I asked, was he in pain.
“He didn’t say much after I got back, he didn’t seem to want to. Sometimes he gave a kind of shout. I didn’t think he was going, but he did. I wish I’d sent for the doctor sooner, Mrs Sperry and me, we blame ourselves for that. His breathing began to make a noise, then the sun came up. I’m sorry to say—”
I said, “You did all that anyone could do.”
“It was full light before he went. The doctor got here a few minutes after.”
He added: “I got her (Mr Sperry didn’t explain who that was) to lay him out this morning. He didn’t look very nice before, and I didn’t think you’d want to see him like that.”
He said: “I never heard anyone say a bad word about him.”
That was a formal epitaph, such as I used to hear in my childhood in that road. But Mr Sperry, as well as keeping his sense of propriety about a death, had also been totally efficient. The death certificate had been signed: the undertaker would be calling to see me later that evening. At last I had the opportunity to tell Mr Sperry that we wanted a church service. Mr Sperry was ready to cope with that. It meant that I ought to go round to the vicar’s and fix a time, before the undertaker came. All the old gentleman’s “bits of things” had been sifted through and collected in his room. So far as Mr Sperry knew or could discover, he had not left a will.
“Why should he?” I asked. Yet, in fact, he owned the house: it was dilapidated now, not worth much, a thousand at most. Anyway, whatever arrangement Mr Sperry had with him (I later found that Mr Sperry was paying £2.2.6 a week), that must go on. Mr Sperry would not have brought up the subject — certainly not until after the funeral — but he was relieved.
He said: “Now you’d like to see him, I’m sure.”
He took me into the hall, opened the door of my father’s room, touched my sleeve, and left me alone. As I crossed the threshold into the half-dark, I had a sense, sudden, dominating, of déjà vu. I could just make out the short body lying on the sofa, then, though all the superstitious nerves held my fingers back, I switched on the light, and looked at him. Strangely, he appeared much more formidable than in life. His head had always been disproportionately larger than the rest of him: as it lay there above the sheets, it loomed strong and heavy, the clowning all gone now that the spectacles were off and the mild eyes closed. His moustache had been brushed and didn’t droop any more. It might have been the face of a stranger — no, of someone bearing a family resemblance, a distant relative whom I hadn’t often seen.
Standing by the sofa, I stayed and looked at him. It took an effort to move away, as I went to inspect the other side of the room, where Mr Sperry had neatly stacked my father’s “bits of things”. There were a couple of old suits: a bowler hat: a few shirts and pairs of long woollen pants: another nightshirt, as well as the one his body was dressed in. An umbrella, one or two other odds and ends. No papers or letters of any kind that I could see (he must have destroyed all our letters as soon as he read them). A couple of library books to be returned, but otherwise not a single book of his own. The two clocks — but they had not been moved, one still stood on the mantelpiece, presentation plaque gleaming, the other in the corner. That was all. He hadn’t liked possessions: but still, not many men had lived till nearly ninety and accumulated less.
I went back and looked at him. All of a sudden, I realised why I had had that overmastering sense of déjà vu. It wasn’t a freak, it was really something I had already seen. For it was in that room that, for the first time in my life, at the age of eight, I had seen a corpse. My grandfather, when he retired, had lived in this house with Aunt Milly, and he had died here (it was early in 1914). I had come along on an errand for my mother. I couldn’t find Aunt Milly, and I ran through the house searching for her and rushed into this room. Just as when I entered today, it was half-dark, chinks of light round the edges of the blinds: there lay my grandfather in his coffin. Before, afraid, I ran away, I saw, or thought I saw, the grey spade beard, the stern and massive face. He had been a man of powerful nature, and perhaps my father’s comic acts, which lasted all his life, had started in self-defence. And yet in death — if I had really seen my grandfather as I imagined — they looked very much the same.
When I put the room into darkness again, and rejoined Mr Sperry, he asked me: “How did you like him?”
“Thank you,” I replied.
Satisfied, he gave me the vicar’s address. They couldn’t afford to live in the vicarage nowadays, said Mr Sperry. That didn’t surprise me: the church had been built after I was born, the living had always been a poor one. The vicar I remembered must have been a man of private means: he and his wife had lived in some state, by the standards of the parish, and he shocked my mother, not only by his high church propensities (he’s getting higher every week, she used to whisper, as though the altitude of clergymen was something illimitable) but also by rumours of private goings on which at the time I did not begin to understand. Parties! Champagne, so the servants reported! Women present when his wife was away! My mother darkly suspected him of having what she called an ‘intrigue’ with one of the teachers at the little dame school which she sent me to. My mother was shrewd, but she had a romantic imagination, and that was one of the mysteries in which she was never certain of the truth.
There was nothing of all that about the present incumbent. He was living in a small house near the police station, and politely he asked me into a front room similar to Mr Sperry’s. He was a youngish, red-haired man with a smile that switched on and off, and a Tyneside accent.
I told him my name, and said that my father had died. At once, both with kindness and with the practice of one used to commiserating in the anonymous streets with persons he did not know, he gave me his sympathy. “It’s one of the great losses, when your parents go. Even when you’re not so young yourself. There’s a gap that no one’s going to fill.” He was looking at me with soft brown eyes. “But you’ve got to look at it this way. It’s sad for you, but it isn’t for him, you know. He’s just gone from a nasty day like this—” he pointed to the grey cloud-dark street — “and moved into a beautiful one. That’s what it means for him. If you think of him, there’s nothing to be sad about.”
I didn’t want to answer. The vicar was kind and full of faith. Young Charles, I was thinking, might have called him sweet.
I went on to say that, if it could be managed, we should like the funeral in two days’ time, on Friday. “Excuse me, sir,” said the vicar, “but could you say, have you any connection with this parish?”
That took me aback. Without thinking, I hadn’t been prepared for it. My mother, hanging on to the last thread of status after my father’s bankruptcy: her stall at the bazaar, her place at the mothers’ meeting: she had felt herself, and made others feel her, a figure in that church until she died. Yet that was long ago. He had never heard of her, or of any of us. When I mentioned my name, it had meant nothing at all.
Of course, he said (both of us embarrassed, as I began lamely to produce the family credentials) he would be glad to take the funeral. Was there anything special that I required? A musical service? An organist? Once more that day I found myself thinking, as simply as my mother would have done, of what the old man might have “liked”. He had loved music: yes, we would have an organist. In that case, said the vicar, the service couldn’t happen till early evening on Friday, when the “lady who plays the organ for us” got out of work. They couldn’t afford a regular organist nowadays, he said: the church was poorer than it had been when I lived here, not many people attended, there were no well-to-do members of his congregation. The only one in my time (at least he seemed well-to-do to us) would have been the local doctor. “The present doctors don’t come to church,” said the vicar, with his switched on, acceptant smile.