The queue parted like the Red Sea to let Levi pass through, the whites of his eyes gleaming angrily. He took two strides into the street, and crashed to the ground, groaned and lay still, his huge body stretched out on the cobbles.
‘Levi!’ Annie screamed. She rushed outside and crumpled beside him. She cradled his dear face in her arms, and sat there rocking for long hopeless minutes. The morning sky darkened while they searched for his pulse and strained to hear him breathing, but Levi’s mighty chest was still, his face frozen in anger.
‘’Tis too late. He’s dead,’ said Annie quietly, and she watched the last sparks of his life drift past her and disappear.
‘You’ll HAVE to go out now, Mother,’ said Alice firmly.
‘You’ll have to get over it,’ agreed Betty.
Annie sat miserably between her two daughters on the morning of Levi’s funeral. Her heart was full of heat and teardrops, her grey hair a storm of impossible curls, her face swollen with grief. She was silent now, rocking slightly, her hand picking threads out of the black shawl around her shoulders. She’d repeated and repeated her words: ‘I can’t,’ but no one would listen, and there was nothing left to say. Only Freddie understood her fear. She looked at him now, sitting in the window, his long legs folded awkwardly, his eyes staring into the garden. He would take care of her, she was sure. He’d leave school and run the bakery. They’d manage.
Betty and Alice had always collaborated in forecasting gloom. They’d been away from home for years, and Freddie had hardly seen them in his life. Annie knew he found them intimidating, especially today. Both were dressed in the blackest of black outfits, identical hats with black net veils covering their faces, trendy tight-fitting black skirts and jackets, and grim expressions to match. Annie felt she no longer knew who they were. To her, Betty and Alice were a long ago memory of happy children.
She looked at her elder son, George, who was hunched on a chair, so like Levi, inarticulate but wise. He’d arrived on a throbbing motorbike, and she could see that Freddie was fascinated by it, more interested in the bike than in his brother who was fifteen years his senior.
Annie had wanted to blame Freddie for Levi’s sudden death, but she chose to keep quiet. A death was trouble enough. She understood Freddie’s aversion to school. Surely he’d suffered enough, she reasoned, and in the months and years to come she would need him. Without Freddie, Annie saw herself ending up in the asylum. She even felt threatened by her two daughters, Alice the manager and Betty the echo. There was something ominous about the way they wanted to manage her, the cast-iron conviction they had about her agoraphobia. Levi had tolerated it, Freddie understood, but Alice and Betty wanted to deny its existence.
The slow clop-clopping of the horse-drawn hearse brought a respectful silence to the street. Neighbours stood outside their doors, workmen downed tools and took off their caps, playing children stood silently, their backs against the wall.
‘It’s coming,’ said Freddie from his seat by the window.
Together they filed outside in their black clothes, with Annie wedged firmly between Alice and Betty.
It was the second funeral Freddie had experienced in his life. At Granny Barcussy’s funeral he had walked, white-faced and distraught beside his father, and Annie had stayed at home, peering out at the sad procession. At the graveside Freddie had broken down and sobbed uncontrollably, and Levi had picked him up and held him like a baby. The smell of his coat and the feel of his big hands patting him had comforted Freddie.
Now he was nearly a man, and no one would comfort him at his father’s graveside. He would have to stand there, stiff and expressionless like Alice and Betty.
When he saw the two black horses turn into the street he had a terrible feeling of deep, deep cold. The power of death to suddenly strip the vigour out of the whole street was almost disabling.
He stood at the door, next to George who towered over him with his face set rigid. Freddie wanted something from the stranger who was his brother, warmth or eye contact or a touch on his arm, but there was none. He wanted to walk backwards in front of Annie, helping her as he had always done, but Alice and Betty had her in an iron grip, their fingers clamped onto her black shawl.
Loneliness engulfed Freddie, and it was the loneliness of being different. This was his family, but he wasn’t remotely like any of them, nor did he want to be. What he wanted most in that moment was to run away, to arrive at his father’s funeral from a different direction and watch it as a lone observer. He wanted to experience the funeral with the sky and the wind and the twisting flight of gathering swallows. He wanted to sit on the floor of the church and feel the music rumble through stone, and watch the faces of coloured glass and stone, watch and read their expression and feel their empathy. And he wanted to share his father’s journey into the unknown, into the silent land.
So he walked alone at the back of the black procession on its way to the cemetery, falling further and further behind, and he looked down from a great height and saw himself detaching, step by step, from the silver cords that bound the generations. He was alone. He saw his family drifting away from him on a river of forgetfulness, and he was glad to walk alone, his feet governed by the tolling of the church bell, his eyes gazing at a sparrow hawk hovering in the distance.
The silence of the funeral seemed to have a shape, an elongated elliptical space that extended ahead of the cortège and for some distance behind, the shape excluding the normal life of the street. Freddie kept within its boundary, close enough, but apart. George didn’t turn to see where he was, and Alice and Betty minced along – almost carrying Annie, the backs of their three heads bobbing in the wake of the hearse as it halted outside Monterose church. A group of people who had known Levi were at the entrance, hats in hand, and the vicar loomed like a heron inspecting an estuary.
Once, Annie had sent Freddie to Sunday school, and the teacher had refused to have him there again. ‘All he does is walk around and stare at the statues and the windows,’ she’d complained. ‘He won’t sit down with the others.’ Freddie had longed to go in there again but he’d never had time off from school, the bakery, the railway, and Annie’s endless errands.
He hung back as the coffin was unloaded – to the tolling of the bell, the jingle of the horses’ harness, and the shuffle of footsteps. The way the coffin was carried high on the shoulders of the pallbearers gave him a strange feeling of finality. His father’s body was inside. There was no going back. It was grim, and it was glorious. The majesty of the church was there for Levi, the stained glass and the brass eagle, the tapestries and the music. After all Levi’s work in the corn mill, his arthritis, his uncontrollable tempers, the broken china, the crying, the po-faced storytelling, the years in the bakery. After all that he was paraded into this magnificent building.
Freddie was last to go into the church, and he noticed that Gladys was there, looking at him with a blend of concern and disapproval. Ignoring her, he lifted his eyes to appraise the wood carvings in the roof, and to gaze at his favourite window which had a saint with a halo underneath a tree of the richest emerald greens, a white curly lamb at his feet, a scarlet cloak and a golden sword at his belt.
‘You should sit with your family. Up there,’ Gladys whispered loudly, but no one looked round. Freddie ignored her, and walked to the back of the church where he sat down on the stone step leading into the bell tower. From there he could see the entire church, his father’s coffin and the backs of heads. The vicar’s voice droned, the congregation stood up to sing, but Freddie closed his eyes, touched the stone floor with his hands, and went into a trance.
Through his sensitive fingers he could feel the earth below the church. It had energy like an arrow of light fired into the rocks, a sound that resonated for miles and miles through the land, through churches and castles and monuments far away. And he could feel water down there, the secret wells and springs winding, branching like arteries of silver through the dark of the earth.