Mortimer Penelope: The Pumpkin Eater

“No!”

He sat down, collapsing. I dragged on my clothes, tearing them, laddering them. In the large, mahogany-framed, mildewed mirror I saw his face sagging open, as though it had been plundered. I got my coat on, tied the belt, combed my fingers through my hair.

“Goodbye, Giles.”

“You’re going home? You won’t find Jake there.”

I crossed the room. As I got to the door he repeated, “Jake’s not there.”

“You think I believe you?”

He leapt up and grabbed my arm. For a moment he held it tightly, then his hand dropped.

“He’s gone … to his father. He went yesterday. He’s been ringing you from there.”

“He wanted me to go there?”

“Yes.”

“You told him I wouldn’t go?”

“Yes.” He raised his head. The faintest shadow of pleasure, almost a smile, moved across his face. “Anyway … it’s too late now. His father died, this morning.”

“Let me wither and weare out mine age in a discomfortable, in an unwholesome, in a penurious prison, and so pay my debts with my bones, and recompense the wastefulness of my youth, with the beggary of mine age. Let me wither in a spittle under sharp and foul and infamous diseases, and so recompense the wantonness of my youth with that loathsomeness in mine age; yet, if God withdraw not his spiritual blessings, his Grace, his Patience, if I can call my suffering his doing, my passion his action, all this that is temporal is but a caterpiller got into one corner of my garden, but a mill-dew fallen upon one acre of my corn. The body of all, the substance of all is safe, as long as the soul is safe. But when I shall trust to that, which we call a good spirit, and God shall deject and impoverish and evacuate that spirit; when I shall rely upon a moral constancy, and God shall shake and enfeeble and enervate, destroy and demolish that constancy; when I shall think to refresh myself in the serenity and sweet air of a good conscience, and God shall call up the damps and vapours of hell itself, and spread out a cloud of diffidence, and an impenetrable crust of desperation upon my conscience; when health shall fly from me, and I shall lay hold upon riches to succour me and comfort me in my sickness, and riches shall fly from me, and I shall snatch after favour and good opinion to comfort me in my poverty; when even this good opinion shall leave me, and calumnies and misinformations shall prevail against me; when I shall need peace, because there is none but thou, O Lord, that should stand for me, and then shall find that all the wounds I have come from thy hand, all the arrows that stick in me, from thy quiver; when I shall see that because I have given myself to my corrupt nature, thou hast changed thine; and because I am all evil towards thee, therefore thou has given over being good towards me; when it comes to this height, that the fever is not in the humors, but in the spirits, that mine enemy is not an imaginary enemy, fortune, nor a transitory enemy, malice in great persons, but a real and an irresistible and an inexorable and an everlasting enemy, the Lord of Hosts himself, the Almighty God himself, the Almighty God himself only knows the weight of this affliction, and except he put in that pondus gloriae , that exceeding weight of an eternal glory, with his own hand into the other scale, we are weighed down, we are swallowed up, irreparably, irrevocably, irrevocably, irremediably…”

The rich, actor’s voice sank into silence. The old man in his funeral clothes, his silver hair like a prophet, walked slowly down the chancel steps and stepped sideways into the front pew. After a moment’s pause the Air on the G String, relayed on tape from the organ loft, sang through an uneasy silence. It gathered the noble and despairing words and suspended them in a perfect cone, a capsule of eternity, over the lonely coffin. Sitting next to Jake I was afflicted, physically afflicted in shoulder, hip and thigh, by his sense of betrayal. He was a child mocked by a father who had played games like a child and now, in death, turned gravely to adult matters, leaving him alone. His father had been the progenitor of Jake’s whole world, its prime example: sceptical, tepid, suspicious of emotion, contemptuous of the laws he scrupulously kept, a member of success and an enemy of failure; if he had acknowledged conscience, he had shrugged it away; the only thing that had ever tortured him was boredom. Why had he ended his life with this agonized cry for help? The only time that Jake had spoken to me since I came, he had burst out, “Why did he want this read? He didn’t believe all that!”

I said awkwardly, “Well … it’s beautiful.”

“Beautiful? He was a bloody liar.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“He didn’t trust me.”

“He loved you,” I said uselessly.

“I thought he was like me. I honestly thought he was … myself. Now it turns out he was quite different.”

“No.”

“I never tried to understand him. I never thought there was anything to … understand. Just a likeable old bastard, mean with his money … liked whisky, liked his cigars, he liked food. And his writing — it wasn’t good … professional, though. Successful. I thought he just wanted to live. What more did he want? What more ?”

“I don’t know, Jake. I don’t know.”

“There isn’t any more.”

But every inconsistent wish had been observed, nevertheless. The vicar, crouching back in the choir stalls, looked deeply unhappy. He was troubled by a sensation of blasphemy. The friends, five old men, only one of them with a wife, sat peacefully enjoying the music, the spring sun, the smell of lilies. When the music ended four of the old men — the actor did not go — rose and stood apprehensively at the corners of the coffin. Four burly undertakers, jostling the old men, lifted the coffin and lowered it on to the old men’s fragile shoulders. A wreath slipped off the tipped end of the coffin and the vicar put his hand over his eyes in quick prayer. There was a hurried consultation among the undertakers, and swift as children picking daisies they stripped the coffin of flowers while the old men stood trembling, throwing hopeless looks up the aisle to the open door. Jake was gripping the front of the pew, leaning forward on his arms as though he were going to be sick. I could hear his father saying, “Absolutely no good asking Jake to carry the box. He’d be sure to drop it,” — and then smiling at him, taking his hand, giving him love but never responsibility. There was nothing I could do. I was a stranger.

Finally, after some scuffling, two of the undertakers crouched under the sides of the coffin, bending low to level up with the old men, who edged uncertainly forward to the brink of the steps and then, at last, proceeded. The vicar pursued them, his face tense, his eyes half shut, waiting for the inevitable crash. But the old men stepped out bravely, although their feet hardly seemed to touch the floor and they were more suspended from the coffin than supporting it. The two undertakers breathed heavily, trying to maintain their expressions of pious gloom while bearing the yoke of an ebony coffin and five schoolfriends, one dead. Jake and I followed. The actor, the solitary wife and the housekeeper fell in behind us. We went out into the warm air. Two children playing catch among the tombstones stopped, stared at us and backed away, running when they were beyond the gate.

Jake would not go to the grave. The vicar signalled to him, but he turned his back on the deep hole, with its emerald lining that could have more usefully been used for a display of lawn mowers and garden rakes than for disguising the solid walls of a grave: the walls of earth, clay, stone, worm and root, hospitable and alive, were made indecent by that horror of fancy raffia. The old men stood perilously near the edge, peering down with the fascination of people looking into the crater of a volcano. How long before they too would jump? Their rusty black clothes were shadows, their faces peaked with fear and curiosity. I stayed with Jake, although he did not know I was there. He was alone. He no longer needed me.