Taking Lives (13 page)

I called his university again, of course. They still had no forwarding address in Portugal. They thought Professor Hart must be travelling, a word that seemed like sin in the mouth of the secretary. I called Holland, too. They were waiting to hear from him. You could tell they would happily wait a long time.

Anna sent me all her love, like a parcel.

For the funeral, they brought out a long Renault hearse, broad bearers in a line in the seats behind the driver, coffin clear through the glass sides with a blue and gilt blanket to hide the safety belts that held it in place.

Nobody had come to the wake. Everyone came to the funeral. The church’s banner went first, then the men in gowns of white and blue over their working clothes, then the crucifix, the priest and the hearse - slowly down the main street, serious but not quite silent. Behind all this, a string of infuriated modern cars were held up on their business, waiting for the road to clear. There seemed to be triumph in the eyes of the old, bony aunts as they walked their memento mori into the faces of the city types behind.

The coffin came off the hearse, and I took my place to help carry it: a sudden, wrenching weight.

A single electric candelabra burned in the chancel of the church. I remembered what a church should be: dark and with Victorian, gilded, bright glass and the smell of incense and wax. But here the reredos went up in rough steps of gold and sky blue, there was a Madonna strung with pearls, three severed heads under her feet, and a saint flying red ribbons as long as himself, with a trident: odd, unofficial gods.

The priest rumbled his words through a microphone. The congregation took up the words, answering before the priest could finish; they couldn’t wait. There was no theatre or teaching, just a dialogue they knew as intimately as any talk in the fields or the bar.

Because I was thinking of doing things properly and not making mistakes, it was not until I turned about and took up the burden of my father’s coffin again that I was entirely overwhelmed. A whole community, this village, villages beyond, had come down here at five on a working day for a mannerly farewell to my father, and to save his soul, if they could.

We walked the church steps, down a tight lane towards the skull and crossed bones over the cemetery gate.

I felt the coffin handle slipping in my hand. I wouldn’t

be less strong than the other bearers, the one who broke this sense of community. I held on. I wondered how a man who had become so slight and bony could weigh so much.

The sky was full of wet light and soft, grey cloud, and along the way I noticed things that took my mind briefly from the rip in my shoulder. Here, hollyhocks massed like spires on the edge of a maize field; here, a practical concrete clinic among houses held up by tree trunks and plaster; here, hay already scythed down and full of prickly flies and grains; and, if I held my head up for a moment, the light playing along the top of the mountains beyond.

There was a moment for the bearers to rest, and then the lane turned uphill. Rain seemed imminent. Then we were through the graveyard wall, into a square of sand and neat marble tablets, memorial photographs, family plots, tiny metal lanterns on each to make the streets of the dead seem decently suburban.

There was one shiny pink marble house at the end: an immigrant’s last resting place, windows slightly curtained, and the family name above the door.

I hadn’t thought to ask, and nobody had thought to tell me; I’d expected an ordinary, dug grave like my mother’s, ropes to lower the coffin, the finality of earth falling on the coffin roof. But the name on the bright pink house, with shelves for many dead, was ‘Costa’.

My mother lies in a hollow of grey marble and green grass in a South London churchyard. So, for the moment, Jose Costa would lie alone, second shelf of four, having made an investment in his son dying in the right place, his son’s sons if ever there were any.

The priest spoke again. The coffin lid was raised so people could finally say goodbye, but I did not go forward. Flowers from gardens lay around, gladioli in scalding reds, fountains of montbretia.

The doors of the vault closed as delicately as a house of glass, and were fixed shut with a padlock. I wondered who had a key, if I should ask for one.

The crowd spread out about the business of tending their own family memories. Nobody rushed away, but everyone else had things do to, fields to tend, houses to clean, time to waste before dinner.

I knew I was expected in this small marble house. I was expected to want to be boxed and filed alongside my father, in his very particular notion of a resting place. It was a neat bit of post-mortem pressure: to be a good son and lie here, to think until I died whether I should.

