Sarah Caudwell - The Sibyl in Her Grave

He seems at the moment to be the only person who can deal with Daphne — she’s still very upset, poor girl. Understandably, of course, as Isabella was all she had, even if — well, never mind. I brought her back here with me on Tuesday morning and Mrs. Tyrrell fed her on tea and chocolate cake while I rang the undertakers and so on, but it was only when Maurice arrived that she began to calm down at all. I dare say Isabella would have seen this as a sign of his “great spiritual authority.”

He asked Daphne the name of her aunt’s solicitor — a Mr. Godwin, living in London — and rang him up and told him what had happened. It seems that Isabella made a will about two years ago, soon after she moved here, and Mr. Godwin is appointed the executor — it doesn’t say anything about funeral arrangements, except that she wanted to be buried rather than cremated. Mr. Godwin said he couldn’t come down for the funeral, but he’d be getting in touch with Daphne in due course.

He was rather cagey about the provisions of the will, but Maurice thought it sounded as if Daphne didn’t have much to worry about financially — it sets up some kind of trust and she’ll get the income from the whole estate. She doesn’t have much for immediate living expenses — just sixty pounds or so that Isabella had in her handbag — but Maurice has had a word with Mr. Iqbal at the supermarket, and she can go on using Isabella’s account there for the next three or four weeks, until it’s all sorted out.

There didn’t seem to be anyone else to be personally notified of Isabella’s death — she’d apparently never been married, though the name she was born with turns out to have been Isabel Cummings. Her only sister died a year or two ago. But Daphne was very anxious to have it announced in all the newspapers, national as well as local, and wanted Maurice to help her with getting the wording right.

So he told her to write out what she wanted to say and said he’d come back later and look it over. I settled her down in the garden, with a notepad and a couple of ballpoint pens, and left her to work on it.

After three hours or so she came back into the house, with ink all over her face from chewing on the ballpoint, and showed me what she’d written. It ran to about a dozen foolscap pages — at a guess, roughly twice what the Times would allow for a senior statesman or Nobel Prize winner. There wasn’t much in the way of factual detail — when Isabella was born, or where she’d lived, or what she’d actually done that was at all remarkable — but a great deal about what a wonderful, caring person she’d been, and a wide selection of her views on life, death, and the nature of the universe.

I felt I had to say that it was on the long side.

Tears of indignation. Daphne said that Aunt Isabella had been a wonderful person, and she ought to have a proper obituary — meaning, I gather, a full page in the Times . Aunt Isabella would have wanted a proper obituary, not a stupid little two-line notice, as if she were just anybody, and if she couldn’t have one it wasn’t fair.

At this stage, luckily, Maurice came back. I must say, he coped splendidly. Truly gifted and remarkable people, he said, very seldom get the recognition they deserve in their own time. Some of the greatest thinkers and prophets, including Socrates and the founder of the Christian Church, would quite possibly not have been given a full-page obituary in the Times . The Times —and all the other newspapers, even the Guardian —were essentially Establishment minded and conservative in their thinking, and couldn’t be expected to appreciate someone whose ideas leapt over the traditional boundaries. After about an hour of this, Daphne agreed to cut down what she’d written to a length which could be inserted at reasonable cost in the deaths column.

She stayed here all day and Griselda joined us for supper and to offer condolences. I’m afraid that by the time we’d finished I was rather longing to have the house to myself again, but it seemed wretched for Daphne to have to go back and spend the night on her own at the Rectory. The undertakers had removed the body, of course, but even so — I felt I had to ask if she’d like to sleep in the spare bedroom.

“Oh no,” she said, “I have to stay at the Rectory. If Aunt Isabella’s dead, I’m the Custodian.”

“You could go and put out food for the birds,” I said, “and then come back here.”

“Not of the birds,” she said, looking very anxious and solemn. “Of the Book. I’m the Custodian of the Book.”

So I didn’t feel I had to argue any more about it. Griselda very kindly walked back to the Rectory with her, and I went off to bed expecting to go straight to sleep.

But as you know I didn’t, and instead sat up writing you a ridiculous letter all about dirty glasses — please take no notice, it was simply because I was tired.

I woke up next morning worrying about something completely different — who was going to give the eulogy at Isabella’s funeral? You know the kind of thing I mean — a little speech about nice things she’d done and how everyone would miss her.

What really worried me was that if there was no one else Daphne might expect me to do it, and I’d have to say no. It’s all very well for Maurice — clergymen have to get used to saying things they don’t mean, just like lawyers — but I simply didn’t think I could do it.

And then I thought of Ricky. It seemed like rather a brain wave, because he’d known her longer than anyone else in Haver and was actually a friend of hers. So I rang Maurice and asked him to sound out Ricky to make sure he’d say yes if Daphne asked him to do it. Maurice said it would be better if I did the sounding out — he’d already talked to Ricky and felt that he’d like it if I got in touch.

So I rang Ricky and explained that I was helping Daphne with the funeral arrangements and there were one or two things it would be nice to discuss with him. I was really rather glad to have a reason for ringing him — I thought he might be feeling upset about Isabella and want someone to talk to, and I wouldn’t have liked him to feel he couldn’t come round and see me just because I’d been a bit cross with him. On the other hand, not being sure exactly what terms he’d been on with her, I couldn’t very well offer anything like formal condolences.

He came round bringing a bottle of Sancerre, and we sat out in the garden drinking it. I still didn’t quite know what to say about Isabella. In the end, I thought that the best thing was simply to begin by talking about the funeral arrangements, and leave it to him to say how sad he was she was dead, or whatever he wanted to say. Instead of that, he suddenly interrupted me, and said, “Reg — about those shares you thought I told her about.”

Of course I told him not to be silly — it was all water under the bridge and there was no need to mention it.

“No,” he said. “No, I want to explain — I didn’t tell Isabella about those shares.”

“Now really, Ricky,” I said, almost beginning to feel a bit impatient, because after all no one else could have done.

“I didn’t tell her about them,” said Ricky. “She told me.”

Not long after she moved here, and she and Ricky renewed their acquaintance, she’d said that she’d like to give him a present — he was a friend, and she liked to give presents to her friends. The present was simply a free prediction — the shareholders in a particular company were going to have something to celebrate within the next month — he could make as much or as little of it as he liked.

Well, Ricky couldn’t see any reason for the shares to go up, but so that she wouldn’t be offended he bought a few. A couple of weeks later there was a takeover bid, and they doubled in value almost overnight. By the time Maurice and Griselda and I asked him for his advice, this had happened three or four times and he thought that the best thing he could do for us was to give us the benefit of Isabella’s predictions.