They Came From SW19 (3 page)

I quite often burst into tears on my way there. On one occasion, when I was about seven, my mum had to untwist my hands from about every gatepost in Stranraer Gardens. ‘It’s not as if it’s the Spanish Inquisition,’ she used to snap.

No, it was the First Spiritualist Church of South Wimbledon! That was what was worrying me. If it had been the Spanish Inquisition it would have been fine. I thought I knew where I stood with the Spanish Inquisition.

Some people blamed Rose Fox for the decline of the First Spiritualist Church. She went too far, people said. There were all these poor bastards who had lost relatives in the First World War, trying to get in touch with them. But with Rose it was hard to hear anything through the table-rapping or the squelch of ectoplasm being flung about the room by men in black jerseys. She started to take photographs of the spirits too, and that is how she came to be accused of trickery.

‘Did I ever tell you’, my dad said to me once, when we were walking, as we often did, in the direction of the off-licence, ‘about how Rose Fox was photographed beneath the spirit reality of Franz Josef of Austria?’

‘I don’t believe you did,’ I replied.

Whereupon, from his pocket he produced a black-and-white photograph of a plump woman in a loose white dress. It was hard to make out what was behind her – a chair, a table and what looked like a wardrobe of some kind. But what was directly above her head was easier to see. Hanging in the gloom, at a height of about five feet, was the gigantic face of an elderly man with mutton-chop whiskers and a helmet with a steel point on it. I happened to know, because we were doing it at school, that the face balancing on Rose’s bonce was that of the last ruler of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

‘My God,’ I said, ‘it looks just like him!’

‘It does, doesn’t it?’ said Dad.

He wrinkled his lips appreciatively, as if he was already tasting the first drink of the day. ‘It also’, he went on, ‘looks amazingly like a photograph of the old boy that appeared in the
Illustrated London News
in June 1924!’

That was typical of my dad. He always took great delight in any reports of trickery. And anything that reflected badly on Rose Fox, who was a great heroine of my mum’s, always went down particularly well.

The worst thing Rose Fox did was not to organize spirit photographs of internationally famous dead people – it was to get married. She got hitched to a man called Stuart Quigley, in the year the Second World War broke out. Quigley died in 1950 and was so boring that no one could bear to speak to him much, even after he’d croaked. But, before he opened that last little door into the unknown, he managed to make Rose pregnant. And so it was that in 1948 Rose Fox gave birth to the man born to make my life a misery – Albert Roger Quigley, MA – part scout leader, part amateur opera singer, part Christian, part Spiritualist and one hundred per cent complete and utter arsehole.

Quigley is an assistant bank manager. My mum once took me into his branch to show me his name, which is written up on a board. He is billed just below someone called Mervyn Snyde, who looks after International Securities. I think they are making a grave error of judgement in letting anyone know he’s there. Quigley, like quite a few other members of the First Church, is downright sinister. It was quite horrible to think that someone like him should be left alive when my dad was dead.

I didn’t start crying until after my mum had left the room. But the thing that started me off wasn’t the fact that Quigley was still above ground. Or the thought of my dad lying on a slab with all his dental-work showing. It wasn’t the thought that I would never see him again, because he still seemed too real for me to imagine that as a possibility. I mean, that guy in the letter, right? He’d planned his Thursday round Norman, you know? And I had so many things that I could have been doing with him, now, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, that it was literally impossible to believe that he wouldn’t be doing
any
of them.

The thing that started me off was the last thing my mum said before she headed off down the stairs. She tried a tentative embrace, patted my head vaguely and went across to the door. She looked, I thought, almost pleased with herself as she turned back to me. I didn’t crack. I just kept right on looking at her, with my head slightly to one side. I think I was trying to look intelligent. My dad always used to say that intelligence was the only thing that made humans bearable. Which makes his ever being involved with the First Spiritualist Church even more puzzling.

‘Over There,’ she said, ‘they are probably organizing some form of official welcome for him!’

