Tony Parsons - One For My Baby

One more chance, I think.

Doesn’t he know? Doesn’t he get it? Doesn’t my father understand anything?

You get one shot at happiness.

The funeral was all wrong.

I had been to funerals before, but they were not like this, nothing like it. The funerals of my three dead grandparents were nothing like the day we buried Rose.

Too young. Not just her. The mourners were too young. In their twenties, most of them, friends from school and the old neighborhood, mates from university and the shop. Many of them looked as though they were going to a funeral for the first time. They had probably never even buried a grandparent. One or two of them might have lost a goldfish or a hamster. And they were in shock. They didn’t even own black ties-that’s how absurdly young they were. They didn’t know what to wear, how to act, what to say. It was all too soon. Too soon. I knew how they felt.

I was in the front car with Rose’s mother and father and I couldn’t find the words to comfort them because there were no words. It was worse than that. There was no bond. We were already strangers, we were already slipping from each other’s lives. The bond between us was in the car ahead of us, in a pine coffin covered with three wreaths of red roses. One from Rose’s parents, one from me, one from my mum and dad. Separate wreaths for separate grief.

The cortege reached the small church on top of a little hill. Below us the fields of rural Essex were covered in yellow. Fields of rape. A terrible name. Why can’t they call it something else? Because I still can’t look at those yellow fields of April without thinking of the day we buried Rose.

A vicar who had never known Rose talked about her qualities. He had tried his best, this vicar, he had talked to friends and family and me, so he spoke of her humor and her warmth and her love of life. But it was only when Josh climbed the steps to the plinth that I felt as if it meant anything.

“The words of Canon Henry Scott Holland,” he said. “ ‘Death is nothing at all. I have only slipped away into the next room. I am I and you are you. Whatever we were to each other, that we are still.’ ”

I held myself together because it was worse for Rose’s parents, this quiet man and his kind wife who had been so proud of their lawyer daughter, this decent man and woman who I had spent Christmases with and who I would probably never see again. I held myself together because it would have been shaming to place my loss above their loss. They were doing the worst thing in the world. They were burying a child.

“ ‘Call me by my old familiar name,’ ” Josh said. “ ‘Speak to me in the easy way which you always used. Put no difference into your tone, wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow. Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes we enjoyed together. Play, smile, think of me. Pray for me.’ ”

There was none of the comfort that you clutch at when you bury someone at the end of their life. Josh did his best. But this black day had arrived fifty years too soon. Nature had been violated. And although I tried to make sense of the words I was hearing, although I tried to tell myself that it was worse for her parents, all I could think was one selfish thought-I want my wife.

“ ‘Let my name be ever the household word it always was. Let it be spoken without effect, without the ghost of a shadow on it. Life means all that it ever meant. It is the same as it ever was-there is absolutely unbroken continuity. What is this death but a negligible accident? Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? I am but waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just around the corner. All is well.’ ”

It was a bad moment following the coffin out of the church, feeling all those eyes on me, feeling all that pity that I didn’t want. But I held it together while we were walking behind the coffin. And it was a bad moment when Rose’s parents were holding each other by the graveside and her oldest friends were starting to come apart. But I held it together at the graveside.

It was only when the funeral director-there are no more undertakers-took me aside and softly asked me if the wreaths were to be buried with the coffin or kept for the graveside that I began to unravel.

“All with her,” I said, “bury it all with her,” suddenly overflowing with helpless tears.

Not for myself or for her parents or even for Rose, no, but crying for the children who would never be born.

I always get a jolt of surprise when I enter my nan’s tiny flat. One little box in a block of sheltered accommodation, it’s as fashionably minimalist as any local restaurant or art gallery, all white walls and creamy blankness, a study in trendy emptiness. Damien Hirst would be right at home in my nan’s flat. One look at this place, and Damien would want to chop my nan in half and stick her in a jar of preservative.

Not that my nan is trying to keep up with the cutting edge of interior design. A few years ago the stairs got too much for her in the home she had lived in for over fifty years, the Oranges for Christmas house in that East End banjo, and this white flat is where the council put her. She refused to move in with my parents.

“I value my freedom, love,” she told me.

The TV has the sound turned down and Sinatra is playing. It’s Sinatra at the Sands with Count Basie and the Orchestra, Frank’s finest live album, in my opinion. My nan is a habitual player of Sinatra records. She is not really all that interested in music, but I know Frank reminds her of my granddad. No, it’s more than a reminder, hearing Sinatra swagger through “You Make Me Feel So Young” or “Fly Me to the Moon” or “The Shadow of Your Smile.” It’s a kind of communion.

Among all the souvenirs from other people’s holidays-my nan is keen on grinning Spanish donkeys and leering leprechauns-there are lots of family pictures on the mantelpiece. Rose and I on our wedding day. Me as a child. Me as a baby. My parents on their wedding day. Her own wedding day-she is black-haired and smiling, a beautiful young woman, a woman who shines-on the arm of her husband, my granddad. But the white flat remains stubbornly indifferent to these signs of life. My nan just hasn’t had the endless years to impose her personality here the way she did in the old place. As I watch her shuffling around the kitchen, laboriously making us some tea-she forbids me from making it as I am her guest-I wonder if she ever will.

“He was here,” my nan says. “Yesterday. With his fancy woman.”

For some reason I am dumbfounded.

“My dad?”

She nods, smiling grimly. “With her. His fancy woman.”

“He brought Lena? Here?”

“His fancy woman. His bit on the side. Bit of crumpet. Bit of skirt. His tart.”

I am glad that my nan is not siding with her son in the dismantling of our little family. She still comes around to our house for lunch on Sundays. Either my mum or I deliver a bag of shopping once a week. We talk on the phone every day, even when we have nothing much to say. We are all pretending that our family is still intact, and I am comforted by that pretence. But something stops me from smiling and nodding at these slanders on Lena.

“You really liked her a little while ago,” I say. “Lena, I mean. You thought she was okay.”

She snorts. “Young enough to be his daughter. What are they going to do? Have a baby?” Another snort. “He won’t be able to pick it up. The old goat. Do you want a biscuit?”

“No thanks, Nan.”

“Chocolate digestive or custard cream?”

“Not for me, Nan.”

“I’ll just bring some in case you change your mind,” she says. “That marriage hasn’t been right since her last loss. You know. Miscarriage. If you dip them in your tea, they go all soft. Do you have sugar? I can’t remember.” She laughs with delight, shaking her head. “Sorry, Alfie. It’s my old timer’s disease.”