Repeat It Today With Tears (22 page)

My eyes are still shut tight.

‘Susie, try and listen, it’s important to me. Jack, John, your father, was always troubled that because he was away at the war he could not carry out some special wishes his mother had, for her own funeral. He had a little sister, you see, but she died. Her name was Ora. His mother wanted to be buried with Ora but because Jack was away at sea and it was wartime he could not make the arrangements.’

I think this woman is raving mad. My father’s body, his long bony el Greco legs cannot be buried in a grave in the ground, wrapped round in a shroud rag. They cannot be weighted down under the dank crow-black earth, those long and energetic legs. And between them his thing, and so often it seemed done and finished like an old flower stalk discarded from the vase. She says Ystradyfwog but I have been to the churchyard in Whit-stable where my grandmother was laid; I know that there was a heap where the dead flowers from the graves and the urns were thrown. This heap was beside the place you drew water to fill the urns and in the next field there was the wooden scout hut and grass where insects buzzed and flicked in the midday heat. Discarded there in their own death mound, petals gone brown and stalks white and limp and fallen over. And yet so easily restored I think, a pinch of sugar in the water, and my father ready once more to beat my sin not out of me but sweetly in again. He cannot be weighted down under dark good night; she makes no sense. Non sense in the things she says.

Mad woman, I am warning you.

‘The headstone is rather special. I found an elderly man working locally who had trained with Eric Gill at Capel-y-ffin.’

John ap Rhys Owen lies beside Ora, beloved infant sister.

She is mad. She is trying to make me believe outlandish land of my fathers’ nonsense. Only non sense can be made out of her District of Ystradyfwog nonsense, sans serif sans sense to say that my father love is in the oblivion of the earth, sans senses, sans eyes, sans taste of me, sans flesh.

I have warned you. What must I do to make you listen, any of you with your sans serif sans sense Gill sans everything nonsense. And before they can make me see or listen to anymore of their outlandish non senses I have howled so that the lost mind of the old prize fighter in the next wing will hear and understand and I have hurled the cake at the wall across the room and it hits with the sound of a wet rubber ball thrown in the playground and I have jumped and run from the high bed. In moments I am in the bathroom and I have locked the door and although I know that they will simply unlock it from the other side it will not be before I have sought that third tile up which is three in on the middle row. Such negligence in buildings and works is the beginning of the end at the Springfield Hospital; it signals the new order when us inmates will find the doors unlocked but the world outside cold and only the red plastic warmth of Woolworth’s cafeteria in which to huddle away our days.

I take down my cracked tile and its white vitreous edge is as efficient on thirsting flesh as any broken glass or blade.

O

Sister Anna Maria says that it is a pity I am unable to come out and attend a Mass. She would take me and accept full responsibility, she says, but Herne the Hunter says no. The next best thing she can do, she feels, is to bring me a copy of the roneod Mass sheet from each Sunday. I can read it at my leisure and I am to be sure to ask her about anything that I do not understand. I thank her most sincerely but in private in my head I must admit that I know enough of the disciplines of Sister Anna Maria’s church to feel guilty that I let her befriend me, even though I know what I have done and what one day I will be about to do. There is one sin that I have yet to commit; it follows with a certain niceness on the other ones. And plenty of torment I have endured in between times; but no more than I deserved. In any case, I do not think that Sister Anna Maria is the sort of person who would wish to rescind her kindness, even when she discovers how truly bad I am.

How shocking I would be to other people if I ever did tell them the whole truth. I do not shock myself though, I never
have. You see, when my father had me in his embrace, arms and legs and hair all wound around, I used to cling on for dear life in my rapture, thinking only, ‘This is what I was made for. This is why I was born.’ And everything outside the act of possession was disengaged from me and my clasped love, as the rest of the fairground seems when the merry go round is turning.

In the Mass sheets, sometimes smudged, brought by Sister Anna Maria, I liked particularly the passage included in the sheet for the second Sunday of Lent, from St Paul’s letter to the Philippians. I think he may have been somewhat weary at the time of writing; he says:
‘I have told you often, and I repeat it today with tears, there are many who are behaving as the enemies of Christ. They are destined to be lost.’

I asked her whether it was the Rembrandt St Paul and she said that she was not too sure but probably because early on there had been just the one Paul; though subsequently, she adds, you had the Passionist and St Paul Aurelian and so on. Rembrandt’s St Paul looks old and weary and ascetic; his head is a bone dome and he seems to be working indefatigably to finish the task in front of him before death claims his entire haggard bag of bones old self and stops him. On the death of William Morris the doctor said that the deceased, so unfailingly driven and engaged, died simply of being William Morris. Rembrandt’s St Paul looks as though he will go the same way.

Considering that I am deemed insane the volume of facts that I have retained in parts of my memory is quite remarkable. For instance, as well as the major speeches from
Richard II
I still have the streets of Chelsea, squares 5C–5D, 6C–6D,
page 76
of the
A–Z of London
, off by heart. I have begun, in finely sharpened fine pencil, to draw myself a map on the end papers of Jack’s
book on Chagall. Like a maiden lady planning a long journey I pore over my map for hours on end. I have put a cross for the Church of Our Most Holy Redeemer and St Thomas More. If I can get hold of a blue pencil I am going to indicate the plaques for Captain Scott at number 56 and poor Christina Rossetti round the corner on Cheyne Walk.

The river, you know, is not kind. It never has been really. It is a bit of a serpent, winding its wide way.

It is my task to close quite soon. We are back to letter writing again, are we not? Must stop now because… and then I, the writer, might make some cheery cheerio reference to what I am off to do. We know what I am going to do, you and I. I hope that you have understood enough to understand. Jack promised me that it would all be all right but sometimes, I must confess, I have thought that he, slipping easy into his old philanderer’s honeyed ways, had lied to me. Now I see that it will be all right, after all. ‘Nearly home,’ he said to me as arm in arm we retraced hushed Oakley Street on the night that he comforted me on Albert Bridge.

Nearly home. Sometimes these days he is so close to me that I feel the gentle alteration in the air as he leans over my shoulder and tells me to describe what I see in the painting on the page and involuntarily I smile and Bonnie Jean, coming in with the water jug, says she always knew that I would get better.

Last month I was allowed to attend my mother’s funeral. It was at the crematorium at Streatham Vale. The chapel there is built of engineering bricks, their surface hard and shiny so that they are never absorbing or softened by the autumn sunlight. I noted that Ron looked much cleaner, now that his hair had turned quite white. My sister’s husband and her two meaty boys were
attendant upon her in her wheelchair. She had some malfunction of the heart and so they gave her someone else’s; she is grotesquely puffed up by steroid treatments.

Before too long Ron and Lin will both be dead. The silent husband, unreconstructed by his expensive suits, will betake himself to Spain. Then, all connections will be cast away. I can return, revenant, to walk through the Chelsea streets on an evening of spring. In Margaretta Terrace the child with the rocking horse curtains will be long grown and gone to make its fortune. But the camellia may still be there, blooming and dropping its waxy pink petals over the wall to the pavement beneath.

I will carry on until I am outside the Phene Arms. Then I will look up at the room in Oakley Street and I shall see the outline of my father’s figure against the window; tall, and the shoulders slightly stooped.