When the guests had left my mother drove Max and me to Blackford Hill. We walked up past the observatory, stood looking out at the city below us, none of us saying much. We watched handsome women throw plastic balls with fearsome efficiency, saw lurchers and deerhounds launch themselves down the hill in pursuit, tumbling as their teeth made contact with their quarry, giddy with the chase.

Max found a tennis ball in the gorse and offered it to a sun-dazed retriever. The dog nuzzled his hand, sat at his feet panting, eager and exhausted in the heat.

‘Well then, laddie,’ said my mother. ‘Throw it.’

‘Won’t the owner mind?’

‘Throw the ball, son.’

The ball arced high, took a bad bounce and landed again in the gorse at the side of the path. The retriever stood up, looked down the hill after it, then ambled off in another direction, tail high.

The catering girl had tidied up while we were out. My mother set out the rest of my father’s fishing equipment on a bed in the spare room so that Max could choose the pieces that he liked, while she and I sat in the kitchen and ate chocolate cake with silver forks. I offered to stay, but she shook her head, helped herself to another slice of cake.

‘What is it, Mum?’

She waved the question away.

‘Mum?’

‘When your father and I had problems, we overcame them, Alexander.’

‘You did well for yourselves, Mum.’

‘Jesus Christ.’ She said it very quietly, and for a moment I thought I had misheard. But she said it again, and I realised I had not misheard. ‘Jesus Christ, give me strength.’ It was louder this time, half-prayer, half-curse.

‘Alexander,’ she said, with great deliberation, ‘son, where is your wife?’

Had the police broken Millicent yet? Had she confessed to killing the neighbour?
You need to know, Alex.

‘Alexander?’ said my mother again. ‘She’s not written for weeks. I know you are having difficulties. You’re not yourself. Neither’s Max. Will you not speak to me about what’s wrong?’

A second breakdown, I thought. My mother knew about the first, because Millicent had told her. (‘Although,’ she had said, ‘it was not technically a breakdown.’) My mother might believe a second breakdown.