Maud stood by the window, gazing into the garden at the antics of the housemartins flying up and down to feed their young under the eaves. You won’t see him stumbling around clipping the bushes any more, Herbert thought as he placed himself by her. ‘I came as soon as I could, Mother. I’m very sorry about it. And sad, too.’ Nothing else to say, though it was obviously the right thing.
‘Darling, it’s terrible. I can’t believe it.’ She could barely speak through her tears. ‘I thought he’d live forever. He always joked he would. Longer than me, I hoped. I suppose everyone says that. The day I first saw him on the beach near Lowestoft seems only last week.’
He felt out of place, but told himself that nothing could be as affecting and important as the death of your father, especially to your mother. He tapped the black cat away when it pushed against his leg. ‘Poor old Hugh!’
Maud looked askance at his use of his first name. ‘He loved you more than you’ll ever know, probably because you gave him more heartache than he ever deserved.’
It was as well Bert had no say in this, for he might swear at the notion that Herbert had made his father’s life a misery simply by living as he’d wanted.
A plate of cold mutton and pickles was set before him at the kitchen table. ‘You must be starving. There’s a bottle of beer in the refrigerator if you want it.’
‘I’ll get it.’ He couldn’t deny that she looked handsome and forlorn in her black skirt and black jacket, black beads, and a black band across her hair, above a lined and pallid mask of loss. Such a hurried dressing into the part stopped her going to pieces. Fresh tears down her cheeks avoided the obstacles of those which had dried a few minutes ago. ‘I think I’ll go up to his study for a while.’ Trying to find pity for this old woman, he hoped she would take his intention as a chilling sort of remorse, which he couldn’t feel, though supposed it would seep into him during the next few months.
‘Don’t go in there yet.’ She didn’t want to be alone. No longer had to be. Impossible to say why he lifted her hand to kiss. She forced him to stand, and drew him between her arms, all bones, ardour and grief. ‘Oh, Herbert, my life’s finished. I can’t tell you how it feels. My heart’s breaking.’
It isn’t, and won’t. Grief doesn’t last, he wanted to say. Everybody recovers. Live for me. I won’t mind. I’ll look after you as much as I’m able. We’ll be closer from now on. He stood aside without speaking.
What madness, to talk about life being at an end. She wasn’t much over seventy, and looked younger. Still, the old man had died, and they’d been nearly forty years together, ten more than he’d been alive. ‘You’ll be all right.’ He held her, feeling pity, tears checked because a grown man didn’t blubber. He forced the smile from his face: hadn’t yet written about tragedy so close, could have felt worse if he had seen the old man die. On the other hand he might have been less disturbed. It would have been interesting.
‘He was so honest. Such an upright person. I hope you find comparable love and devotion in your life, Herbert.’
In harness from the cradle to the grave, he’d had nothing to be dishonest about. Nothing important, certainly. ‘I’ll go into his study’ — anything to get out of her way. ‘I want to look at where he was happiest’ — or to see if there’d be a clue as to what kind of a man he was now he’s dead.
‘No, Herbert, it’ll take a while to get tidy.’
They’d lived such a neat life. If a single bibelot was out of alignment on shelf or table it had to be put back in case a hair’s breadth of their life was going astray. Everything ordered and pre-ordained, a charmed but restricted existence he could never fall in with. Yet he envied them, and regretted that he couldn’t live in the same way, though the barrack-room tidiness of his own flat suggested he might be on the way to getting there.
He couldn’t care at all whether or not he saw the old man’s study. It was a ploy to be alone, but his mother needed him every minute in her sight, and her overpowering sorrow was like warm mud too thick to swim from. ‘Your father is in the living room. They’ll be coming for his — him, at two o’clock.’
She was halfway to being dead herself, and wanted him, who couldn’t recall when he’d been so much alive, to comfort her and coax her back. On the other hand he had never known her to be so vibrant. Before leaving London there’d been neither time nor thought of phoning Deborah. He wanted her with him now, to commiserate and hold him, to say she loved him, to lick his ears, anything to space out the millibars of such a bleak atmosphere. She would shield him from a sensation he shouldn’t be exposed to, feelings only real if written about from the imagination. He didn’t know what he wanted to be kept away from, since the experience must surely be good.
Deborah would know how to comfort his mother, or would try anyway. He saw them melting together, a very sexy scene, anger as he brushed the picture out. He would show her the house, walk her through the gardens, and take her to the orchard where he had once stood in the rain hoping to find out who he was, so long ago that he couldn’t imagine the man he had been. Trying to find his true self — poor fool — he hadn’t known that if he did nothing about it his self was sufficiently strong and centred to come out of the shadows and find him. He took his mother’s hand. ‘Let’s look at him, then.’
‘It’ll be a big funeral. You can help send out the cards. Quite a few will go to his regiment.’
The idea pleased him. All the old buffers would come. A few young ones as well, maybe a platoon to fire a volley over the coffin. ‘So they should.’
Hugh’s moustache was greyer than grey, and the flesh it sprang from as white as if he had never been east of Suez. He looked satisfied more than at peace, about right for a soldier. His saluting arm seemed alive and set to come up for a final gesture of farewell. Maud kissed the cold lips, weeping as if to bring him back to life and walk with him arm in arm into the garden, talking about vegetables and what to have for dinner.
Real life’s about to begin for her, as it is for me. ‘We all have to die.’ He regretted the callous remark, but its brutality calmed her: ‘I know. It’s the only consolation I have.’
‘I would like to look into his study some time.’
‘Not till after the funeral.’
Such peculiar fancies should be allowed to someone in a state of shock. ‘Why ever not, though?’
‘He must have known a stroke was coming on. I heard this weird noise, but thought he was just reorganizing his books. He did, from time to time. In fact you might say he did it endlessly. It calmed him. And he liked the room to be tidy. But when I found him I saw he’d made a bit of a mess. I’ll never know why.’
She didn’t bother to stop him when he walked towards the stairs. The tobacco smell from years of puffing was strong but stale, and the door wouldn’t open its full arc, some obstacle preventing it. Her tone set off an alarm in him: ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to push.’
He slid through the gap, couldn’t go right in for fear of increasing the wreckage. If his father hadn’t found the maniacal energy maybe the stroke wouldn’t have gripped him in such a vice. He might have halfway recovered and been in a wheelchair, the vilest horror to him. Or perhaps he sensed the inevitable, hoped it wasn’t certain even so. He had tried to head it off by an animal rage against the injustice of death, or even against fear which had dragged out his utmost violence, giving him astounding strength.
Herbert found the curved pipe snapped in two behind the door, its bowl filled with slightly charred tobacco, as if Hugh’s last wish had been to fill it and light up to face the end in familiar comfort. Finding the onset too quick, he had broken it before crushing half a dozen others underfoot and attacking everything else in the room.