He loses his thread and breaks off what was in danger of becoming a rant. He calls to his cousin and the wife whose name, alas, escapes him, please to come in and have a glass of wine or a cup of tea, as he makes his way across the room to welcome them both.
Then his mischievous aunt, always one for keeping up a comical or embarrassing situation if she can, calls out in a high-pitched theatrical voice:
— And tell us, pray: what are the creatures’ names, my dear?
And a few of the mourners laugh and he, suddenly mindful of a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses, also known to the aunt (but very far, in fact, from her mind), who were once just an ordinary sad bunch of people but became permanently radiant-faced after getting the glory, replies with all due gravity:
Taylor, Audrey, Hilary and Mallarmé, one male and three females.
Sometimes a house is bigger than a heart, an apparently crazy thought, scarcely stands to irreason: a house is always bigger. But the thinker of the heart knows that in its pull, voracity, embrace and engulfing power it is at least as colossal as the mouth: it sucks up an ocean, casts out decades, burns down at a quiver forest after forest, searing soaring seeking or holding onto its prey, its inseparable maker, in a valley of kings of its own making. But sometimes a house is bigger. You can huff and you can puff but the walls won’t give, making the heart collapse, taking it all in at its own pace, a matter of a minute or a year and the house has prised open the heart and built itself so big inside it sprawls out finally standing alone with the heart pulverised, faked within, beyond repair. She recognises this in you and fears you have no sense of it. You know nothing of this.
Three days after the funeral you drive her to Heathrow. In the receding visibility of the security line winding towards the departure lounge, her green shoes and lower body already gone, she turns back and sees you in tears, but she is always weeping first. It is unclear when you will next see one another, if ever, this miraculous relationship that has been going on already for years; she is fearful for you to the trembling tips of her fingers for what will happen now as you head back down the long road west through the summer dusk anxious already for the creatures abandoned that morning. There is the calm of water-lights, the shade and cool of this other world restfully alert to the eye, buried in time, the placid underworld and prehistoric clarity of sitting beside the great tank and watching. You establish a routine in your solitude as keeper, maintaining the quality of the water with the pH value at seven, and the temperature thermostatically regulated to between 24 and 27ºC, ensuring a good supply of oxygen to the tank via the filter outlet, removing faeces and left-over food from the substrate using the vacuum siphon, making regular partial water changes to the tank to avoid the build-up of ammonia, nitrite and nitrate, and of course feeding these creatures, securing the appropriate supplies of shrimp, whitefish, perch, occasionally mussels and squid, as well as earthworms, along with a variety of plant foods such as cucumber and lettuce leaves.
In the doldrums of grief these blazing dog-days alone unflaggingly you patrol the extensive gardens on a small tractor, cutting the chaotic former lawns back to something resembling a controlled state, weeding the former flowerbeds, assaulting the high hedges toting an electric hedge-trimmer like a machine-gun, sweat pouring off you as you shift load after load of grass and weeds and hedge-cuttings dry as a tinderbox down to the bottom of the garden to stack it up on a fire along with the steady flow of combustible material from inside the house, the innumerable papers bills pieces of correspondence, bits of bereft wood from here or there. In the dazzling heat of these raw grief-days you work with mole-like speed and feverish determination to clear as much as you can of the jungle that was once garden, your father’s swards, your mother’s joy untended, the flowerbeds infuriated with brambles nettles thistles and other weeds, all orderliness choked up in the two and a half years since she died, and making sorties into the drawing room cupboards and bureau-drawers and edging your way furtively, unsteadily, eyes swimming, before setting foot in the end in your father’s study, ruinous reliquary of the all-in archive and bibliography of remains.
You encounter, but it is already too late, your father’s things: the sturdy, built-in, ceiling-high shelves of old books never read or read in youth fifty or sixty years ago, gathering dust more or less untouched ever since, the numerous boxes and cases and cabinets stuffed, the diffuse array of small wooden tables, some of them of your father’s own construction, and the great oak desk piled high with all the gubbins of the inveterate pipe-smoker and former proof-reader and graphic design artist, the papers, the pens, the rulers and magnifying glasses, the erasers, paper knives, inks, ashtrays, debris of stationery, calendars, jottings, newspaper clippings and other memoranda stretching back twenty-five years or more on the surface of the desk alone, untouched since his wife, some four or five years earlier, acted a madness of Miss Havisham in reverse, blundering into her husband’s sanctuary, careering maniacally tipping over tables, pushing over pictures, like the strangely unreal stylised portrait of her father-in-law taken in a photographer’s studio in Ealing in the 1930s, scattering papers and implements, tearing down books, since which time he stopped working in his study or stopped retreating there to sit in his melancholy old age, taking temporary respite from the otherwise more or less constant responsibility of looking after his beloved wife, mad as an attic as she was, and never again disturbing the disturbance she had created in that berserk interlude but letting the place be, archive of chaos, overrun by spiders and mice.
You encounter, too too late, not only his collected works already scattered but in the deep drawers of the great oak desk and boxes and cases and cabinets the remains of all else, every letter, document and photograph relating to the family, from birth to death certificate, from toddler holiday snaps to terminal correspondence, and of the lives of your father’s father and mother, the last deranging flotsam casting up as from a kaleidoscope of sepia a photograph from Bexhill-on-Sea in full beachwear circa 1920, another of your mother’s grandparents, labourers on the farm in Scotland never before or again to be pictured, circa 1890, another of your mother’s father’s father from the Highland Games even further back, caber-tossingly dark and in the vestiges now yours to keep or consign to the almost daily garden pyre or further trip to the tip. With folders containing heating bills and letters exchanged on the subject of the boiler from a quarter of a century ago, or documentation relating to the extension built and the purchase and sale of the house you had previously all lived in, the bundling up and dispatch is almost automatic, but in the case of more personal relics, however apparently trifling, you can linger and lose all sense of perspective before deciding no, not now, not yet, and returning the folder to its place in the drawer.