Joanna Kavenna - Inglorious

Rosa thought that her mother had been an elegant and frugal woman, and it was a shame she couldn’t ask her advice. It would have been nice to be able to talk to her. Rosa had been idle and had never asked enough questions. Her mother — and now Rosa felt despair and yearning like a kick in the stomach. It was impossible to accept. And yet she had to. It had to be. Still, she despised it and wanted to cry out loud, protest. It was iniquitous! If she was undisciplined, it started, and she hated the way it made her feel, abandoned and unkempt. She remembered a tall woman, almost as tall as her daughter, with bobbed brown hair, vivacious and outspoken. Rosa’s mother had so many friends that when she died the church was heaving with mourners and some had to stand outside and listen to the service. Everyone was shocked, absurdly. ‘It was so sudden.’ ‘At least she didn’t suffer’ — dozens said that, and it was perhaps true, though Rosa was surprised by their certainty. Still, they took Rosa’s hand at the door, and said, ‘I’m so sorry. Look after your father, and yourself, dear Rosa’, and she smiled and thanked them for coming.

Bristol was hazy under a misty winter, which Rosa later remembered as pale and frigid. Her father was faint-hearted in the service. He couldn’t speak, so after the vicar (‘Oh Lord, we come here today to celebrate the life of Harriet Lane, loving wife and mother, who died recently after a short illness’ — a very short and despicable illness, a shock to the head, a haemorrhage which swept her out before she could say goodbye — ‘Oh Lord, thank you for smashing up Harriet Lane, so impressively …’) Rosa had to address the church. That was the worst of it, looking out at a sea of sympathetic faces, wanting to cast herself on the coffin and scream. The Ancients had it better. You could ululate as much as you liked. Wailing was positively expected, scrabbling in the sand quite allowed. The modern British funeral was all wrong, Rosa decided, as she said a few terse words and tried to imagine she was talking about a remote acquaintance. She read a poem, Larkin’s ‘For Sidney Bechet’, which had been one of her mother’s favourites. For a while she wanted to fall into a faint, she had never really noticed how long that poem was, but it coursed on, verse after verse and Rosa’s voice breaking with every word. On me your voice falls as they say love should/ Like an enormous yes. That messed the congregation up; they all started snivelling and rubbing their eyes. She kept on with it, though she saw her father had his head in his hands. My crescent City/ Is where your speech alone is understood/ And greeted as the natural noise of good/ Scattering long-haired grief and scored pity. She got to the end, bitterly and with a sense of mounting disbelief. The poem didn’t reflect her mood at all. She didn’t find anything natural or good at the time; she found her grief quite bewildering and devastating. Not only had she produced a dreadful reading but, more importantly, she had committed perjury over her mother’s coffin. She dropped the book on the floor as she walked back to her seat. When the music started playing her father had to be helped from the church. She was angry with him at the time, thinking he was weak.

Of course the dead faded away. It was impossible to mourn them all the time. The memories dissolved, slowly. But if she thought about it she became aware just how furious and abandoned she felt. She was sure her mother would have helped her. ‘The matter, Rosa? Explain to me?’ ‘Not sure, mother.’ ‘Well, write it down, call me up again when you want to talk. Let’s think of an action plan. Lots of love.’ Their conversations would have been pertinent, to the point. It was her father who was irresolute. Her mother was always brisk and quick-witted. The family home was shabby and comfortable. The kitchen was sparsely furnished with old-fashioned appliances, things her parents bought when they first married and never replaced. The cooker was a monument to an earlier era of domestic technology. The furniture was always second-hand, bought from adverts in newspapers, never fashionable or expensive. It wasn’t that her family was poor, though her parents had irregular jobs. Rosa’s mother with her shop in Clifton Village, selling jewellery and scarves. It never boomed, but it brought in enough. Her father worked hard on his works of local history. He was always engaged on a new project, working in his study for hours, and eventually a book was published, something about the Victorians in Bristol. He bought up dozens of copies and gave them all to his friends. That made Rosa cringe in her chair, because she remembered mocking him, talking with her friends about him and his free books. Suggesting they have a competition, first prize a copy of his book, second prize two copies, and her teenage friends snorting in the garden, hands to their faces. She had no idea at all; she was ignorant of everything that was important. In their home in Redland, a crumbling Victorian town house, Rosa remembered her mother and father preparing food, and it seemed now she thought about it that there had always been something steaming on the cooker, some pot of stew or soup. She saw her father standing over it, adding vegetables and talking to her mother in a soft voice, her mother pushing back her hair, leaning over him to stir the soup again. Hardly aware at the time, Rosa now knew that her parents had been happy.

Now she was sitting rigidly in her seat. Her mouth was trembling. She rested her arms on the table and put her head in her arms, feigning sleep. Certainly it would be a terrible thing to shatter the tranquillity of the carriage. No one would thank her, and the old Bible reader would be quite perplexed. Rosa lifted her head and cast a glance towards her, and still the woman was engrossed in the Holy Book. Her mother had always fallen silent as they approached the Lakes. Well, of course, thought Rosa, no reason to assume you have a monopoly on retrogression. Possible that the entire carriage is musing on years long vanished, the freefall of the seasons. Though the woman with the Bible and the knitting couldn’t be, thought Rosa. She would be praising the Lord, and the child eating crisps would be thinking about crisps, and the small hunched man by the door who was tapping his stick on the floor — it was impossible to know what he was thinking about! Perhaps he was reciting an Upanishad, in the beginning this universe was but the Self in the form of a man. He looked around and saw nothing but himself. Thereupon his first shout was, ‘It is I!’ whereupon the concept ‘I’ arose. Perhaps he was thinking something she couldn’t imagine, something so rich and holy she would never think it (or something so perverse and disgusting, she thought, glancing across at the man again).

Really, she had nothing to complain about. For hundreds of years — time uncharted — her ancestors were anonymous hordes, busy with the practical conditions of survival. They tilled fields; they went down mines. Some of them went to sea. Then in the twentieth century there was a subtle shift. At fifteen grandmother Lily left school and started work. She was one of seven children; two died in infancy. She went to work in a shop, a miniature revolution. At the age of thirty she married Thomas Marswick, a carpenter. Rosa remembered her grandmother as a tired old woman with a round face and tightly set hair, wearing an apron, distributing sweets. Her idea of leisure was to talk over the wall to the next-door neighbour, Jackie, about other neighbours who had recently died. Rosa’s grandmother loved disasters, and in response to polite social questions she would release a volley of despair, deaths, cheated expectations. This attraction to the mournful overtook her progressively, and she fell into depression after the death of her husband, sliding through the house in her slippers, muttering about adversity. According to family legend, she had hidden all her money around the house, and most of it was never found after her death. She had a pair of false teeth which she kept in a mug by the bed. She accepted the structures of society, the random distribution of wealth, accepted it all and died quietly.