The Whole Day Through (14 page)

‘No point. You’ve got nothing pink to wear. I looked.’

It was a large church and two thirds full. They were handed service sheets and took seats towards the back. Ben saw three of the nurses from the ward there, all in pink tops, and one of the doctors, who he was relieved to see was looking flushed in sober work clothes. He knew no one else. Bobby, however, seemed to know lots of people and was much waved at. While he left the pew to hug someone, Ben focussed on the service sheet.

There was a photograph on the front of Shirley on the day of her wedding to the bisexual geography teacher
from whom she had contracted HIV. Her guide dog stood between them, his harness handle decorated with flowers. The husband had been among the unlucky ones, like Laura’s Tris, who sickened and died in the early Eighties. By the time Ben first became aware of Shirley she was very much the merry widow, as galvanized into AIDS activism by bereavement as she had once been goaded by blindness into campaigning on behalf of people with disabilities.

Ben glanced at the hymns to reassure himself he knew them then looked around him. Never having been to Lourdes or Knock, he had never seen so many wheelchairs in one church. Or walking sticks. Or guide dogs. Perhaps as a tribute to Shirley, those with guide dogs had been encouraged to sit on either side of the central aisle so their dogs, all of them impeccably behaved and sitting upright beside their owner’s chairs, formed a kind of guard of honour for the priest as she walked to the front to welcome everyone and announce the first hymn.

Bobby stopped socializing and dodged back to his seat as the organ struck up with
All Things Bright and Beautiful
.

‘How do you know all these people?’ Ben asked him.

‘I dunno,’ Bobby said. ‘I live here, don’t I?’ And he started to sing, vigorously, slightly out of key and not letting his difficulty in keeping up with the words on the page get in the way of a good tune. After
Lord God made them all
he gave up on Mrs Alexander, gave up trying to
sing words he couldn’t remember and merely sang
La La La
to the verses and rejoined the text for each chorus, which caused several of their neighbours to turn round and smile.

Ben was happy to see he was no longer suffering from his little problem. Knowing Bobby, he would not have trusted the insecticide to work on a single application and would have been reapplying at restless intervals throughout the day and was probably feeling a little scorched down below.

The priest entered her pulpit during the last verse and, once there was silence, invited them all to sit. ‘Don’t worry,’ she went on. ‘I know how fond Shirley was of a good party so this won’t take long.’ There was a flurry of laughter. ‘Our friend, Shirley Burgess,’ she went on, ‘was an extraordinary woman. Confined to a wheelchair until her late teens, totally blind all her life, she changed more lives and made more friendships in a year than most of us could hope to do in a lifetime. Yes, she suffered when she was losing Paul and yes, she suffered towards the end of her long battle with the effect of the HIV virus but if I had to choose one word to typify Shirley it would be
Undefeated
. It will come as no surprise to anyone who knew her that she left nothing unplanned for her memorial service and certainly wasn’t going to trust a mere priest to organize it. That hymn we just sang, and every word you hear until I get my way and say some prayers at the very end, was chosen by her as her loving message to all of you. None of you was at
her funeral because she insisted that be a completely private affair and because, as she kept repeating to any of us in earshot, “The death bit is completely unimportant.”’

The priest sat down and the lower lectern was approached by an extremely old blind man Ben didn’t know but often saw being led down the high street by his dog. Dog at his side now, he fumbled noisily to ascertain where the microphone was, raised a laugh by saying, ‘Sorry, Shirley,’ then produced a sheet of Braille. ‘The first reading is from the words of Henry Scott Holland,’ he said, ‘who was a canon of St Paul’s Cathedral and died in 1918.’ He then turned his head from side to side in that way the sightless do when gathering in an audience. ‘Death is nothing at all,’ he began. ‘I have only slipped into the next room. I am I and you are you. Whatever we were to each other, that we are still.’

Ben listened just long enough to recognize the passage as one their mother had chosen for her own funeral. He glanced at Bobby but he was simply listening, the way he tended to, with his head a little on one side. (Mum always worried this meant that he might be deaf, although his hearing was only slightly below average.) The choice of reading had surprised Ben because it was so forthright in its avowal of an afterlife and he never thought their mother had believed in such things. But death weakened many resolves and perhaps she simply wanted to, or died hoping.