I rather wished my father had chosen the permanence of rotting underground rather than this state of waiting for doors to open on something better.

I wondered why my father had to start from scratch in his own town, why there was no family vault for him to join. I wondered at the polite duty of the funeral, the lack of strong tears.

I had picked up flowers from the ground, violent pink and black-red roses bound together with grass. Now they hung in my hands and I didn’t know where to put them. I realized the caretakers were looking down this suburban street of the dead, politely impatient.

I needed something to dry my eyes, to blow my nose, the kind of thing a father has. I remembered: playing penguins, draped in Dad’s huge tweed jacket; waiting for Dad to free a bee that was trapped in my hair, talking big on a night walk before some exam, and seeing a shooting star. For all the impossibility of my father’s change of worlds and country, for all the ways my father made me grow away, it was not bearable for my father to be gone.

This show of feeling was improper for an Englishman, even more shocking for a Portuguese. It was impractical too, burning my eyes. I tried to go casually to the other side of the marble tomb, where I would be less obvious, until I could get back my breath.

I saw, across the marble, already a little etched into the delicate surface of the stone, scrawls and lines of spray-gun black, broad tarry strokes on the fine pink marble. They made a date or a number: 1953.

You can’t feel shock on top of shock. It fails to register. I went back to my car, started the engine and edged through the quiet streets. It was as though the whole town had done enough feeling for the day, and closed itself down.

I was shivering when I came to the main road. I ought to complain and protest, but I wondered why nobody had warned me. Perhaps nobody had noticed. It was as though the pink tomb, with its bubblegum veining, was a boast; and the curt black lines were an order to shut up.

Perhaps nobody minded.

I had to see a lawyer, settle an estate of whose size and ramifications I had absolutely no idea. I wondered why my father had chosen a lawyer in some small town called Vila Nova de Formentina, forty miles away: Maria de Sousa de Conceicao Mattoso.

I unlocked the door to my father’s house.

I expected to be overwhelmed. I always had an acute sense of smell. My father didn’t smoke in London, or keep a dog, so that house had a minimal smell: crowns of bay leaves rusting in the kitchen, and the ersatz pine of the rasping stuff my mother used to clean. I didn’t smell either of those in this secret house. There was cedar oil for polish, though, and dust in the old air.

I expected photographs, a kind of potted life, but there were none. There were no souvenirs, those had mostly belonged to my mother, and been too much trouble to ship. There was one picture on the wall, but I had never seen it before: a bank of tiles that showed a brown caravel on a blue and white sea.

I wondered if I could second-guess my father, find the coffee beans and the grinder in predictable places, the cups, the sugar and the drinking water (my father never trusted London water for serious coffee). Somehow I still didn’t doubt that there must be some continuity from London to this house, from father to son.

There was no coffee, no drinking water. I pulled open cupboards one by one, tugged at drawers, put on the light in the larder and looked about on the wooden shelves. I was furious: the bastard dying and not even leaving a fucking cup of coffee.

Maria Mattoso said, ‘Mr Costa?’

She had come through the hall silently, but not in order to take me by surprise. Maria was all business. You could take her for some thin city girl.

I thought I should apologize. Instead, I offered tea.

Maria said: ‘A glass of water, please.’

She sipped a very little and put the glass neatly down. There was no extravagance in her, I thought at the time. I noticed a silk of hairs on her arms, dark against dark. I also wondered why I was noticing this so much.

She was a lawyer, after all. She was there to talk about money in savings accounts of one kind and another, earning rates of interest that seemed wild; and the house, of course, and some land with grapes, and the contents of the house. Everything went to John Michael Snell Costa with the provision that I give a tenth of the estate to some orphanage two towns away.

‘Do you want to keep the house? Or to sell it?’

I said, ‘How would I bloody know?’ and then, ‘I’m sorry.’

‘You have time,’ Maria said.

I thought how clean, how distant she seemed: a sharp, bony spectator. I wondered if my father had fancied her. He’d been a spectator, too, in London, they’d have had that in common.