I goggled at her. All I could think was that my dad hated parties. Especially official ones. In order to avoid replying, I looked out of the window. Over Here, the late afternoon sun was slanting down on to the impassive red brick of Stranraer Gardens. I could see our cat slink into the opposite garden, her shoulders pressed towards the ground.

‘We are going to be talking to him in the very near future,’ she said. Then she walked back towards me and nodded significantly. ‘I am sure that he has a great deal to discuss with you. And I have a very great deal to tell
him
now that he has Passed Across!’

There was something almost menacing in the way she said this. She straightened her narrow shoulders and gave me a blink from those worried little eyes of hers. ‘Conversations with Norman,’ she said, ‘are only just beginning!’

With a kind of smirk, she bounced out of the room. I could hear her steps on the stairs, sounding, as usual, a note of warning, of some kind of trouble on the way.

That would be the last thing the poor old bastard wanted. He finally gets through with the mortgage and the weekly shopping and putting the rubbish in a grey plastic bag and trying to fit it into the dustbin, when what? She’s calling him up and telling him the news about the latest jumble sale and my failure to pay attention in French. I would have thought the only plus about being dead was not having to listen to her any more.

She’ll have him back before he knows it, I thought. She’ll send his ghost out to Sainsbury’s.

It was Sainsbury’s that did it. I suddenly saw my dad wheeling the trolley round the delicatessen section. The way his face lit up at the sight of the salamis and the smoked fish was beautiful to behold. I saw him purse his lips as he sorted through the bottles of rosé wine, trying to find that special one that was going to make an evening with my mother bearable. I saw him finger his paunch at the check-out counter and grin when he caught sight of the chocolate biscuits, Swiss rolls, soft drinks and all the other things I had managed to smuggle aboard the wagon: I saw his big, round face and neatly combed, balding hair, and I saw the heavy gold ring on his left hand. I saw him. You know? I saw him.

It was only then that I thought: He’s not coming back any more. I’ll never see him again as long as I live. And I may not see him when I die, either.

I put my face down on his desk then, and cried like a baby.

A friend of my mum’s once said that my dad looked a little seedy, and at the time I was very offended. But there was some truth in the remark. When I saw his clothes, without him, in the weeks after his death, I could see that that was what they were. The suits were neither flash nor respectable. The jerseys were all torn and ragged, and the pairs of shoes (my dad loved buying shoes) were never quite expensive enough to achieve whatever effect he had intended.

But he was more than his clothes. None of his possessions made sense without him. And what made it even harder to understand that he really had died was the fact that, as is usual in the First Spiritualist Church, he was not buried. Not by us anyway. A day or so after he was transferred from the hospital to the funeral parlour, the undertaker rang my mum and said, in an unctuous tone, ‘Will you be wanting to arrange a viewing, Mrs Britton?’

‘No,’ said my mum.

‘What I mean is,’ said the undertaker, sounding a touch peevish, ‘he is here at the moment. If you want to see him . . .’

He hasn’t run off or anything! You know?

I was listening to all of this on the extension – which is the only way you ever find out anything in our house – and this last remark was followed by the longest pause in British telephone history. I seriously thought my mum had gone off to make a cup of tea.

Eventually the undertaker said, in a wheedling tone, ‘He looks very nice now.’

Come on down! We’ve laid on tea and biscuits and a video!

‘He really does look at peace. It’s amazing what we can do!’

I thought this was a bit much, frankly. I wouldn’t have said my dad was a good-looking guy, but I didn’t think he needed the services of an embalmer to make him palatable.

‘No one,’ said my mum, eventually, ‘will be coming to see Norman.’

‘Oh . . .’ said the undertaker, going back into peevish mode. ‘If that’s how you feel . . .’

In that case we’ll take him out of the window. He’s taking up space! We’ll screw the old lid down and get on with it.

‘Anyway,’ the guy said finally, ‘he will be here till about a quarter to five . . .’

So boogie on down while you have the chance! I mean, what do you require here? A funeral, or what?

‘No, thank you very much,’ said Mum. ‘Thank you for the opportunity of a viewing, but in this instance the family must decline.’

The guy on the other end of the line was obviously dismayed at this unwillingness to test-drive his mortician’s skills.