A local handbell group performed next. In the echoing acoustic, their ringing seemed merely loud and blurred at first but then Ben realized he was hearing a sort of introduction. The melody, when it emerged, was
Climb Ev’ry Mountain
, which raised many knowing smiles and tumultuous applause at its end. There was another hymn,
Lord of the Dance
, whose words had always made Ben cringe. Bobby laughed out loud at the verse that rhymed
whipped
and
stripped
. Then a Scotswoman in a wheelchair declaimed Mary Frye’s
Do Not Stand at my Grave and Weep
, which drew murmurs of appreciation. And then, to Ben’s surprise, Bobby stood, walked solemnly to the lectern and began to speak, his voice a little shaky with nerves at first.

‘Shirley taught me,’ he told them all. ‘She got me through my GCSEs in Maths and English. Finally! So I could get a job selling coffees and papers instead of just washing up and putting out rubbish bags. Being taught English by someone who does all her reading with her fingers was very…’ He broke off, searching for a word. ‘Was very humbling. I think Shirley wanted me to read this poem because I had to write an essay on it and I really, really hated writing essays.’

There was kind laughter, which he joined in, and a few people, who presumably knew they were brothers, glanced round at Ben. Bobby reached into his jacket pocket and produced a piece of paper which he unfolded. ‘
First Sight
,’ he announced, ‘by Philip Larkin.’ He took
an audible breath in and out and in again then started. ‘Lambs that learn to walk in snow…’

He still didn’t find reading easy or pleasurable and, as always, he had to follow the words with a pointing finger so as not to lose his place, which made for an unintended caesura between lines as his finger travelled from the end of one to the start of the next. So
Meet a vast unwelcome, know Nothing but a sunless glare
came out with a new sense as
Meet a vast unwelcome “No!” Nothing but a…
He had clearly been rigorously coached, by Shirley presumably, with a tapping of her thickly ringed hand on a tabletop, in the idea of metre –
AS they WAIT beSIDE the EWE
– which rather overwhelmed Larkin’s understated evocation of wonder, and Bobby’s recitation nearly broke down altogether, faced with the challenge of
immeasurable
. But it was astonishing and Ben wished their mother could have lived to see it.

Shirley, wise old bird, had known exactly the effect her combination of reader and poem would have and Bobby walked back up the aisle, still seraphic in his thirties, beaming with proud relief, to antiphonal nose-blows. The organ was playing for the last hymn, accompanied now by the handbells to make a big finish and, standing with the rest, Ben stepped outside the row to let Bobby back in and was greeted with a bear hug and a wave of his brother’s woody-sweet cologne.

The hymn was
Be Thou My Vision
and, while Bobby la la’d gutsily at his side, Ben found himself thinking not just of their mother but of Laura and Chloë and the mess
he had made, and was about to make, of both their lives and of all the time he had so foolishly wasted, time for the building of memories and the getting and raising of children, and of all the good that might yet be wrested from the wreckage. He found himself completely unmanned and had to fumble for a handkerchief and sit down long before the last of the bells had jangled.

The weather had changed in their hour in the cathedral. Clouds had rolled in and the air, so honeyed earlier, had become prickly and oppressive. There was a rumble of thunder as Mummy was shuffling to the car. She had taken to buying
going-out shoes
a size too big for her as they were easier to get on and off, and they clacked on the tarmac as she progressed. ‘Storm coming,’ she said with approval. She liked storms; the more crackly and electrical the better.

Laura had been terrified of lightning as a child and no amount of placid statistics from Dad or explanation from Mummy of the positive and negative charges on either side of a thundercloud helped. In vain they tried to make a storm fun by encouraging her to work out how far away the storm centre was based on thunder travelling at twelve miles a minute and lightning at one hundred and eighty-six thousand a second. Their well meaning
efforts were undercut by their chuckles – they both loved storms and, Laura now suspected, were turned on by them like teenagers in a horror film – and by the simple fact that her fear lay beyond the reach of reason, like fear of flying. It was no use being told how unlikely it was to be struck down by a bolt from the blue. She was scared of the suddenness of lighting, its lack of rhythmic predictability and its silence. She had long ago learnt to hide her terror but she had never lost it.

