He was woken after seven by June moving about, the noise of doors downstairs, never thought of, never forgotten. A bit later he swung out of bed, and parted the curtains. In the grey dusk of the garden only frail winter jasmine made a sign of the world of colour and light. He hadn’t said how long he was staying – he knew June didn’t want him hanging around, but thought she might resent it if he left. The date of the funeral was yet to be fixed, and he longed to be back in London, but there was something bleak and illusionless in going away, a first clear admission they didn’t need each other.
After breakfast he went out for a walk through the town, and there were things June said she needed him to get. He felt flat, colourless himself today, but lurkingly conspicuous, a returning son, who had known these streets, walls, crossroads, gable ends in the 1950s. But no one knew him, even though in Walsh’s he stared smiling at the little man who slipped the loaf into the bag and twizzled the ends as he had forty years ago, but in plastic gloves now and a hairnet, the stay-at-home son turning into his old mother. Walsh’s at least was there, with its yellow linoleum, its doughnuts and cream horns, and the opaque glass dish like an ashtray, where they put your change. Three or four other shops were empty, and stripped bare. Some were chain stores, burger joints, places Johnny might have hung about in, if he’d been a teenager now, looking at men. In Pinnock’s tea rooms the cheap cups and saucers, CDs and high heels of a charity shop were lined up in the window, for the time being. Johnny stared in, remembering, the string curtain in the kitchen door, the steep narrow staircase to the first-floor lavatory, and Gordon Pinnock himself, one of the certain homosexuals of his own childhood, another man who’d once been in love with David Sparsholt. Gordon had retired to Madeira, twenty years ago, with one of his waiters. Johnny strolled on, with an uncanny sense of knowing this town in a thousand details, the past showing through the present, and of being on the brink of saying goodbye to it for ever.
Not wanting to go back yet he cut down Coton Road, over the Ringway and into Riversley Park – here nothing had changed but the seasons, the beds of salvias and geraniums in front of the Museum dug over for winter, but, happy and strange, the soldier back, with his startled look, gun in one hand, eyes lifted under his soft-brimmed hat: a memorial to the Boer War, stolen years ago, a local outrage, and now lovingly recast, when the Boer War was beyond memory. Johnny strolled along the landscaped curve of the river-bank. It felt a moment to think alone about time, loss and change, and the path by the water seemed a fitting invitation, with the bare scraped minimum of poetry to it . . . It had rained in the night, and there was a sheen of damp still on the tarmac, an untraceable sad glimpse out of childhood in this very spot. Fifty yards ahead of him a couple in their twenties were dawdling just where he wanted to be, the man much taller, but their arms round each other, tightly but not quite containing their energy, which broke out in quick wriggles and tuggings apart, mock fights, as if they were ten years younger. Now the man ran away a few yards, struck a pose, she drifted scornfully then rushed at him with a shriek and jumped on him and kissed him. Johnny felt a weary resentment of them, their happiness, claiming the full heterosexual allowance to carry on in public. He fell behind, and in doing so seemed more consciously to be following them. He thought about holding and kissing Zé, and Zé fucking him, and wondered if this could be it – the question turning, as he walked under the bare willows, from a warm but doubtful one about taking things further with him into a much colder one about a future without love, sex, the repeatedly chased and in his case rarely captured affair. The couple ahead were hard to get away from because they kept stopping. Johnny stopped too, with a sudden weird thought they were just like his parents sixty years ago – even, for a moment, tall good-looking man, short lively woman, that they were them. Twice she looked over her shoulder at Johnny, then said something to the man, who glanced round too. He laughed as he saw he was spoiling it for them, just as they were spoiling it for him.
When he got back to the house, June was putting her coat on and said she was going to top up the bird feeder, but Johnny insisted on doing it for her. He went out through the cold utility room, with its square pot sink where his father had washed his hands after work of all kinds, the cracked white bar of soap marbled with his dirt. When he opened the connecting door into the garage and turned on the light, there was the sleek superannuated Jaguar, heavy and silent, a dead man’s car; and beyond it June’s blue Golf GTi. ‘I’ve done something I never thought I’d do,’ his father had said, ‘I’ve bought a bloody German car.’ Johnny took in the remote chilled smell of oil and wood shavings from the workbench at the back where David had tinkered away his retirement mornings. On the floor in the corner, heavy, as if magnetized and movable by no one else, his large black barbell rested, and, delicately cobwebbed, the hand-weights with their stack of iron discs, used all his adult life, in staring daily sessions, until work on his arms and chest became a threat to his heart.
Johnny found a bag of birdseed on a shelf and went out through the back door. The absolute confirming greyness of the winter sky, in every direction . . . the lawn dark green with the wet, and the shaped clumps of conifers, severe and cemetery-like today, blocking off the view from the flanking houses. The bark-covered beds, the roses pruned down hard. He unhooked the green tube of the feeder, a cage within a cage, with its squirrel-proof outer guard, jiggled out its little chained lid and poured the pretty particoloured seed in a pleasing flow over the small bars which half-obstructed the entrance. The seed fell as if through time, threshed corn streaming from its chute between timbers and into the dryer at Peachey’s farm. But in a moment it was full, overfull, and he tipped some out and flung it on the grass, where the squirrels could eat it to their heart’s content. Then he hung the feeder back on the rustic frame his father had made and erected, with every structural safeguard, outside the kitchen window, where June could watch it and occasionally, for some rare visitor or a great congregation of coal tits or sparrows, call him through to have a look. Through he would come, just too late, and to a scowl from June that suggested his own thoughtless movements had frightened them off.
‘We must talk about the funeral,’ she said, when Johnny joined her again in the sitting room. She had got out three possible photos for the order of service, which might have been captioned ‘War Hero’, ‘Criminal’, ‘Old Gent’.
‘Did Dad say anything about it?’
It seemed that he hadn’t. ‘He wasn’t religious, as you know,’ said June.
‘It’s a cremation, anyway, I hope.’
‘I’m afraid,’ said June, ‘he wanted to be buried’ – and looked away at the sudden rush of agreement between them. ‘It’s in his will.’
Johnny stared at the airman photo and wished very much that the square-jawed squadron leader had given the order, when it finally came to it, for incineration. ‘Well, if that’s what he wants, I mean wanted.’
‘And with his own father, of course.’
‘Well, I suppose.’ He got up and gazed out of the window at the empty quadrant of the drive. It was a strength to him to know that Pat was (illicitly, nocturnally) scattered on Eel Brook Common – even if he felt a literal-minded reluctance to walk there in the months that followed, when the frost on the grass or the wind-blown grit on the paths might hold microscopic parts of him. He still wondered, when he saw the damp chevrons of his boot soles on the floor of the porch, if in fact he wasn’t treading Pat back into the house. But Dad was going down, in an armour-plated box, into the red Warwickshire earth, and would lie there stubbornly, immaculately dressed, until long after everyone who remembered him alive was dead too.