Питер Ловси - Do Not Exceed the Stated Dose [Stories]

“He’s not going to come back, is he, Mum?”

Wendy shook her head. She was only beginning to think about what happened next. There would be a trial, of course, and she would try to shield Norman from the publicity. He was so impressionable.

“Will they hang him?”

“I think it’s time for your bed, young man,” Maud said. “You’ve got to be strong. Your Mum will need your support more than ever now.”

The boy asked, “How did the dime get in the pudding, Grandma Morris?”

Wendy snapped out of her thoughts of what was to come and stared at her mother-in-law.

Maud went to the door, and for a moment it appeared as if she was reaching to put on her coat prior to leaving, but she had already promised to stay the night. Actually she was taking something from one of the pockets.

It was a Christmas card, a little bent at the edges now. Maud handed it to Wendy. “It was marked ‘private and confidential’ but it had my name, you see. I opened it thinking it was for me. It came last week. The address was wrong. They made a mistake over the house number. The postman delivered it to the wrong Mrs Morris.”

Wendy took the card and opened it.

“The saddest thing is,” Maud continued to speak as Wendy read the message inside, “he is the only son I have left, but I really can’t say I’m sorry it turned out this way. I know what he did to you, Wendy. His father did the same to me for nearly forty years. I had to break the cycle. I read the card, love. I had no idea. I couldn’t let this chance pass by. For your sake, and the boy’s.”

A tear rolled down Wendy’s cheek. Norman watched as the two women hugged. The card drifted from Wendy’s lap and he pounced on it immediately. His eager eyes scanned every word.

My Darling Wendy,

Since returning home, my thoughts are filled with you, and the brief time we shared together. It’s kind of strange to admit, but I sometimes catch myself wishing the Germans made you a widow. I can’t stand to think of you with any other guy.

My heart aches for news of you. Not a day goes by when I don’t dream of being back in your arms. My home, and my heart, will always be open for you.

Take care and keep safe,

Nick

Nick Saint (Ex-33rd US Reserve),

221C Plover Avenue,

Mountain Home,

Idaho

P.S. The dime is a tiny Christmas present for Norman to remember me by.

Norman looked up at his Grandmother and understood what she had done, and why. He didn’t speak. He could keep a secret as well as a grown-up. He was the man of the house now, at least until they got to America.

During the singing of the Twenty-Third Psalm, the man next to me gave me a nudge and said, “What do you think of the wooden overcoat?”

Uncertain what he meant, I lifted an eyebrow.

“The coffin,” he said.

I swayed to my left for a view along the aisle. I could see nothing worth interrupting the service for. Danny Fox’s coffin stood on trestles in front of the altar looking no different from others I had seen. On the top was the wreath from his widow, Merle, in the shape of a large heart of red roses with Danny’s name picked out in white. Not to my taste, but I wasn’t so churlish as to mention this to anyone else.

“No handles,” my informant explained.

So what? I thought. Who needs handles? Coffins are hardly ever carried by the handles. I gave a nod and continued singing.

“That isn’t oak,” the man persisted. “That’s a veneer. Underneath, it’s chipboard.”

I pretended not to have heard, and joined in the singing of the third verse — the one beginning “Perverse and foolish oft I strayed” — with such commitment that I drew shocked glances from the people in front.

“She’s going to bury Danny in the cheapest box she could buy.”

This baboon was ruining the service. I sat for the sermon in a twisted position presenting most of my back to him.

But the damage had been done. My response to what was said was blighted. If John Wesley in his prime had been giving the Address I would still have found concentration difficult. Actually it was spoken by a callow curate with a nervous grin who revealed a lamentable ignorance about the Danny I had known. “A decent man” was a questionable epithet in Danny’s case; “a loyal husband” extremely doubtful; “generous to a fault” a gross misrepresentation. I couldn’t remember a time when the departed one had bought a round of drinks. If the curate felt obliged to say something positive, he might reasonably have told us that the man in the coffin had been funny and a charmer capable of selling sand to a sheik. I cared a lot about Danny, or I wouldn’t be here, but just because he was dead we didn’t have to award him a halo.

My contacts with the old rogue went back thirty years. Danny and I first met back in the sixties, the days of National Service, in the Air Force at a desolate camp on Salisbury Plain called Netheravon, and even so early in his career, still in his teens, Danny had got life running the way he wanted. He’d formed a poker school with a scale of duties as the stakes and, so far as I know, served his two years without ever polishing a floor, raking out a stove or doing a guard duty. No one ever caught him cheating, but his silky handling of the cards should have taught anyone not to play with him. He seduced (an old-fashioned word that gives a flavour of the time) the only WRAF officer on the roll and had the use of her pale blue Morris Minor on Saturdays to support his favourite football team, Bristol Rovers. Weekend passes were no problem. You had to smile at Danny.

I came across him again twelve years later, in 1973, on the sea front at Brighton dressed in a striped blazer, white flannels and a straw hat and doing a soft-shoe dance to an old Fred Astaire number on an ancient wind-up gramophone with a huge brass horn. I had no idea Danny was such a beautiful mover. So many people had stopped to watch that you couldn’t get past without walking on the shingle. It was a deeply serious performance that refused to be serious at all. At a tempo so slow that any awkwardness would have been obvious, he shuffled and glided and turned about, tossing in casual gull-turns and toe-taps, dipping, swaying and twisting with the beat, his arms windmilling one second, seesawing the next, and never suggesting strain. After he’d passed the hat around, we went for a drink and talked about old times and former comrades. I paid, of course. After that we promised to stay in touch. We met a few times. I went to his second wedding in 1988 — a big affair, because Merle had a sister and five brothers, all with families. They were a crazy bunch. The reception, on a river steamer, was a riot. I’ve never laughed so much.

Danny was fifty-seven when he died.

We sang another hymn and the curate said a prayer and led us out for the Committal. The pall-bearers hoisted the coffin and brought it along the aisle. I didn’t need the nudge I got from my companion as they passed. I could see for myself that the wood was a cheap veneer. I wasn’t judgmental. Quite possibly Danny had left Merle with nothing except his antique gramophone and some debts.

“She had him insured for a hundred and fifty K,” Mean-mouth insisted on telling me as we followed the coffin along a path between the graves. “She could have given him a decent send-off.”

I told him curtly that I wasn’t interested. God knows, I was trying not to be. At the graveside, I stepped away from him and took a position opposite. Let him bend someone else’s ear with his malice.

Young sheep were bleating in the field beside the churchyard as the coffin was lowered. The clouds parted and we felt warmth on our skins. I remembered Danny dancing on the front that summer evening at Brighton. Bon voyage , old buccaneer, I thought. You robbed all of us of something, some time, but we came in numbers to see you off. You left us glittering memories, and that wasn’t a bad exchange.