I went to the office with a black band around my arm to make me feel important, and Mr Weekley was sorry at my loss, impressed by such looks of grief that I could use when necessary, and told me I could stay off for a day after the funeral. I also got immediate sympathy from Claudine on telling her by phone at midday, and it blossomed to a full-blown envelopment of her body when I went to her house in the evening and found that her parents were out. It was marvellous, the grief people thought you felt, and how they were ready to shed your own tears for you, and the soft oily gratitude they gave you for giving them the opportunity of it.
Grandma wanted her dead husband to have a fair funeral, and Mother and I did our best to see that her wish was satisfied. There were three car-loads of friends and family, and I sat among them with my black suit on, seeing the occasional person by the roadside take off his hat as we went by. Standing in the rain by the open grave, and staring the box into the bottom of it, I had the mad desire, which I was hardly able to resist, to jump down and drag my mother and grandmother with me so that all three of us got buried at the same time.
I walked back to the gate and the waiting cars, and didn’t care whether the world ended or not. This had nothing to do with my grandfather having died. It was almost as if I’d started something by suddenly beginning to live, but wasn’t interested any more in going on to finish it.
I’d asked Claudine to come to the funeral, but she said she ‘didn’t like to’ because she wasn’t yet ready to meet my mother. The truth was that she didn’t want to be connected to someone who had died, and nobody could blame her for this, because there had been moments when I hadn’t been too easy about it either. Yet I wanted her to come, because it was the first opportunity in our courting that I’d been able to offer on my side something to balance the weight of her family that she had given to me from hers. It would in some way have equalized the intimacy of life between us, but she was too embarrassed to come, and I thought: so what? Why should she? Maybe she won’t even go to her own grandparents’ funeral, when the time comes. If I had a father of my own, I thought, instead of being the undoubted bastard that I am, I wouldn’t have bothered to take so much part in it as I had.
I got really drunk that night, so that I didn’t even have the stiffening left to get myself to Claudine’s place as I’d promised. When I saw her the next day I said I’d been too blacked out with fond memories of my dear grandad to leave the house. I’d hugged my bed, I told her ‘in a paroxysm of grief’. She really understood that, and forgave me, giving me such comfort on the settee that I said I hoped I’d be able to do the same for her some day, if ever she needed it, though I hoped she wouldn’t.
It took a long time to push house deals through, and I assumed that Wainfleet was having a surveyor go over the Clegg mansion before he made his offer. Nevertheless, I was beginning to wonder why I hadn’t heard from either of them, and I knew that no news had come in at the office. Nothing would go wrong as far as I could see, and I stayed optimistic because before going out to work that morning (I hadn’t yet steeled myself to calling it ‘business’ as they did in West Bridgford) I read my horoscope in Mam’s paper which said: ‘A day to remember. Financially good. Romantically sound. Don’t rush it. Promotion in the air. Heady progress. Good for you.’
I went blithely to work and, as was only to be expected when I got there bright and punctual, Mr Weekley called out for me: ‘Shut the door,’ he said.
He didn’t look good, and I wondered whether it wasn’t his turn now to go down with some half-imaginary flu. He opened a folder in front of him: ‘Cullen, you’ve been up to some monkey business, and it’s the most clumsy piece of work I’ve ever come across in this line. If it had been a bit more subtle and underhand I might have been tempted to keep you on. As it is, you disgrace me. A bloody baby could have done better. Let me put you in the picture. Your Mr Wainfleet did offer Clegg a higher price for his house — four thousand three hundred instead of four thousand that Clegg originally wanted. I’m putting you wise so that you’ll never make the same mistake again, behind the back of the person you might work for at your next job. Well, so far so good, but in comes the first chap who set out the asking price, and offers four thousand four hundred. Then Clegg plays him off in a dutch auction, and Wainfleet, red in the face, ups it to four thousand five hundred. Do you see what you started? You bloody jackanapes!’
I was boiling too: ‘That’s all right by you,’ I cried, ‘as far as commission’s concerned, isn’t it?’
‘Oh, yes. But let me tell you the last of it. Then comes the bright young chap again, and jacks it up to four thousand six hundred. There it stops, and yesterday while you were away getting those ordnance-survey plans, enter Wainfleet absolutely frothing at the mouth, and accusing me of using innocent young you as a pawn to start a dutch auction, and positively screaming that he was going to make a complaint to the Society. Well, of course, I can take care of that. In any case that vile vendor Clegg wasn’t entirely innocent when he saw which way the wind was blowing. But you’ve got to go, young Cullen. You can take your briefcase and umbrella, and remember next time to think before trying to push something so intricate. Oh, yes, I know, you nearly brought it off, but don’t forget: there’s always some swine a bit greedier than you are.’
‘I didn’t expect anything from Clegg,’ I said. ‘I was only trying to do the firm a favour so that you’d think highly of me and I could get on a bit. Anyway, they were both bidding for the house on the open market. What’s wrong with that? It was nothing to do with me.’
‘Don’t lie, Michael. You make it hard for me, mate. I’ve got the particulars of the house here that you typed for Wainfleet, with your fancy price on it. Oh, all right, there’s more to you than the others working here, but I can’t keep you on. However, I’ll give you a fair reference so that you might get a job somewhere else. But wherever it is, try not to pull such monkey business again. It’ll get you a bad name.’
I couldn’t be sure of a wink under his glasses, but wanted to thump his putty cheeks and grey moustache so as to stop the trembling in both my legs — except that I didn’t want to end up in a cell at the Guildhall at that particular moment.
I took my fortnight’s pay and insurance money, and said goodbye with regret to Miss Bolsover. ‘It’s a shame you got into trouble,’ she said, ‘but don’t worry.’
I smiled. ‘Glad to get away, really. I’ve been thinking of moving on to London’ — another useless lie, for she was bound to see me around town sooner or later and wonder why I hadn’t had the guts to go. She was a proud, grey-haired woman, well into her thirties, who I often fancied knuckling into because there seemed no hope of it.
There was only one person I wanted to see at that moment, and it was still early enough in the day to go out and find him. In fact a few hours in the country would do me good after the mental strain of getting the sack. I’d wheedled from Miss Bolsover the information that the bright young man had sent in his deposit cheque on Clegg’s house for four hundred and sixty pounds, so I’d be due for at least a hundred pounds when the contract was signed, though I wondered now whether Clegg the egg would keep to it.
The fields and woods weren’t half so pleasant, for a sharp wind was shaking itself out from Lincolnshire, and even a thick tweed overcoat didn’t stop it finding my ribs. Walking through it from the bus stop, the full shock of getting my cards hit me, and I wondered whether in this life I was only destined to work in a factory where I could get into nothing more troublesome than walking out now and again with whatever was produced there bulging from my pockets. My natural move should have been to retreat, to get back and let my heart curl up in safety where no blow-through mistakes could get at it. But natural moves were already alien to me, and I was set on some course even more natural than my natural desires because I didn’t think one bit about what I was going to do.