A bossy girlfriend whisked her off to a great house party in the Cevennes once. Laura was the only unattached female, the only unattached male was too young for her, too gay and sullenly in love with someone’s husband, and there was a storm, quite the most violent summer storm she had ever shuddered through. She was no dog lover, had never overcome her disappointment that there were even more dogs in Paris than in London. And the hosts had a Great Dane, an imperious, black-splodged bitch called Célimène that wore a collar from Hermès and showed no interest in Laura until the storm began. Then, while everyone else whooped and shrieked and went swimming in the rain, Célimène sought her out, sensing a fellow sufferer. Laura had never seen an animal so afraid. The great beast lost all haughtiness as it cowered against her knees under the kitchen table, teeth chattering, tail beneath its legs. And in her self-conscious attempts to comfort it, Laura felt herself the mistress of her own fear by comparison.

As they drove back around the Close, out under its arched gate and back up St Swithun’s Street, the skies grew darker and darker and the thunder and lightning became more frequent and closer together. Mummy wound her window down and breathed like a wine taster. ‘It always smells fantastic just before summer rain,’ she said. ‘Don’t you find? Jasmine and compost heaps.’

The rain began to fall as they were driving into the garage and by the time she had unlocked the gate and they had made their stately progress through the garden, their dresses were wet through.

She set the kettle to boil for couscous then hurried upstairs to towel her hair and put on something dry. It came as no surprise to come down to find Mummy’s clothes left in a damp heap at the foot of the stairs and to see her in the garden, pottering back and forth with a pair of secateurs and a ball of twine. She was tying back flowers the rain threatened to topple over and deadheading where necessary, but she was also delighting in the simple animal pleasure of feeling a summer downpour coursing over her skin.

Laura paused in mixing her mother’s gin and tonic and pouring herself a glass of wine, to watch and marvel. She could not imagine reaching eighty, a whole thirty-five years hence, and facing the inevitable rebellion of her body, everything stretching and heading south and dewlaps and wattles and wrinkles and greyness, yet still taking pleasure in something so entirely commonplace
and physical. The old woman before her presented such a red-blooded contrast to all the walking-sticked worshippers in the cathedral earlier, seemingly united in a retreat from the body into things of the spirit.

There was no point taking her out a drink as the rain would dilute it in seconds, so Laura simply made sure there was a bath towel at the ready for her return indoors then set about making their supper. She tossed a handful of frozen peas into dry couscous then poured hot water and a little olive oil over them and shredded a mixture of dried apricot, pistachios, spring onion and mint while she waited for the couscous to rehydrate and the peas to thaw. Then she tossed a punnet of raspberries in vanilla sugar then slid a pair of lamb chops under the grill.

She was fond of food and eating but cooking bored her and years of living on a budget in a confined space had taught her to favour meals that were largely a matter of careful shopping and cunning assembly over menus that involved long oven hours and the production of lingering heat and smells.

While the chops began to sizzle, she turned on the radio in the hope of distraction from the storm. A Prom had started, which she normally enjoyed. But it was the broadcast of a new composition. She persevered for a minute or two but found it impossibly angular so she switched channels and made do with a soothingly impenetrable discussion on the relative psychological merits of a variety of spiritual disciplines.

A lightning flash lit the garden for a second and set the radio crackling and made her jump as though a gun had gone off. A great whump of thunder was followed by more lightning almost at once and all the power turned off and on again, which would mess up both their clock radios. She glanced anxiously through the open door. Mummy was looking more than ever like something from a radical
King Lear
, with leaves and petals sticking to her breasts and thighs and her hair flattened and darkened by the rain and a growing pile of clippings on her walker for feeding to the compost heap when she was done.

Laura sipped her wine, ate one of the buttery cheese straws on which they had both become keen, then thoughtlessly drank the rest of the glass and topped it up. She reflected how lucky they were to have a garden that wasn’t overlooked. There was a road to the front and left, the chasm of the railway cutting to the back and their only neighbour was the happy-clappy church, which had high stained glass and no windows that could be peered through, disapprovingly or otherwise.