Anne Doughty - Last Summer in Ireland

Intensely aware of the long past, I stood in sheer delight, watching the high white clouds stream out of the west against a pure blue sky, their fleeting shadows racing across the grass like companies of phantom horsemen summoned into battle.

‘You’ve a great imagination.’

I could hear my mother’s voice, as clearly as if she had been standing beside me. If you wrote the words on a page, they would look harmless enough. They might even be read as a compliment. But the written word can’t conjure up that characteristic intonation, that inflection of the voice, that habitual edge of criticism; nor can it show the tightening of the lips, the ironic smile, the upward movement of the chin and the dismissive shake of the head.

The last thing you ever did where Mother was concerned was take what she said at its face value.

And now she is gone. After all the months of waiting, of knowing the diagnosis she refused to acknowledge, the months of phoning and visiting hospital and then hospice, of trying to behave better than one felt. Yet when the end came, it was still a shock. I didn’t even suspect anything from Sandy’s tone when I picked up the phone last Friday evening.

‘I’ve been trying to get you since five-thirty. I tried Robert Fairclough’s, but you’d gone.’

‘Yes, I went for a drink with Pat at the Festival Hall. She’s over for the Tyroneweave Exhibition.’

The pause at the other end was only momentary.

‘Mother passed away at twenty-five past five.’

Passed away. To write that the men and women who once stood upon this mound had passed away was appropriate enough, but for my plain-speaking sister to use the words was more of a sudden shock than the news itself. But we choose our words to match our feelings and when it came to the point, Sandy’s feelings were clearly not what she had expected. Waiting in the queue for security at Heathrow next morning she still sounded totally distraught.

‘I’m sorry, Dee, I haven’t the remotest idea what to do at a time like this. There’s a Which paperback I meant to buy.’

She looked so uneasy and so unhappy I’d have liked to put my arms round her, but that’s not something you can do with Sandy. I couldn’t do it when she was nine, or nineteen, and I certainly couldn’t do it now she was twenty-nine.

Our mother’s fierce hostility to physical contact of any kind between women had gone deep with Sandy and this was no time to upset her any further. All I could do was reassure her that I knew the rules, the unwritten ones that guide the community at times like this. I knew every line that would have to be spoken and every gesture that would have to be made from years of observation and hours of listening to Mother as she assessed the relative success or otherwise of the many funerals she had attended.

‘I’m prepared to do it their way, if I can manage it,’ I said, as we crossed the wet and windy tarmac. ‘How do you feel about it?’

‘I don’t,’ she shouted back over the whine of the engines. ‘Just let’s get it over with. Tell me what to do and I’ll do it. I won’t be happy till I’m walking back up that corridor.’

Sandy was as good as her word and Matthew, my husband, as reliable as ever. We performed the prescribed rituals in the prescribed fashion. Even Mother might have admitted that her funeral ‘went off very well.’ After it was all over I was left with no more than a handful of fragments and images flickering inside my head like the fleeing shadows on the grass.

I didn’t get much sleep in the two nights before the funeral, so on the day itself I seemed to see everything in the brightest Technicolor, with the sound turned up. The incredible noise of elderly relatives drinking tea or whiskey, according to sex, in the sitting room. The fallen petals from the wreaths tramped into the hall carpet. The bright green wing of Sandy’s eyeshadow. The frayed ends hanging down from the giant umbrella produced by the funeral director.

I felt slightly drunk most of the time, though I left the actual alcohol to Sandy and Matthew. Nevertheless, I felt very much in command of the situation. Like an anthropologist who has studied her tribe long and hard, I knew exactly what I should do at each point as the elaborate ritual unwound. I think I even managed to play my part with conviction. Matthew said I did it very well. Sandy was quite unambiguous in her praise: ‘You were just fantastic, Dee. Given how you really feel, you were incredible. I don’t know how you did it.’

In one way, it was all very easy. You simply didn’t allow your true feelings to get in the way. You let people have what they wanted, say what they wanted to say, believe what they wanted to believe, because that was what was important for them. Truth of any kind was the enemy, not to be allowed within the charmed circle of mourners and mourned.

In particular, Mother’s dying, lengthy, painful and diminishing, had to be rewritten to their liking. She had fought every step of the way, refused all the help and support the hospice had so richly offered, been critical and unpleasant to everyone she had come in contact with and repeated endlessly that her only wish was ‘to be out of this damn place and back to work’. But such facts, however true, are not relevant to those who gather to mourn.

The church was very full and very hushed. In contrast, the minister’s voice was very loud. It seemed to oscillate in harmony with the sudden drumming of rain on the roof and against the windows of the north aisle. I found its resonant boom strangely soothing. But the more it went on, the sleepier I got. I was listening to poetry in a foreign language. I was sure it was very good and no doubt apt to the occasion, but what was I supposed to say at the end of it all?

I sang the hymn vigorously, took deep breaths as I had been taught at choir practice and hoped that would help me to get through the address. We were asked to be seated. I composed myself.

‘Pearl Henderson, our dearly beloved sister in Christ, devout member of the church, unfailing servant of the Lord, whose triumph over death, whose courage in adversity was surely an inspiration to us all, goes before us into glory . . .’

As the words cascaded down upon me, I couldn’t quite grasp what was happening. I just kept looking at the toes of my new black patent shoes. Even though I had polished them the previous evening, they seemed to be very dusty. I wondered if it was the shininess that attracted the dust and whether they would have been less dusty if I hadn’t polished them.

‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, if the Lord doesn’t have her the devil must.’ I was in the school playground, on a March day, bright with sun, the dust blowing in a sudden breeze, the long arc of a skipping rope curving before me, the chant of children’s voices.

But it was not children’s voices I was hearing, it was still the minister. Quieter now, more conversational, he was reading from his notes: ‘Pearl Henderson was the youngest member of a churchgoing family. Hers was a home where Jesus Christ was known and loved and Pearl brought that knowledge to her family life here in Armagh after her marriage. It was the faith and care of Christ that sustained her when, with her two children still very young, she lost her husband and bravely took up the role of breadwinner.’

One of the undertaker’s men had a dreadful cough. I looked across at him as he tried to muffle it in a huge striped handkerchief, but the more he tried the worse it got. By the time he’d recovered himself, the well-articulated voice had reached the 1980s. Mother’s active phase of building up the business gives way to ‘the opportunity for further public service through the Business and Professional Women’s Club of which she was secretary for many years’.