Rupert Thomson - Dreams of Leaving

Tears were falling from Mary’s eyes. Alan had died alone. Among strangers. Without understanding. She had been so far away. Too far away to comfort, to explain, to reassure. That degree of distance from someone she had been so close to. It dismantled her armour. Her make-up ran, her body crumpled in Ruby’s arms. That one weekend away had opened up a gap for ever. She couldn’t leap over or build a bridge. She could only sit at the edge and pour her tears into it. One day, when she had cried enough, perhaps she would be able to swim across. She would be returning from that weekend for the rest of her life. Even on her deathbed she still wouldn’t quite have reached home.

‘You poor darlin’,’ Ruby murmured. ‘It’s a bloody world.’

As Mary drove back to Muswell Hill, a strange thought occurred to her. A middle-aged man — try, she told herself, to see him objectively, even if only for a moment — collapses on a busy street. A woman bends to help him. The flow of pedestrians is interrupted. A crowd gathers. The traffic jams as cars slow down and drivers peer through windscreens. One of the city’s main arteries is blocked for maybe thirty seconds. The traffic police appear. They gesticulate with their immaculate white gloves. The cars move on. The crowd disperses. The street regains its rhythm.

But there are no traffic police in the middle-aged man’s veins.

The blockage is permanent.

He dies.

Yes, she thought. Alan had articulated, on a large scale, the drama that had taken place inside his own body. He had externalised his death. She wanted to tell him that, she wanted to see the expression on his face — when she thought of things like that she always told him — but she could only have told him if he was still alive, if the whole thing had never happened, and then there wouldn’t have been anything to tell. Grief’s vicious circle. He was dead, and you could go round and round, but you couldn’t go back. There was no reversing up a one-way street like death. No sir, there was a big ticket for that.

*

The day before the funeral a wreath of white flowers and wild ferns was delivered to the house in Muswell Hill. Alison carried it into the kitchen and laid it on the table.

‘It’s from Moses.’ She read the note, then looked across at Mary. ‘Isn’t he coming tomorrow?’

Mary was standing in front of the mirror. She tilted her head sideways, adjusted an earring. ‘No,’ she said.

‘Why not?’

Mary didn’t answer.

‘He’s entitled to, isn’t he?’ Alison said, not querulous exactly, but insistent. ‘I thought he was — ’ and she paused — ‘a member of the family.’

Mary recognised her own words. She chose not to acknowledge them. ‘He doesn’t know about it.’

‘What?’ Rebecca was lingering in the doorway. ‘He doesn’t know that Daddy — ’

‘He doesn’t know about the funeral,’ Mary cut in.

‘Why not?’ Alison persisted.

Mary turned from the mirror. This was the point at which the truth became too complex, too unwieldy, to manage, at the moment at least, and lies, the lackeys that they were, presented themselves, oily and obsequious. And so she said simply, ‘I didn’t tell him,’ which closed the door in the face of her daughters’ questions and the lies that wanted to serve as answers. The two girls seemed to accept this, despite the look they swapped behind (or almost behind) their mother’s back. Alison murmured something about not being able to breathe; she moved away and opened a window. Rebecca did something nervous with her feet. Mary forced herself to leave the room.

The tension stayed with her. At four in the morning she threw on a silk dressing-gown and walked out on to the terrace. Such a wind. She filled her lungs with fierce air. Clouds, great jagged sheets of steel, clashed overhead. The moon showed briefly, dented and blackened, the bottom of an old saucepan. They told her no stories, nothing she could use to explain her withholding, her dishonesty, not even to herself. She stood on the terrace and listened to the crash and jangle of the night until she, too, seemed turned to metal by the cold, until the wind had blown all thoughts from her head. Towards dawn she slept.

In the morning she opened the doors of her wardrobe, and the rows and rows of black clothes that she saw there immobilised her. It’s almost as if I’ve been preparing for this moment, she thought. It’s almost as if I’ve spent my entire life preparing for this death, this grief, this widowhood. With every black dress bought, with every black accessory received. Preparing, preparing. She dropped on to the bed, remembered her mother on a rare visit to London saying, in that deliberately puzzled voice she could put on (as if grappling with a problem to which she could imagine no possible solution), ‘I simply do not understand this love-affair you seem to have with black.’ She couldn’t think what her reply had been. Something withering, no doubt. But now the sight of all that black crushed and sickened her. When Alison walked in twenty minutes later, she still hadn’t moved.

‘You’ve got to get dressed, Mary,’ Alison said. ‘The car will be here soon.’

Mary didn’t look round. ‘I’m going to wear white.’

‘You can’t. It’s just not the right time for something like that.’

Perhaps she responded to the panic in her daughter’s voice. ‘Not the right time,’ she repeated. But with no irony, no venom. Without another word, she submitted to Alison’s choice of dress.

*

When a funeral happens, people don’t usually say, ‘It’s a nice day for it,’ but if it had been a wedding or a picnic or a flower-show, Mary thought, that’s what they would have said. Last night’s wind had cleared the sky of clouds. As they drove from the church to the graveyard in their hired grey limousine, they passed old men on benches, hatless, sucking on their teeth, women in gardens pinning wet clothes to the wide thin smiles of their washing-lines, shopkeepers in their doorways, slit-eyed against this unexpected sunlight. So many people out. The world and his wife, she thought. And then, moments later: the world and his widow. Not self-pity, this. Accuracy.

The car turned in through black wrought-iron gates.

‘Excuse me,’ she said suddenly, ‘but I’d like to walk the rest of the way, if you don’t mind.’

Their chauffeur, a man whose face was as rigid as the profile on a coin, stopped the car. She stepped out. Her children followed. She looked about her, recognised the cat that was dozing on a headstone. She breathed, almost with relief, the familiar air of the cemetery. She had walked its paths so many times. With Alan, with the children, and, most recently, with Moses. If Moses had come to the funeral he might have been surprised, even disappointed, she thought. He would have expected some less formal, less conventional event, unaware of how the process is designed to carry you, like a raft, away from the wreckage of someone’s death, away from that whirlpool it creates, to carry you as effortlessly as possible into calmer waters where you can begin to think again. It was a funeral like a million others before it. The usual words, the usual music, the usual moments of solemnity. For once, too, she fitted in because everyone was wearing black. It almost seemed to her as if they were imitating her. Which, in their grief, perhaps, they were.

They reached the graveside. Now the priest began to recite the traditional phrases. They have beauty, she thought, staring away into the sky. A used beauty, a worn beauty, like stone steps worn smooth and slightly concave by five, ten, twenty centuries of feet. They were phrases everybody passed through. There were no exceptions. At least they contained that truth. We’re all pretty ordinary, she thought. All pretty ordinary when it comes down to it. That’s what the phrases said.