“Age strikes us all before we know it,” I said.
“Age? I was not referring to age. I hope I don’t look all that decrepit, Henry, but I like having a companion and Wordsworth is very occupied now because he’s studying to enter the London School of Economics. This is Wordsworth’s snuggery,” and she opened the door of an adjoining room. It was crowded with glass Disney figures and worse – all the grinning mice and cats and hares from inferior American cartoon films, blown with as much care as the chandelier.
“From Venice too,” my aunt said, “clever but not so pretty. I thought them suitable, however, for a man’s room.”
“Does he like them?”
“He spends very little time there,” my aunt said, “what with his studies and everything else…”
“I wouldn’t like to wake up to them,” I said.
“He seldom does.”
My aunt led me back to the sitting-room, where Wordsworth had laid out three more Venetian glasses with gold rims and a water jug with colours mingled like marble. The bottle of Black Label[17] looked normal and out of place, rather like the only man in a dinner-jacket at a fancy-dress party[18], a comparison which came at once to my mind because I have found myself several times in that uncomfortable situation, since I have a rooted objection to dressing up.
Wordsworth said, “The telephone talk all the bloody time while you not here. Ar tell them you don gone to a very smart funeral.”
“It’s so convenient when one can tell the truth,” my aunt said. “Was there no message?”
“Oh, poor old Wordsworth not understand one bloody word. Ar say to them you no talk English. They go away double quick[19].”
My aunt poured out larger portions of whisky than I am accustomed to.
“A little more water please, Aunt Augusta.”
“I can say now to both of you how relieved I am that everything went without a hitch. I once attended a very important funeral – the wife of a famous man of letters[20] who had not been the most faithful of husbands. It was soon after the first great war had ended. I was living in Brighton, and I was very interested at that time in the Fabians[21]. I had learnt about them from your father when I was a girl. I arrived early as a spectator and I was leaning over the Communion rail – if you can call it that in a crematorium chapel – trying to make out the names on the wreaths. I was the first there, all alone with the flowers and the coffin. Wordsworth must forgive me for telling this story at such length – he has heard it before. Let me refresh your glass.”
“No, no, Aunt Augusta. I have more than enough.”
“Well, I suppose I was fumbling about a little too much and I must have accidentally touched a button. The coffin began to slide away, the doors opened, I could feel the hot air of the oven and hear the flap of the flames, the coffin went in and the doors closed, and at that very moment in walked the whole grand party, Mr. and Mrs. Bernard Shaw, Mr. H.G. Wells, Miss E. Nesbit (to use her maiden name), Doctor Havelock Ellis, Mr. Ramsay MacDonald[22], and the widower, while the clergyman (nondenominational of course) came through a door on the other side of the rail. Somebody began to play a humanist hymn by Edward Carpenter, ‘Cosmos, O Cosmos, Cosmos shall we call Thee?’ But there was no coffin.”
“Whatever did you do, Aunt Augusta?”
“I buried my face in my handkerchief and simulated grief, but you know I don’t think anyone (except, I suppose, the clergyman and he kept dumb about it) noticed that the coffin wasn’t there. The widower certainly didn’t, but then he hadn’t noticed his wife for some years. Doctor Havelock Ellis made a very moving address (or so it seemed to me then: I hadn’t finally plumped for Catholicism, though I was on the brink) about the dignity of a funeral service conducted without illusions or rhetoric. He could truthfully have said without a corpse too. Everybody was quite satisfied. You can understand why I was very careful this morning not to fumble.”
I looked at my aunt surreptitiously over the whisky. I didn’t know what to say. “How sad” seemed inappropriate. I wondered whether the funeral had ever really taken place, though in the months that followed I was to realize that my aunt’s stories were always basically true – only minor details might sometimes be added to compose a picture. Wordsworth found the right words for me. He said, “We must allays go careful careful at a funeral.” He added, “In Mendeland – ma first wife she was Mende – they go open deceased person’s back an they go take out the spleen. If spleen be too big, then deceased person was a witch an everyone mock the whole family and left the funeral double quick. That happen to ma wife’s pa. He dead of malaria, but these ignorant people they don know malaria make the spleen big. So ma wife and her ma they go right away from Mendeland and come to Freetown. They don wan to be mocked by the neighbours.”
“There must be a great many witches in Mendeland,” my aunt said.
“Ya’as, sure thing there are. Plenty too many.”
I said, “I really think I must be going now, Aunt Augusta. I can’t keep my mind off the mowing-machine. It will be quite rusted in this rain.”
“Will you miss your mother, Henry?”
“Oh yes… yes,” I said. I hadn’t really thought about it, so occupied had I been with all the arrangements for the funeral, the interviews with her solicitor, with her bank manager, with an estate agent arranging for the sale of her little house in North London. It is difficult too for a single man to know how to dispose of all the female trappings. Furniture can be auctioned, but what can one do with all the unfashionable underclothes of an old lady, the half-empty pots of old-fashioned cream? I asked my aunt.
“I am afraid I didn’t share your mother’s taste in clothes, or even in cold cream. I would give them to her daily maid on condition she takes everything – everything.”
“It has made me so happy meeting you, Aunt Augusta. You are my only close relative now.”
“As far as you know,” she said. “Your father had spells of activity.”
“My poor stepmother… I shall never be able to think of anyone else as my mother.”
“Better so.[23]”
“In a new block under construction my father was always very careful about furnishing the specimen flat. I used to think that sometimes he went to sleep in it in the afternoon. I suppose it might have been in one of those I was…” I checked the word “conceived” in deference to my aunt.
“Better not to speculate,” she said.
“You will come one day and see my dahlias, won’t you? They are in full bloom.”
“Of course, Henry, now that I have found you again I shan’t easily let you go. Do you enjoy travel?”
“I’ve never had the opportunity.”
“With Wordsworth so occupied we might make a little trip or two together.”
“Gladly, Aunt Augusta.” It never occurred to me that she meant farther than the seaside.
“I will telephone you,” my aunt said.
Wordsworth showed me to the door, and it was only outside, when I passed the Crown and Anchor, that I remembered I had left behind my little package. I wouldn’t have remembered at all if the girl in the jodhpurs had not said angrily as I pushed past the open window, “Peter can talk about nothing but cricket. All the summer it went on. Nothing but the fucking Ashes[24].”
I don’t