Mr Walton, the undertaker, said he would have a pint of black-and-tan with Guinness and best bitter. A tall, vigorous young man in his middle thirties, he had the look of a woodcutter or hedger momentarily in town to get his implements sharpened. Part of this look derived from his heavy tan, which had been acquired, so he explained earlier, during a recent five-week holiday on the Costa Brava. Alec found he could imagine Mr Walton paying for an extra lavish sea-food dinner with one-sixth, say, of the profit on a moderately lavish funeral.
The party, some fifteen strong, was sitting or standing about in the lounge of the King’s Head. Alec had been relieved at this choice of venue, thinking that the saloon bar at the side of the building would have been too full of associations, but a glance inside soon after arrival had shown him that, since his last visit here, the room had been so remodelled that he had been unable even to locate the nook by the vanished fireplace where he and Betty and Jim had drunk their pink gins not five Saturdays ago. All the horse-brasses and sporting prints, the uneven dark woodwork and frosted-glass panels that had given the bar its character had been swept away, and the new bright plastics made it bare and unwelcoming. Alec recognized this as part of a pattern of change. The things with which his life had been furnished — the tennis club, the Liberal Association and its strong social side, keeping up with the new plays, music in the sense he understood it, even such numerically unimportant occasions as George V’s funeral and George VI’s coronation — were no longer there.
The young waiter in the smart white jacket carried his tray over to where Alec was standing in silence with Jim. ‘I wanted to say how sorry I am, sir. We shall all miss Mrs Duerden coming in here. We all liked her very much.’
‘Thank you, Fred, that’s very nice of you. I think this is yours, Mac.’
Alec took the whisky and soda. He had asked Frank for a small one, but its quantity, combined with the darkness of its colour, suggested that it was not very small. This would be his third double, not counting the brandy at the cemetery. Taking a hearty swallow, he tried for a moment to work out how much it was going to cost him to buy a round, then gave up. He could manage it, but it was a good job he had had the foresight to cash that three-quid cheque last night at his local. Much more important was the question of saying something meaningful to Jim, which he had not managed to do so far. He tried again: ‘I know this must seem like the end of everything, but it isn’t really, you must believe that.’
‘Isn’t it? Must I? I’m seventy years old, Mac. What am I supposed to start doing at my age? It’s just a matter of waiting now.’
‘Well, of course, that’s how it seems, but—’
‘No, that’s how it is. Probably in a few months, I don’t know, it’ll look different again, but how, I just can’t—’
‘You’ll find so many things you want to do.’
‘Look, you’re not going to waffle about developing new interests, are you? Spare me that. Did I tell you that part-time job of mine with those varnish and stain people packs up at Christmas? What do I take up then? Chess?’
‘There’s bound to be something.’ Alec was disconcerted by the violence of Jim’s tone and manner. He repressed an impulse to glance over his shoulder. Before he left he would mention to his friend the possibility of their joining forces in London, but now was clearly not the time.
‘Oh yes, I’m sure,’ Jim said bitterly. ‘Wherever you look there’s something. Oh, are you off, Rector? Haven’t you got time for another one?’
‘Unfortunately not.’ The clergyman spoke with feeling so intense as to be unidentifiable. ‘I have to be getting along.’
‘Well, you’ve been very kind and I’m most grateful.’ Jim turned aside to say goodbye to one of the local couples.
The clergyman looked at Alec. ‘Thank you for saying you liked my address,’ he said, blankly this time. ‘It’s the one I… You’re not family, are you?’
‘No, just a friend.’
‘It’s the one I use for those who have become members of my flock retroactively, so to speak — a proportion that increases every year.’
‘I see. It was you who—?’
The half-question hung in the air for a second or two while what was arguably a smile modified parts of the clergyman’s face. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘alone and unaided I did it. But of course I was a much younger man then. Goodbye to you.’
Soon afterwards they went in to lunch, just the family and Alec, five adults and two children. They sat at the round table in the window well away from the alcove favoured by the Trio: another relief. Further, Alec considered, it looked as if he were going to get away with not having to go up to the house at all. He wanted never to see it again, marked throughout as it was by Betty’s personality — apart from such details as the oversized TV set Frank had had delivered on the Duerdens’ fortieth wedding anniversary.
Their waiter offered his condolences, then the head waiter and the wine waiter; Frank caught the last named by the sleeve before he could move away and ordered another round of drinks and two bottles of hock off him. The manager came over and chatted for a couple of minutes. He was a new man and had not known the Duerdens well, but, without pushing himself forward, he spoke the language of decent feeling. ‘I had hoped to get to the church this morning,’ he said, ‘but I just couldn’t, with the Business Circle lunch and a christening party out of the blue. But I was thinking about you.’ Before departing he added: ‘Mrs Duerden’ll be missed all over the town. It won’t be the same place without her.’
This moved Alec in a gentle, unagonizing way. Betty would never have wanted to be thought one of the important people in the district, but she had been a well-liked queen of her modest bits of castle. Such reflections occupied him for most of the meal, which soon began to acquire some sort of festive air. A couple of stories from Frank about the difficulties of bringing the laundry business up to date contributed little, Alec considered, apart from additional light on the fellow’s character. When Bob got going, however, with what he called some unofficial law reports, it had to be admitted that he cheered everybody up. Even Jim had to laugh a few times, and the two Gioberti girls, each clutching a glass of pop, seemed spellbound.
While Alec ordered a round of liqueurs, Frank leaned back and lit a cigarette. ‘Fantastic really,’ he said. ‘Here we are, the lot of us, all having a good time, and two hours ago we were all, well, overwhelmed by grief. It just shows you, don’t it? I mean it’s natural, see? The church, the graveyard, the pub. Whoever it was thought up how to run funerals knew his job. I reckoned the service was real nice, didn’t you, Ann?’
Annette kept her eyes on the table. ‘Very nice,’ she said.
‘It was a bit, what shall I say? austere, that’s the only criticism I got. Of course, you don’t want to listen to us, we’re Romans, we go for a bit of, you know, colour and ritual and ceremony and incense and all that jazz. When you’re used to that type of thing the other stuff’s bound to come a bit drab, see what I mean?’
‘Yes, I do,’ Alec said. ‘But you’ve got to remember that’s the way we run things.’ He paused to pick up four of the half-dozen pieces of silver that remained of his two pound notes. ‘We like our religion to be austere, as you call it.’
‘Like I said, it’s what you’re used to.’
Alec’s voice rose. ‘And we don’t like a lot of dressing-up and chanting and bowing and scraping and any tomfoolery of that kind. That’s not what we want in this country. We’ll do things the British way…’