I asked whether he would miss it at alclass="underline" but I guessed the answer, for here we were very much alike.
“Who knows?” he said.
Yes, I knew, the places, the times, one was nostalgic for were not the obvious ones, not even the happy ones.
“Anyway,” he went on, “I can always send them home thoughts from abroad.”
A moment later he said: “It will be good to be on the move.”
Then, before we stirred ourselves, he enquired about how we should be getting on at home. Maurice would presumably still be round: he was close to his mother, and that was fine. “He’s very sweet,” said Charles, who, like others of what he called his generation, wasn’t ashamed of what mine would have considered saccharine expressions. He was fond of his half-brother, and sometimes, I thought, envied him, just because he seemed so untainted by the world. What would happen to him? “I wish,” said Charles, “that he could get through his damned examinations.” Was there nothing we could do?
Charles was busy about others’ concerns, joyful, vigorous, since in independence he was setting off on his own. It would be good to be on the move, he had said. I wasn’t resenting the rapacity and self-absorption of his youth, perhaps one couldn’t in a son when the organic links were strong, when one had known in every cell of one’s body what that state was like. I should worry about his remaining alive, until I myself was dead. It was strange, though — not unpleasant, a kind of affirmation, but still strange — to see him sitting there, as much on his own as I was now or had ever been.
40: Death of an Old Man
AS Margaret and I sat over our breakfast, the telephone rang. Good God, I said, was it Mr Pateman again? — not so amused as Charles had been, hearing of this new addition to our timetable. Margaret answered, and as she stood there nodded ill-temperedly to me: it was a trunk call, from the usual place. Then her expression altered, and she replied in a grave and gentle tone. Yes, she would fetch me. For an instant she put a hand on mine, saying that it was about my father.
“This is Mr Sperry here.”
“Yes?”
“I’m afraid I’ve got bad news for you, I’m very sorry, I’m sure. Old Mr Eliot—”
“Yes?”
“Early this morning. He passed away.”
Again I said yes.
“I was with him when he went.”
Mr Sperry was asking me about the funeral. “I’m doing what I can,” he said. I replied that I would arrive at the house by lunchtime. Mr Sperry, sounding more than ever apologetic, said that he had a piece of business then. Could I wait till half past three or four? “It doesn’t matter to him now, does it? He was a fine old gentleman. I’m doing what I can.”
Returning to the breakfast table, I repeated all this to Margaret. She knew that she would be desolated by her own father’s death: she was tentative about commiserating with me about the death of mine. Somehow, even to her, it seemed like an act of nature. He was very old, she said: it sounded like a good way to die. It was a pity, though, that instead of having only his lodger with him, there was none of us. “I’m not sure that he even wanted that,” I said.
We found ourselves discussing what he would have wanted in the way of funerals. It was so long since I had talked to him seriously — I had talked to him seriously so seldom, even when I was a child — that I had no idea. I suspected that he wouldn’t have cared a damn. I forgot then, though later I remembered, that once he had expressed a surprisingly positive distaste for funerals in general, and his own in particular. He was rueful that if he died before his wife (he had outlived her by over forty years) she would insist on ‘making a fuss’. But I forgot that.
Neither Margaret nor I felt any of that singular necrophilic confidence with which one heard persons express certainty about what a dead relative would have ‘liked’. I had once stood with a party at Diana Skidmore’s having drinks round her husband’s grave, carefully placed near a summer house on his own estate. Diana had been positive that there was nothing he would have liked more than to have his friends enjoy themselves close by: she was equally positive that he would, curiously enough, have strongly disliked golf balls infringing the airspace over the grave.
Margaret and I had no such clear idea. My father must have a funeral. In church? Again we didn’t know. As one of his few gestures of marital independence, he had always refused to attend church with my mother, who was devout. I was pretty sure that he believed in nothing at all. Yet, for the sake of his choir practices, he had frequented church halls, church rooms, all his life. When I rang up Martin to tell him the news, I asked his opinion. Rather to my surprise, for Martin was a doctrinaire unbeliever, he thought that maybe we ought to have a service in the parish church. Quite why, he didn’t or couldn’t explain. Perhaps some strain of family piety, perhaps a memory of our mother, perhaps something more atavistic than that. Anyway, wherever his impulse came from, I was relieved, because I had it too.
This was a Wednesday, still mid-June. Martin’s family would all travel the next day, and so would Margaret and Charles. The funeral had better be on Friday, if I could arrange it. That was what I had to tell Mr Sperry, as we sat in Aunt Milly’s old ‘front room’ that afternoon — the room where, with indignant competence, she laid down the battle plans for the teetotal campaigns. But I couldn’t tell Mr Sperry about the funeral at once, for he had a good deal to tell me.
It was a dank close day, and when he opened the door he was in his shirt sleeves. As though he wouldn’t have considered it proper to speak of ‘the old gentleman’ dressed like that, he immediately put his jacket on. The Venetian blinds in the front room were lowered, a crepuscular light filtered through. Mr Sperry gazed at me with an expression that was sad and at the same time excited by the occasion.
“I’m very sorry, I’m sure,” he said, repeating his greeting at the door. I thanked him.
“Of course, it has to come to us all in the end, doesn’t it? He had a long innings, you’ve got to remember that.”
Yes, I said.
“Mind you, he’s been a bit poorly since the winter. But I didn’t expect him to go like this, and I wonder if the doctor really did, though he says it might have happened any time.”
From his first words, he had been speaking in a hushed whisper, the tone in which my mother always spoke of death. In the same whisper, he went on: “There was someone, though, who knew his time had come.”
He said: “The old gentleman did. Himself.”
“When?”
“Last night.”
He paused. Then, more hushed: “I was just getting in from a job, I had been looking after Mrs Buckley’s drainpipe, it must have been getting on for half past six, and I heard him call out, Mr Sperry, Mr Sperry. He had a good strong voice right up to the end. Of course I went in, he was lying on his sofa, it was made up to sleep in, you know, he said, Mr Sperry, I wonder if you’d mind staying with me tonight. I said, yes, Mr Eliot, of course I will if you want me to. I said, is there anything the matter? He said, yes, stay with me please, I think I’m going to die tonight. That’s what he said. So I said, do you mind if I go and get a bit to eat. He said, yes, you have your supper, and I went and had a bit of salmon, and came back as soon as I could. He said, I wonder if you’d mind holding my hand. So I stayed there all night. I kept asking him, do you want anything else, but he wouldn’t say.”