Night Read Free Page B

jumped in, to leaven the occasion. I doubt it. I lack the talent for instigating comedy. They put it down to grief. Some said a seizure, some said cracked, some said highly strung. Highly strung! I eat like a horse, the reason I eat is to encase my heart in a solid fortress of fat, so that I can at last decently and uneventfully expire without much ado, to return in the end to materiam primam whate’er it be.
    There were refreshments after the funeral. The catering! She would not have tolerated it. There was spotted dick and big biscuits that were damp, and had somewhere in their lifespan been neighbours to paraffin oil. On the savoury side there were chunks of ham thrown on to plates, some with a dollop of potato salad and others with a yellow piccalilli, depending on the whim of the two serving ladies. The whole event lacked finesse. Naturally there weren’t enough chairs. People had to sit on the edges of chairs, which made the cutting of their ham precarious. Then the catsup was thin and scalding and restraint was not executed in the pouring of it. This was due to the seating more than to any avidity. Things were said, not too many things, her praises sung. They discussed her memoriam card, discussed what mottoes it could contain. I had always noticed her penchant for the colloquial, for things like “The early bird catches the worm,” but I had to sit there and hear the adages of Saints Jerome and Bonaventure trotted out as applicable material. How little we make of what we know of anyone, how little we employ it.
    Of course she did not die without a long illness, mothers never do. Fathers likewise.
    I went to nurse her, grudgingly, no, not grudgingly, with pangs. Birth pangs, life pangs, death pangs – they must be cousins. She was upstairs, same bed as she had given birth in, had had her lumbago in, and numerous other afflictions. I remained out of the room as much as possible, out in the hallway, humming so that she would know I was there, doing chores. I varnished a floor but the fumes of the turpentine did not agree with her, in other words I varnished half a floor. While in the room I washed her sores, polished the mirrors and made plans for future times – Christmas, holiday, and so forth. There is nothing so offensive as hoodwinking the nearly dead. We die by degrees but there is one part of us that decidedly knows when it is all just over. There is one strand of the mind that reckons with that passing over and she was in possession of it. I could hear it, registering, like a clock and invisibly ticking. There was altar wine on the window-sill and it bore a label from the land of Spain. She declined that. It was the priests’ wine, the canons’. Poor canons, their old scrotums like dust, shedding maybe, shedding dust. Their organs, pink or whey? Poor canon, he coughed when he came, to shrive her. Not a bit standoffish. No preamble. The sacrament was always under a cloth, a cloth that had little darns in it. She swallowed with agony, to hear her swallow was to have pity for her, the stitches under her throat, jabbing like needles. Some distraction always intervened, like a cat sidled in, a kettle sang, or a bird sang, or something fell off the bed, usually her comb. Once he came with the chalice empty. After that the curate came. Poor canons, old, grey, teetering,lonely and loony, with their frock coats and their faithful housekeepers, that breed of dark warted women that do wait upon them.
    I would go out on the landing again and talk in. She saw the treachery of those plans regarding Christmas and holidaying, and her eyes were as daggers, blue, cobalt blue, asking not, not to go. Ranting, raving. I heard things no one ought to hear, no one or everyone. She listened for a lorry going by, mentioned the driver, a big brute she said, bullet-headed, said he could jack it up, referred to his jockstrap, said Off with the jockstrap and fire. When the pain got less or the morphine got more