Rosie Thomas - If My Father Loved Me

There were perhaps twenty-five people in all. Muted piped organ music whispered around us.

On being given the nod by the crematorium officiator, who wasn’t exactly a vicar and who certainly wasn’t lively enough to qualify as master of ceremonies, one of the cousins hobbled to the lectern. He read that passage from Canon Henry Scott Holland about not having gone away, but being in the next room, still with you. I thought it was a fine and comforting piece of writing, but unfortunately untrue. Ted was completely gone. The shadow of himself that he had lately become had followed the younger man, with his Spencer Tracy looks, his laugh and his silk ties and his perfumes, off and away out of our reach.

Lola’s shoulders shook and she pressed the Kleenex to her face. I reached around Jack to rest my hand in the smooth dip between her shoulder blades.

After the reading there was a hymn, ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’, which I had chosen for no more significant reason than that Ted sometimes hummed it while he was shaving. He would turn his face from side to side, catching the best of his reflection in the mirror above the bathroom sink as he whisked on the soap lather with an old bristle brush. Then with his lips twisted aside he would razor a long, crisp channel through the white foam, all the way from his cheekbone to his jaw. The humming was counterpointed in my memory by the dripping and clanking of pipes in our chilly bathroom.

Or maybe I never actually saw any of this ritual, only imagined that I had. And maybe I also imagined the conspiratorial half-wink he gave himself as the words of the hymn played on in his head, all things wise and wonderful , as if he were saying to himself, that’s you, my boy.

After the hymn the officiator gave a short address. Lola and the cousins and I had provided as much background as we could about Ted and his life, and it was a good attempt at a tribute, given that he had never met him. Practice helped, I supposed, since the man was probably doing this several times a day. He spoke of Ted’s popularity, his love of life and its opportunities, and his gifts as a perfumer. We were just shuffling to our feet again, to the first notes of the organ voluntary that the cousins had suggested to accompany the coffin’s slow slide between the curtains, when Jack scrambled past me. I thought for a second that he might be going to be sick, which had been one of his specialities as a younger child, but he pushed me back when I went to follow him. He marched up to the lectern and took his place behind it, and the recorded music was abruptly switched off. Lola and I glanced nervously at each other. He had given no indication that he wanted to make his own tribute and I regretted that I hadn’t thought of asking him.

Jack cleared his throat. ‘My grandad,’ he began. We waited in silence. ‘My grandad told me when I was just a little kid that pigeons are vermin.’

After another beat of silence I heard from the back of the room a snuffle that might have been suppressed laughter. I stared hard at Jack, seeing his stiff hair and the way his baby’s face would settle into the aggrieved lines of pre-adolescence. He didn’t blink.

‘At our other house before … before Mum and me and Lola moved, they used to sit on all the upstairs windowsills and on the gutters, and Grandad didn’t like all the … all the … mess they left. He pointed at it when I was going to bed one night and said it was smelly and they were dirty. And I looked at their feet, the ones that were standing on the windowsill, and they were all, like, scabby. Their plumage was dirty as well.’

This all came out in a breathless rush. Plumage was a very Jack word. Lola was signalling to him, little patting movements with her hands that meant slow down, speak slower, but he didn’t see her. His gaze was fixed on the back of the room.

‘I said, are all birds dirty, then? And he said, I remember it really well, he said no, birds are beautiful, they’ve got the gift of the air, all the freedom of the sky and it’s just the poor pigeons who live in London and eat rubbish and everything and sit on top of our dirt that makes them dirty. So they’re vermin in the same way as rats, because rats are really clean creatures, in fact. He told me that as well. Anyway …’

Jack paused and now he did look at his audience, letting his eyes slide over us. He had got into his stride. We all sat without moving.

‘Anyway, after that I got interested in birds. I liked the idea of the freedom of the sky. I wanted to think about them not being all vermin with diseased feet from living on our mess. So I started watching them and learning about them, and he was right, they are beautiful. Seabirds especially because the sea belongs to them as well as the sky, if you think about it. So it’s because of him. That I like birds. I owe it to him.’ He nodded sideways to the coffin under the purple drape. ‘That’s what I wanted to say, actually. Grandad knew about things. He didn’t always let you know that he knew, but he still knew. He was interesting, like that.’

The rush of confidence subsided as quickly as it had come. Jack’s voice trailed away and his gaze returned to the floor. We sat in silence for a few long seconds, waiting to see if he wanted to add anything else. At last the officiator cleared his throat and stepped forward, and at the same moment Jack’s head jerked up and he swung round to face the coffin. ‘I love you, Grandad,’ he blurted out. There were tears on his eyelashes. Then he turned round and marched back to his place between Lola and me. I tried to put my arm round his shoulders but he shook it off.

The piped music started up again. The curtains at the back of the chapel slowly parted and with a faint mechanical creaking the coffin slid forward. I kept my eyes fixed on it, feeling the faint tremors of Lola’s weeping.

Then I began to think about my mother.

I could remember her calling me in from the garden – Sadie? Sa-aa-die! – where I was playing some complicated and solitary only-child’s game.

I was ten when she died. I have so few memories of her and yet this tiny moment was suddenly crisp and rounded out with the sound of a radio playing in a neighbour’s garden, and the suburban scents of dusty shrub borders and cooking. It was exactly as if I were standing there beside the rosebushes again, torn between playing and responding to her call.

Yes? I answered now, silently and pointlessly, but there was no more. It was strange that Ted himself, who had been so vividly alive and such a forceful presence all my life, should seem absent from these proceedings, while my shadowy mother, dead for more than forty years, was close at hand.

I wish I had been able to go to my mother’s funeral. I think Ted sent me to a neighbour’s, although I can’t remember the precise circumstances. He excluded me, anyway and later he swept my mother out of our lives and made it as if she had never existed.

Ted’s coffin had travelled the full distance. The curtains swished shut behind it and we all stood silently while the organ voluntary wheezed to an end.

Afterwards we walked out into the bright daylight. There was some more handshaking and subdued conversation. The family and neighbours already knew that there was to be a gathering back at Ted’s house, and there was a slow movement towards the handful of parked cars. Polished shoes crunched on the gravel path and two or three people patted Jack on the shoulder as they passed.

The old woman in the black hat was waiting with the sun showing up the dust on her defiant fox fur. She came towards me with her head tilted expectantly. She had purply-red lipstick, gamely applied to pursed lips, and powdered cheeks. ‘You’ll be his daughter,’ she said. ‘I am Audrey.’