Authors: Nicholas Royle
Quilt (8 page)
They have no black shoes. They have been aware of this for some days but failed to take action. Their shoes by chance are green, and this is the first thing the undertaker and pallbearers notice, by the hearse outside the lychgate, some twenty minutes before the official start of the proceedings. The undertaker shakes the hand of each in turn and looks them in the face, but his primary focus is the shoes. His gaze drops to the ground, bright green trainers, both of them wearing green trainers: what is this about, why for the life of him hasn’t the gentleman got black shoes and the lady for that matter, the sylph-like slip of a girl who must be half his age? What does it mean, this green, this dividing of green shoes among the two of them? It’s a conspiracy, a sign, something not right.
It’s a hot day and the undertaker is sweaty already, a corpulent man liable to feel the heat even without all his clobber on, and whether it is the sun or something about the couple, he is not one to be fazed in the course of things, but he is having trouble with these green shoes on the both of them. And what is their relation in any event? Is she his daughter? No, that can’t be right, nor his sister, no resemblance there either. And those green shoes in which they are conjoined, up to what could an undertaker like himself ever suppose to be other than no good! What a colour! He’ll tell his wife, even more than himself massively overweight, dying off the fat of the land, he’ll regale her with the details tonight. After the second funeral and the forty-mile round trip, that evening back in the flat over the funeral parlour, upstairs from the
chapel of rest where the son had gone just the day before with the same girl, the wife saw them then, remember, the son come in to pay his respects and the young woman followed like a cat. He never thought anything of it at the time, regarding what their relation was, but the gentleman come in and the undertaker conducted him through to the chapel, a surreal little living room with no television or other furnishings of the living but a chintzy wallpaper with no windows besides one curtained-off interior window that would, were the curtain drawn back, give view onto the stuffy little corridor. It resembled a retro-room in a shabby provincial museum, how life looked decades ago, or so the son thought. Reproductions of landscape paintings are pinned to the walls, lepidopterously; there is a little table with artificial flowers and a faded doily; and
crème de la crème
, you look up to see a little picture of Jesus, the crucial accoutrement to the designation of chapel of rest. What else?
Anything else?
Yes, of course, no twitching at the curtain of the interior window needed to catch that. It is the labyrinth at the centre, the bier or bed or bearing point of life. The day before the funeral and this is the one and only opportunity to see his father reposing, almost prostrate, laid almost horizontally but with a slight propping up of the upper body, the shoulders and head just as he had been last time ‘in life’. All our yesterdays a fortnight of solemnity. Day fought to death, seems only yesterday, but then propped up perhaps a shade more, and smiling that faintly Mona Lisa cryptic valediction about which he will never tell anyone unless in a touch, a certain squeeze of the hand, and now so strangeways, all awry, all away,
utterly not. As she said when he invited her to come in and stand a moment with him:
– That is not your father.
You expect to see the one who has died, instead this bier, this base, this resting-place empty but for this untenable tenant, intolerable not least because all the time you are acutely aware that the laying out and propping up is but the exhibition of a moment and no sooner will you have vacated the office at the front of the funeral parlour than your lumbering undertaker with the help of his brother-in-law will be carting that one out and bringing in the next for some other’s viewing an hour hereafter, and the body not the body but gone away, imprisoned without weight, the air heavy with lilies, the strange starched white shirt sported by the corpse not his father, his face drawn, yes, hollowed away and weirder than waxwork, with eyelids sealed and stitching too on the forehead, a word he always hears in his father’s voice, the suppressed aitch introducing a sort of naval charm, familiar as a fo’c’sle, for’ead with the proper dropping of the aitch pronounced deep in a forest of id, not head, stitching not only of the surrounding of the face but for the gash, the foregashed forehead a couple of centimetres long, the trace of the wound sustained when he fell from the hospital bed, unattended and unnoticed for who knows how long, onto something he imagines sharp as gravel.
So digging into that steak and potatoes his wife cooks that night the undertaker will remark on the son as is
bereaved and the slip of a girl with him both wearing spring-green shoes and what is the meaning, in a lifetime of working on the sward, turfing up and turfing back down, he never asked himself about green as such and now with this strange couple it is written all over the churchyard. The vicar arrives and they exchange a few practical and time-of-day remarks, suitably subdued. Neither says anything about being ill-at-ease with the manner of the man and the woman in green shoes, but both are troubled, the undertaker now in particular, by suspicions of superstition, a supernaturalistic greenery jarring with the homely Christian calling that goes with the territory, as of grace omitted before the steak. There’s a lifetime’s mistaking brought up in a moment like this, spotting the green shoes and wondering quite out of church bounds, and it’s a blessed relief he considers, as the pallbearers maintain their shuffles of conversation looking at the ground, that he can keep his thoughts to himself and imagine the place where it’s already not possible, what with all the newfangled technology, a man’s privacy approaching the verge of extinction.