‘My church’, said my mum, with a certain amount of prim pride, ‘does not believe in burial as such. We give you carte blanche as far as Norman’s corpse is concerned. Do with it as you will!’

‘I see,’ said the undertaker.

You could sense him trying to work out what this signified. Did it mean absolutely anything went? Were they to be allowed to stick him in a trolley and wheel him round the local supermarket? Or give every last bit of him away for medical research?

‘You do . . . er . . . want him buried?’ he said finally.

‘Buried? Not buried? What’s the difference?’ said my mum.

‘Well,’ said the undertaker, ‘to us, quite considerable.’

‘Is it?’

‘Well, we don’t usually find ourselves dealing with non-burying situations. Cremation and burial are, so to speak, our raisons d’être.’

‘Quite,’ said my mum, rather meanly.

It was possible, of course, that the guy was wondering whether to give my dad the full five-star treatment.
Burmese mahogany
, you could hear him thinking,
silver-plated handles, top-quality professional mourners.
Indeed, when the bill came in, it looked as if we had been charged for exactly that.

‘Are you a Hindu?’ he asked eventually, with some caution.

‘Certainly not,’ snapped my mum.

He was well and truly stumped now.

‘Well, Mrs Britton,’ he said in the end, ‘we shall try and dispose of your husband’s body in a way that we hope will be suitable as far as you are concerned.’

‘What you do with his body is irrelevant. I will be talking to Norman in the next few days, and I assure you that one of the things we will not be discussing is his funeral.’

‘Indeed,’ said the undertaker. Then, clearly desperate to regain some professional self-respect, he said, rather brightly, as if none of this conversation had taken place at all, ‘Would you like any photographs of the event?’

My mum started laughing at this point. I was rather with her actually. ‘Photographs?’ she said. ‘Photographs?’

I think the guy was simply wondering whether he would be required to furnish proof that he hadn’t sold the cadaver to some fly-by-night surgeon.

‘Norman’, she said pityingly, ‘has gone to a place more beautiful and more peaceful than anything you could imagine. You can’t take photographs of it and stick it on the mantelpiece. You can’t get package holidays to it. But those of us who have talked to people who have had first-hand experience of it know it is utterly, utterly beautiful!’

‘I’m sure,’ said the undertaker feelingly.

And, leaving the poor sod trying to work out for himself exactly what place she was talking about, Mum put the phone down.

This must have happened about a week after Dad died. But I don’t remember much about the days that followed that first, awful conversation with my mum. Perhaps because the night that followed it was so eventful.

It was hot that autumn. The evening they took him to the hospital went out like a Viking funeral. I didn’t cry for long. I was frightened she might hear me. I cleaned up my face and sat looking out of the window. The plane-tree opposite looked how I felt. It hadn’t even got the energy to turn brown. But the sun was going gently, winking back at me from the windows of the neighbours’ houses in the way it can do, even when someone you care about dies. A few streets away, on the main road, a police car or an ambulance made the noise I most connect with cities – the pushy, important wail of a siren.

Down the street I caught sight of a few stalwarts from the congregation, trying to park a car. You can never keep them away from a death. But they were on the job with unusual speed. Maybe someone Over There had tipped them off.

Like many other things in the First Spiritualist Church, the parking was a team effort. Hannah Dooley, in a tweed skirt and a double-breasted jacket, was waving madly at the bonnet, while Leo Pike was sneering at the boot through his gold-rimmed glasses. I couldn’t work out what his expression meant. Maybe it just meant that Pike drove a large, uncontrollable Ford that was at least ten years old. This was a brand-new Audi. The guy in it was important business.

The door opened and Quigley got out. Yo, Quigley! New wheels! You tapped into the bank’s computer, or what? Pike held the door for him. No one cringes quite like Pike. Humbling himself in the sight of God is not enough for him. He would crawl to me if I let him. As I watched his wintry little face, his shoulders hunched in his tweed jacket, his constant, half-bowing motions as Quigley emerged, I found myself wondering, once again, how it was that someone so humble could be, on occasions, so fantastically menacing.