Before you died I’d have found his speech in poor taste; the Big Things are embarrassing, best to avoid them. But since your death I prefer a naturist style of conversation. Let’s strip it all down to what matters. Let’s have emotions and beliefs on show without the modest covering of small talk.
“Do you want to talk through the service?” he asked.
“No. I’m leaving that up to Mum. She said she’d like to.”
Had she? Or had I just wanted to hear that when she said she’d do it?
“Anything you’d like to add?” he asked.
“The truth is I don’t really want her buried at all. Tess was a free spirit. I know that’s a cliché but I can’t think of another way of explaining her to you. I don’t mean that she was untrammeled by convention, although that’s true; it’s that when I think of her now, she’s up in the sky, soaring. Her element is air not earth. And I can’t bear the idea of putting her under the ground.”
It was the first time I’d talked about you like this with someone else. The words came from strata of thought many layers down from the surface thoughts that are usually scraped off and spoken. I suppose that’s what priests are privy to all the time, accessing the deep thoughts where faith, if it exists, can be found. Father Peter was silent but I knew he was listening, and driving past a Tesco local supermarket, I continued our incongruous conversation: “I hadn’t understood funeral pyres before, but now I do. It’s ghastly to burn someone you love but watching the smoke going into the sky, I think that’s rather beautiful now. And I wish Tess could be up in the sky. Somewhere with color and light and air.”
“I understand. We can’t offer you a pyre, I’m afraid. But maybe you and your mother should think about a cremation?” There was lightness in his tone that I liked. I supposed that death and burial were an everyday part of his job, and although not disrespectful, he wasn’t going to allow them to edit his conversational flow.
“I thought you weren’t allowed a cremation if you’re Catholic? Mum said the church thought it was pagan.”
“It did, once upon a time. But not anymore. As long as you still believe in the resurrection of the body.”
“I wish,” I said, hoping to sound light too, but instead I sounded desperate.
“Why don’t you think about it further? Ring me when you’ve decided, or even if you haven’t and just want to talk about it.”
“Yes. Thank you.”
As I parked the rental car in the hospital’s underground car park, I thought about taking your ashes to Scotland, to a mountain with purple heather and yellow gorse, climbing up into the gray skies above the first level of cloud and in the cold, clean air scattering you to the winds. But I knew Mum would never allow a cremation.
I’d been to St. Anne’s before, but it had been refurbished beyond recognition with a shiny new foyer and vast art installations and a coffee bar. Unlike any hospital I’d been in, it felt like it was a part of the world outside it. Through the large glass doors I could see shoppers strolling past, and the foyer was flooded with natural light. It smelled of roasting coffee beans and brand-new dolls just opened from their boxes on Christmas Day (maybe the café’s new shiny chairs were made of the same plastic).
I took the lift up to the fourth floor, as instructed, and walked to the maternity wing. The shininess didn’t extend up that far, and the smell of coffee mixed with brand-new dolls was smothered by the usual hospital smell of disinfectant and fear. (Or is it only we who smell that because of Leo?) There were no windows, just strip lights glaring onto the linoleum beneath; no clocks, even the nurses’ watches, pinned to their uniforms, were upside down; and I was back in a hospital world with its own no-weather and no-time in which the aberrant crises of pain, illness and death were Kafkaesque turned ordinary. There was a sign demanding that I wash my hands using the gel provided and now the hospital smell was on my skin, dulling the diamond on my engagement ring. The buzzer on the locked ward door was answered by a woman in her forties, her frizzy red hair tied back with a bulldog clip, looking competent and exhausted.
“I phoned earlier. Beatrice Hemming?”
“Of course. I’m Cressida, the senior midwife. Dr. Saunders, one of the obstetricians, is expecting you.”
She escorted me into the ward. From side rooms came the sound of babies crying. I’d never heard hours-old babies cry before and one sounded desperate, as if he or she had been abandoned. The senior midwife led me into a relatives’ room; her voice was professionally caring. “I’m so sorry about your nephew.”
For a moment I didn’t know whom she was referring to. I’d never thought about our own relationship with each other. “I always call him Tess’s baby, not my nephew.”
“When is his funeral?”
“Next Thursday. It’s my sister’s too.”
The senior midwife’s voice was no longer professionally caring, but shocked. “I’m so sorry. I was just told that the baby had died.” I was thankful to the kind doctor I’d spoken to earlier that morning for not turning your death into pass-the-day-away gossip. Though I suppose the subject of death in a hospital is more talking shop than gossip.
“I want her baby to be with her.”
“Yes, of course.”
“And I’d like to talk to whoever was with Tess when she gave birth. I was meant to be with her, you see, but I wasn’t. I didn’t even take her call.” I started to cry, but tears were completely normal here, even the room, with its washable sofa covers, was probably designed with weeping relatives in mind. The senior midwife put her hand on my shoulder. “I’ll find out who was with her and ask them to come and talk to you. Excuse me a moment.”
She went into the corridor. Through the open doorway I saw a woman on a gurney with a just-born baby in her arms. Next to them a doctor put his arm around a man. “It’s customary for the baby to cry, not the dad.” The man laughed and the doctor smiled at him. “When you arrived this morning, you were a couple and now you’re a family. Amazing, isn’t it?”
The senior midwife shook her head at him. “As an obstetrician, Dr. Saunders, it shouldn’t really amaze you anymore.”
Dr. Saunders wheeled the mother and baby into a side ward and I watched him. Even from a distance I could see that his face was fine-featured with eyes that were lit from the inside, making him beautiful rather than harshly handsome.
He came out with the senior midwife. “Dr. Saunders, this is Beatrice Hemming.”
Dr. Saunders smiled at me, totally unselfconscious, and reminded me of you in the way he wore his beauty carelessly, as if unacknowledged by the owner.
“Of course, my colleague who spoke to you earlier this morning told me you were coming. Our hospital chaplain has made all the necessary arrangements with the undertakers, and they are going to come and get her baby this afternoon.”
His voice was noticeably unhurried in the bustle of the ward; someone who trusted people to listen to him.
“The chaplain had his body brought to the room of rest,” he continued. “We thought that a morgue is no place for him. I’m only sorry that he had to be there as long as he did.”
I should have thought about this earlier. About him. I shouldn’t have left him in the morgue.
“Would you like me to take you there?” he asked.
“Are you sure you have time?”
“Of course.”
Dr. Saunders escorted me down the corridor toward the lifts. I heard a woman screaming. The sound came from above, which I guessed to be the labor ward. Like the newborn baby’s cries, her screams were unlike anything I had ever heard, scraped raw with pain. There were nurses and another doctor in the lift, but they didn’t appear to notice the screams. I reasoned that they were used to it, working day in, day out in the Kafka hospital world.