‘There are no complications, are there?’

‘If you keep the land that goes with the house, we might have to file with the Ministry of Agriculture since you’re a foreigner.’

‘But my father was a foreigner.’

‘Born here. There shouldn’t be a problem. It’s just some olive trees, a few hectares, and some grapes.’

‘Of course.’

She said: ‘I expect you know the land.’

‘I’ve never been here before.’

‘Oh,’ Maria said. She was a little shocked, she was used to families being together and knowing all one another’s business.

I had a sense of being overheard. I didn’t want to be in the house any more. But Maria was conducting a meeting, and her manners held us in place.

‘He was a remarkable man,’ she said, politely.

‘I suppose so.’

In a few minutes, carefully but not obviously, she placed me as married, no children, well, no living children. I worked in a museum, had been at Oxford; senhor doutor, for sure.

‘Will you go home now?’

‘No.’ I said. I surprised myself.

‘If you want to sell the house, we can start that without you. If you don’t mind who buys it -‘

‘I’ve got nothing to be sentimental about.’ I was talking very loudly, so he could hear me.

‘If you don’t, lock it up and go away. Come back when it’s kinder weather.’

I really hadn’t noticed until then, but it was a relief to blame heat for my sense of tiredness and the way my emotions sank and welled. I was ridiculously aware of sweat staining the one good, dark suit I had with me, and how improper this was in front of Maria.

‘Someone spray-painted the tomb,’ I said. ‘I ought to report it. I ought to have it cleaned.’

She looked blank.

‘Marked. They’ve written on it, at the back.’

She said, ‘Why would they write on a tomb?’

‘1953. I suppose it’s the date of something.’

‘People have such long memories around here,’ she said. She stretched with grace. ‘Your father always said I was a wonderful lawyer because I didn’t have memories. Just files. That’s why he came to me in the first place.’

The grace confused me. One minute she was buttoned up in her lawyer’s role, precise as a stamped document, and the next she stretched as though she had no self-consciousness at all.

She’d done such intimate things - written down and packed away my father’s life, seen him alone when he couldn’t use social training to mask what he felt. She must know things I never knew. I told myself that was the only reason I felt such a quick sense of closeness.

The dinner for the festa was in someone’s garage, just like the wake should have been, at a long wood table, with the aunts busying about with goat stew, roast suckling pig, little fritters of salt cod and potato, local red wine with a soft, dirty undertow, roast peppers, cut oranges, potatoes boiled and fried and roasted. The fan at one end took out the faint backtaste of diesel and turpentine. Lean back, and the wall was sharp with chisels and blades, loud with a many-coloured rootball of electric wiring.

I sat near the head of the table, still in my one jacket in the heat, while everyone else was down to shirts.

I drank. The wine went down light and almost sweet, too young to have lost the taste of grapes. The men came up to me, leaned across to me, grinned their bare grins at me and told me a few things about my father. Much more than telling, they were asking - about his life, his wife, his times.

I wondered which one of them had marked his grave, and whether that was all they meant to do. But my wondering drowned in the wine.

The men told me their things: how the heat had been for the grapes, given the sudden wrong rain in June; about the emigrant who’d come back to find his palace under interdict, took a shotgun and blew the head off the woman who did planning for the local council; about who was sick, who was well, which families went off hotfoot to Brazil and should have waited a year longer for the sake of seeing the new train, the new road, the new water pumps,

about how Erminio’s pines burned just in time for him to plant eucalyptus with the new subsidy, and he’d got the insurance, too; about how his lawyer, that Maria, was looking good these days.

They tugged me under the wine, into a small place with its huge assumptions and the more I drank, the more I thought I understood and the more I laughed. Once, I lost track altogether and began laughing without a reason and, a moment later, everyone joined me.

So I mentioned my father: just those words, ‘o men pai’.

‘He didn’t come here much.’

‘But my father -‘

There was a little well of silence in the party, but it soon filled with talk and noise.