Nothing here had any relevance to his father. The minister who presided over their sorrow had remained for Charlie no more than a kind and considerate man, administering mouthfuls of solace from his markered bible. He quoted beautiful archaic words at them. He gave up prayers of thanksgiving, raising his hands in benediction, quoting verses in his pulpit voice. But he didn’t know for what he was giving thanks. He didn’t know the years of suffering, the unnecessary despair. He thanked God. But God was not the only one to whom the thanks were due. You couldn’t just make out all grief to the Almighty and expect Him to honour it. That was too easy. Your involvement went a lot deeper than that. Grief was your responsibility as well as His, and it wasn’t enough to put it all to His charge.
But that was what they seemed to be doing. There was a vagueness about the whole thing, as if it didn’t relate to anyone personally, but was merely a dismissal of anonymous remains. The minister’s inaccurate and generalized eulogy typified it. This was a service dedicated to some uncertain and idealized image of a man that bore no resemblance to Charlie’s father. Charlie tried to go along with it, but he couldn’t recognize his father in any of it. He found himself wondering if this was all there was to be. He wanted desperately to accept this, to believe in its significance as the others seemed to. But by the time the minister brought his service to a close, Charlie was still unconvinced.
The men filed out into the waiting taxis and they moved slowly through the top part of the town with the traffic giving them precedence, and an old man at the kerb taking off his cap. The cars stopped just inside the gate because where the grave was could only be reached on foot by a narrow path. The cemetery was wet and very green after the recent rain as they came out and took the coffin. They carried it upwards to the new grave which was half-way up the hill, and laid it on the ground while the minister spoke. Charlie remembered what the card given him by the undertaker had said: ‘Please take cord 2.’ They lowered the box, and the minister dropped dirt on to the wood. While the minister spoke for a few moments they stood around awkwardly, each with his own thoughts.
Charlie heard the minister’s voice taking place far away, listened to rooks in the near-by trees, saw the clouds move together dark, conspiring rain, heard the horns of the traffic which passed, one graveyard away, and it wasn’t enough.
Nothing here was enough. Something more than sanctimonious mutterings was needed over this grave. It was like a confidence trick to keep his spirit quiet. It would have been more honest to try to summon his ghost from its grave to haunt the actions that lived after it until it was blessed with meaning and had been given justice. Anything would have been better than this hypocrisy.
Charlie looked round the others at the grave. Their faces were as impassive as masks. What was taking place behind the masks? Did they know what had happened to the corpse that was lying in that coffin? Did they know what he had been and what he had been made into before he filled a box? Were they prepared simply to accept it as the way things were? Their faces showed nothing. They stood in their dark clothes like sentries barring the way to honesty, guardians of indifference and pretence.
Charlie felt antagonistic to their very presence. They were part of the lie that had destroyed his father. Their impassivity was a denial of what had happened. They thought it was enough to stand for a little while round this grave down which they flushed the refuse of their lives. But there was more to it. Death wasn’t an end in itself. Lives were more than boxes of worm-food or elaborate manure. People mattered, and accounts had to be kept.
The minister was finished, and two men in overalls started to fill in the grave. The others began to leave slowly like oxen yoked to an invisible burden. Charlie still stood beside the grave.
‘Come on, kid,’ John said to him quietly. ‘It’s finished.’
‘It’s no’ finished,’ Charlie said, shaking his head.
John did not know what he meant. He could see the others moving towards the gate, outside which the cars were drawn up, waiting.
‘It’s no’ enough,’ Charlie said simply.
On a plot of waste ground opposite the cemetery, two boys were calling to their careering dog.
‘Sheena, Shee-na, Shee-na!’ They yodelled through cupped hands.
It ran in crazy circles, cornering into the sound each time they called, tethered to their voices.
One of the men filling the grave glanced up at Charlie, and John touched his arm.
‘Come on, Charlie. Come on.’
‘Ah’m tellin’ ye, John,’ Charlie said. ‘It’s no’ enough.’
Chapter 6
‘AYE, MAGGIE GOT A QUICK CALL, TOO,’ HIS FATHER said. ‘Big Tam fairly went doon the brae after that. He used tae be a great case before it. Mind it was him that showed us yon trick wi’ the egg, Charlie?’
Remembering the scene, Charlie was able to recall it complete, existing as it did bright and separate in his memory, like a room where the same people sat for ever saying and doing the same things. All he had to do was re-enter it and set them into motion. His memory, like a skilful stage director, established time and place, arranged them in their positions, gave them their cue. Saturday night. He had come in after seeing Mary home. In the living-room, his father, Uncle Hughie, and Elizabeth. Elizabeth, reading a magazine with that air of detached concentration as if something else was happening at the same time, like having her hair done. His father and Uncle Hughie sitting at the fire with the coffee table laid between them. They collided intermittently on Saturday nights, about half-a-dozen times a year, as if under some planetary influence, and inevitably finished up here, counteracting alcohol with tea. The crumbs on the tablecloth and the ash in the saucers indicated how far they had travelled towards cold sobriety. Charlie sat between them, listening to them pontificate on the General Strike, and local worthies, thoughtfully repeating names from the past, paging images through rooms of memory. Then, in the middle of the perfunctory conversation, his father’s remark about the egg suddenly opened up a whole new moment. It was one of those ‘open sesame’ remarks through which the trivia of a night suddenly fall apart to reveal something memorable. One moment they were seated by the fire talking with perfect sanity, and the next were witnessing something utterly unforeseeable and magnificently ludicrous.
‘What wis this about an egg?’ his uncle Hughie asked. He had an insatiable passion for all tricks, riddles, and feats of general curiosity.
‘Ye must’ve seen it done,’ Charlie’s father said. ‘It’s just a matter o’ tryin’ tae break an egg longways.’
‘An egg?’ Uncle Hughie said incredulously.
‘A comming or garding egg,’ Charlie’s father said, warming to the fact that it was new to Uncle Hughie. ‘Ye just haud it at the two tips between yer hands. And ye canny break it. That’s a fact.’
Charlie’s father demonstrated the prescribed method of holding the egg.
‘Ach, get away wi’ ye!’ Uncle Hughie’s lip curled sceptically.
‘That’s as sure as Ah’m sitting here, Hughie. Ah’ve tried it maself.’
Uncle Hughie appealed to an invisible synod. As he looked back at Charlie’s father his scorn was tempered with sympathy.
‘Ye mean tae tell me, John, that you’re goin’ tae sit there, a grown man, an’ tell me that ye couldny break an egg?’
‘Ah’m tellin’ ye mair than that. You couldny break an egg, if ye haud it the way Ah’m talkin’ aboot.’
The slur on his manhood was too much for Uncle Hughie, six feet in his woollen socks, half as many broad, with arms like