Batley’s Victorian phaeton was wheeled out of his stables. It was repaired, oiled, and given a new coat of paint. Farmer Hallam agreed to supply two black horses for the occasion. There was a problem, however, with the plumes.
George couldn’t help smiling. He was thinking of Tabasco, the undertaker. Shortly before his death, Tabasco had sat George on his knee and told him about the week Lord Batley spent in his back parlour. Tabasco had considered Batley a snob and a fraud, and he had rather enjoyed the power that the peculiar situation had bestowed on him. How Tabasco had cackled as he recalled his whispered dialogues with Batley! One, George remembered, had gone something like this:
‘What the devil’s happening, Tabasco?’ Batley sat in his coffin like a large disgruntled baby. ‘Why all the delay?’
‘They’re going to have a special procession for you,’ Tabasco told him, ‘because you’re so important.’
‘Oh God,’ Batley groaned and ran his hands through his black hair in which, to Tabasco’s immense satisfaction, streaks of grey were beginning to show. (So it was true: the hair was dyed.) ‘How long am I going to have to wait?’
‘Your guess is as good as mine. A week at least. Maybe longer. You know what this place is like.’
‘Why, for heaven’s sake? What’s holding us up?’
‘The plumes.’
‘Plumes? What plumes, man?’
‘The black plumes, your lordship. For the horses’ heads. You can’t have a funeral procession without black plumes. Not for someone of your distinction. That wouldn’t do at all, would it?’
‘Oh, damn this bloody place to hell.’
‘I think I’d better screw you down,’ Tabasco said. ‘I can hear somebody coming.’
Just an excuse, of course, to shut the bastard up.
Still smiling, George read on.
No black plumes could be found. Lord Batley grew restless in his coffin. He complained of headaches, cramps, disorientation. He moaned about the food. He cursed what he called Tabasco’s ‘inefficiency’.
Meanwhile, in Magnolia Close, Hilda Peach, the Chief Inspector’s resourceful wife, was improvising a pair of black plumes out of two old straw brooms.
The day finally came. It was December 15th 1938 –
How clearly George remembered that day. He must have been eleven. Clouds the colour of lead. Searing cold. His gloved hands. Alice on the other side of the street, standing between her parents, the wide dish of her face tilted at the sky like radar. Then the clatter of carriage wheels on the cobblestones. And what happened next.
— and the weather was bitterly cold. The route which the funeral procession was to follow had been mapped out by Peach himself. Lord Batley would lie in state in an open coffin. The people of New Egypt would line the streets. They would be wearing black. It would be a solemn but memorable conclusion to the life of a distinguished local figurehead.
Things turned out differently.
As the carriage slowed to negotiate the sharp bend that led to the church, PC Fisher noticed clouds of white smoke rising from the coffin. He broke ranks and hurried discreetly to Peach’s side. Peach was supporting the grief-stricken Lady Batley.
‘Chief Inspector, sir,’ Fisher clamoured. ‘Lord Batley’s on fire.’
‘A dead man on fire?’ Peach raised his eyebrows. ‘A little unlikely, don’t you think?’ Glancing down at Lady Batley, he seemed to be addressing the question to her. Lady Batley’s eyes floated like pale helpless fish on the surface of her face.
‘I know it sounds unlikely, sir, but look. Smoke.’
Peach looked. ‘That’s not fire,’ he said calmly, ‘that’s breath. The man is still alive.’
Lady Batley collapsed moaning against Peach’s arm. He passed her unceremoniously to Fisher.
Lord Batley was removed from his coffin in full view of the villagers who had lined the streets in his honour, and escorted, under their disbelieving gaze, to the police station. His widow followed, still weeping — though for a different reason now. The funeral cortège was quietly disbanded. The villagers returned to their houses.
As a direct result of this episode, it has become much harder to die. Inhabitants of New Egypt are subjected to a series of rigorous tests before being allowed to rest in peace. Peach inspects each corpse in person. ‘One Lazarus is enough,’ he is supposed to have said in that winter of 1938.
But what of those who had taken bribes from Batley?
The doctor was carefully beaten up by PC Hazard prior to having his licence to practise removed. Tabasco died two months after the funeral — in place of Batley, perhaps. The sexton, meanwhile, was given a lecture on greed by Peach and forcibly retired on a meagre pension.
And Batley?
Batley is still alive and well and living in New Egypt. He is one hundred and three years old now and is believed by many to have lost the ability to die –
And here the manuscript ended. George had lost his momentum, lost interest. In that moment, the moment when he pushed his pen aside, he had realised that he was no different from any other New Egyptian. The apathy had taken hold. What better comment on the nature of the village than that its self-appointed historian had failed to complete his history of the place! How typical, how archetypal that was!
It had been ten years since he had touched the manuscript, and he now knew that he would never go back to it again. What was the point? Who could he give it to? When he died, it would fall into the hands of the police and end up in that fucking museum.
Not on your life.
He would destroy it first.
*
The following day, at three in the afternoon, a man with tangled grey hair stopped outside George’s house. It was Dinwoodie, come to pay his respects.
Dinwoodie unlatched the gate. A screech of metal disturbed a silence of dripping leaves. The gate, it seemed, was rarely opened.
He paused again, and stared up at the front of the house. Another death in the family. Another, though? He wished he knew. Even after all these years. Especially after all these years.
The front door opened before he could pretend to be moving, and George Highness emerged, wrapped in a brown overcoat and a yellow scarf. In his hand, a bunch of flowers. Dinwoodie jumped backwards, as if he had been caught red-handed at something. Which, in a way, he had been. Trespassing not so much on property as on grief. He gulped a hello.
‘Good afternoon, Dinwoodie,’ George said. To Dinwoodie, his composure seemed unnatural, suspect.
‘I — ’ he began.
‘You wanted to see me?’
‘Yes,’ Dinwoodie said. ‘I was on my way to visit you.’
‘And very nearly there, by the look of it.’ With his free hand, George indicated Dinwoodie’s feet which were planted on, if not rooted in, the garden path. ‘I was on my way out,’ he continued. ‘As you see.’
Cool customer, Dinwoodie thought. He tried again.
‘I wanted to offer you my condolences,’ he said. And then, by way of explanation, ‘The death of your wife. I’m very sorry.’
At last George looked surprised. He blinked and angled an embarrassed glance into the shrubbery that divided the path from the small front lawn. ‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘but it seems a little like the death of someone who was already dead.’ A smile leaked from his face. ‘If you follow me.’
‘Yes,’ Dinwoodie said. ‘Yes, I think I do.’