The church, once they’re all ensconced (besides a cousin who is stuck in traffic and only makes it to the reception shortly before everyone leaves), is cool and surprisingly calm out of the August mid-afternoon heat. There are more people than the son had suspected or could even recognise. Presiding over the proceedings, the vicar has comfortably internalised a
modus vivendi
for dealing with this slightly odd occasion: the bereaved
man, evidently not a church-goer, wants nonetheless to read a speech. Complacently she introduces this, after repeatedly invoking in first-name terms the dead man she has never met. In lucid and collected fashion, determined to remain straightforward, neat and audible, he proffers a few remarks about his father’s love of words, his gifts with language, his extraordinary precision with syntax, grammar and spelling (he had worked as an editor and proof-reader over many years), and also about his father’s passion and inventiveness with things, his skill as a maker of objects and contraptions sometimes more Heath Robinsonian than others might tolerate let alone admire. The speech then moves on to a truncated version of an anecdote about the church in which they are standing, concerning a period around twenty years earlier, when the vicar had no connection with the parish.
One day a builder came and erected scaffolding around the lychgate, presumably with the intention of painting or reroofing or otherwise repairing it, but no one ever followed it up, the days passed and the weeks and months and no one came and no one seemed to mind, besides the son who saw it as a daily eyesore and defacement of the church. Eventually he took it upon himself to type out a statement on the subject, on a single sheet of paper:
One of the most recent and most striking features of the village church is the scaffolding at the lychgate. It has now been in place for a year – some say even longer – and its purpose is shrouded in obscurity. It seems
likely that the original purpose of the scaffolding was to facilitate the application of a new coat of paint. Perhaps a more fundamental, strenuous and time-consuming operation had been envisaged: structural repairs to the lychgate? Rumours have been rife. One account which appears to retain credibility locally is the postulation of an argument between a painter and a builder and their consequent parting of ways. The painter may never return; or, of course, may never have existed. Already it is so long ago that few locals can easily picture the church without its parergonal complement. Another rumour has concerned the establishment of a small group known as the village Revolutionary Council, working for the peaceful overthrow of the scaffolding, as well (it is claimed) as the removal of the grotesque bow of barbed wire which secures the little ‘kissing gate’ round at the back of the church.
Is the scaffolding now a permanent feature at last, a monument in its own right? And if so, should it be attributed symbolic significance? These are questions which, over the past three months in particular, have caused fierce debate in certain areas of the parish. Suffice to bring to notice the philological endeavours of one local historian who has noted the word ‘scaffolding’ as etymologically of obscure origin but nevertheless as bearing the less widely known sense of ‘a raised framework, as for hunters, or among some primitive peoples for disposal of the dead’ (
Chambers
). Given the etymology of ‘lychgate’ (Ger.
Leiche
, corpse), the notion of an alteration in church policy, with regard to the practice of excarnation, irresistibly suggests itself.
This document was signed ‘For the people of the village’ and dated ‘June 1986’. His father apparently delighted in this so much that he created a specially
carved wooden platter, like the sort of distended
table-tennis
bat you find in certain churches with information about the history and architecture of the building. The dead man screwed down this little text about ‘THE SCAFFOLDING’ under a carefully cut plastic plinth. The son placed the platter in the church that afternoon. Within days the scaffolding was dismantled. Unread at the funeral, this text is nonetheless exactly as the vicar pictured. Every word conforms to her sense of the inside narrative of the occasion.
He concludes with a few lines from Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’, read not sung, tacitly countering the more obvious option (favoured by the vicar) of everyone singing it in the service, hearing it regurgitated on the cranky church organ, accompanied by fifty or sixty people who cannot sing to save their lives, when the only rendition he wants to hear is the school carol service no one but he can now recall, with his father so improbably but majestically booming out above all other voices: I will not cease from mental fight, / Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand / Till we have built Jerusalem / In England’s green and pleasant land. And when he takes his seat again, in the pew at the front of the church beside the pristine girl, her body lightly touching him like a prehistoric egg, still warm, she is contemplating the text about the scaffolding, which he showed her just last night, the platter retrieved from one of the cupboards near the back door stuffed with disintegrating early twentieth-century india paper volumes of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
.
Excarnation is literature. Its music strips you. Literature is excarnation.