Maggie Gee - The White Family

She wanted her Alfred. ‘Alfred, dear. I’ll leave you here and go for help.’

‘No. Don’t leave me. You said you’d never leave me …’

She cradled his shoulders, stroked his head. Still alive, still Alfred’s. Her husband’s, hers.

‘Do you see … where we are?’

She looked. She saw they were by the edge of the oval of tarmac where the skate-boarders came, on summer days, at the foot of the hill, ringed with plane-trees. Above them, a single magpie circled. One for sorrow. Then another joined him.

‘Yes?’ For a moment, it meant nothing.

He meant everything to her.

‘The band … The bandstand, after the war.’ His breathing was bad, harsh as a saw-edge then quiet for a frightening length of time, but he wanted to tell her, wanted to speak, his eyes trying to tell her what he meant, still blue as the sky beneath his wild eyebrows, Alfred, Alfred , his eyes still bright.

‘Do you remember?’

‘Course. You asked me —’ she was trying not to cry, not to let him down, ‘you took me dancing, and you asked me —’

‘We could be together.’

‘We are together.’

Cheek to cheek … Around the dance-floor, cheek to cheek … Very gently, she placed her cheek against her dear one’s, and was chafed by its chill, its surprising roughness, and she saw where the bristles were pushing through, perhaps he could no longer shave himself, and the nurses were too busy, May would do it –

No. It no longer mattered. No.

The long struggle could finally finish, the long attempt to keep mess at bay, to be dutiful, to fight against chaos.

Wind in the leaves. Among his people …

‘I’m sorry, May … ’

‘Don’t, Alfred …’

‘May, dear …’

‘So proud of you …’

His hand fluttered, faint, restless. ‘Things to do.’

‘No, Alfred … hush, dear … it’s over, love.’

Here in the grass he was safe to sleep .

Cheek to cheek, in each other’s arms, and the long war ended, and everything hopeful … Slipping away into the past, slipping away beneath the future, and through the dance-floor grew the roots, the great tree-roots pushed and flourished …

No … Grave …No … Grave

Shirley bore two boys, unidentical twins, two boys conceived on the same day, both olive-skinned, both curly-haired, but one much paler than the other.

Elroy, mercifully, has no doubts. They’ll grow up together. They are blood brothers. Elroy, with luck, will be father to both, if his relationship to Shirley survives, for it’s hard to bear such grief, such anger. But they lessen a little as time passes, time sweeping onwards, sweeping across … blurring the stains, patching the wounds. Babies, baby-clothes, bottles, nappies … Kindness, tiredness, ordinariness.

The whole King family loves the babies. They can never be separated from the past, and yet they are alive, and yelling … The first little boy was called Winston, of course. The other is Franklin. They’re Shirley and Elroy’s.

No … Grave … Shall Hold His Body Down …

Who’s that walking behind Shirley and her double-buggy, with a puzzled face? She looks rather like a younger Shirley, but thinner, more thoughtful, little gold glasses …

The only thing she’d known about her adoption was the name of her family, which was all too common. Then, with the murder, there were pictures in the papers. She looked in the paper and saw her mother.

Nothing is easy. All new to her. But she had no siblings, and now she has two, and suddenly she catches up with Shirley, seizes the buggy, and runs down the road, making them laugh in the late sunshine … Shirley can follow her three children.

(Sophie’s grief … Winston had no children.)

The two funerals had been on the same day, side by side, a triumph of mismanagement. Elroy was no longer speaking to Shirley, and she had been trying to comfort her mother, trying to make May eat and sleep. So Shirley didn’t know they were burying Winston, three or four hundred black people come from all over London to protest the murder, to be together.

She turned up with all the White family and twenty or thirty local people, most of them ageing or elderly, to mourn their local Park Keeper. She arrived almost last, with Darren and Susie and May, three different masks of sorrow, in the limousine that followed the hearse, then a small delegation from the Parks Department, solemnly processing before George and Ruby.

What they saw was chaos. No one could park. The press was there, in banks, in droves, shoving cameras and microphones in the faces of weeping, shouting, reluctant people. Darren got out, blinking, miming, oddly fish-like as he took it in, as if he had never seen this before, though he must often have seen it before — but never before when it was his father.

Shirley saw Elroy. And a sea of black faces. Then she saw Dirk’s friends. A little phalanx of them. Crewcut youths, pale, stupefied, scowling at the black people. Furious, frightened to see so many. ‘White family funeral. Where’s the White family funeral? Alfred White. What the fuck is this?’

Perhaps they had come out of respect for Alfred, perhaps they had come to catch a glimpse of Dirk, imagining him handcuffed between two policemen (though Dirk, in fact, had been returned to prison once the news of the mix-up was radioed across, for the police well knew he would never have survived — his small white face behind plate glass, lost, disappointed, shrinking in the distance) — but Shirley thought, what if they’ve come to make trouble? What if those louts start shouting rude names?

‘I’m sorry, Mum,’ she said, and she left her, she fought her way across through the crowd, she caught her lover by the arm, and he pushed her away, she touched him again, and he nearly struck her, and she dropped back, she fell into the line behind, the line of his people who were now her people, hers by choice, and Sophie saw her, Sophie couldn’t look at her or kiss her but she let her walk by her, she took her hand –

No …Grave … No … Grave …

Shirley had crossed the river. She walked with his people. The song was deafening, they sang together and it burst from the graveyard, rolled through the Park, soared skyward, skyward, up the sunny hill —

No … Grave … Shall Hold His Body Down …

No … Grave … Shall Hold His Body Down …

Darren, meanwhile, was fighting the press, slugging it out with a man from the Sun —

A police helicopter over Hillesden Green Cemetery watched the crowd fan out among the gravestones, hundreds of ants at their invisible purpose.

‘How are we supposed to make sense of this lot?’

‘No effing idea which side is which.’

No … Grave … No … Grave …

Close up, you see the two separate streams, the jostling, the little pockets of aggression, the angry looks, the different skins. Move back a little, and you see the river. It has two banks, but all of it mourns. A great tide of people stops in the graveyard, crying, poised on the edge between past and future.

Straight-backed, Sophie and Shirley walk, and Sophie mutters the Psalm of David. The night will shine like the day. And darkness will be as light … He has created both darkness and light …

Blindly gleaming, stubborn, warm, life in Shirley pushes, quickens.

‘ The White Family points to new directions in British writing. Full of power and passion, as well as somte timely warnings, this is one of the year’s finest novels, and it deserves the widest possible readership.’