A Change of Pace (22 page)

If you enjoyed
A Change of Pace
you might be interested in
Running to Paradise
by Virginia Budd, also published by Endeavour Press.

Extract from
Running to Paradise
by Virginia Budd

Prologue

Evening. Summer lightning intermittently flashed across the grey-green sky, as though some inter-galactic signaller were trying to get a message through to the misguided denizens of planet earth. Thunder rolled far away and storm clouds spiralled. It was very hot. The people in the grey village houses shut their casement windows, left open to catch the least vestige of the sultry air, anticipating the coming storm. The people on the executive housing estate at the northern end of the village reached for their digital telephones to warn their friends that evening’s barbecue was cancelled and what about a blue video session instead. The people in the council estate ignored the coming storm. They were most of them out anyway; there was nothing to do in the village on a Saturday night.

At the southern end of the village, in a small, bright, antiseptic room in St Hilda’s Home for the Elderly, Charlotte Seymour lay dying. She lay on her back in the neat bed, covered by a pale blue eiderdown, her head propped up by pillows. She no longer smelt the scent from the stocks that grew beneath her bedroom window, nor saw the spruce fir silhouetted against the flashing sky, nor indeed heard the rumble of thunder: she felt neither heat nor cold, she had already entered the anteroom to death. An elderly man sat beside the bed, his large, baggy frame fitting with difficulty into the plastic-seated chair. He snored from time to time. Death was long in coming and he had drunk heavily as was his wont, that evening.

Charlotte Seymour’s breath rattled and scraped; her eyes were closed and her hands, each finger ring-encrusted, each fingernail a vivid scarlet, were still. But her mind, the mind she had lived with for over eighty years, that mind which had so frequently served her so ill, was awake alright, wide awake, as though at last, too late, prepared to use and employ the latent power within.

A few heavy drops of rain splashed on the window sill and the man in the chair awoke, gazed owlishly round the room, as though wondering where he was, then struggled to his feet and closed the window. He yawned, scratched his chest and looked down at the woman in the bed. It would have been hard to tell by his expression whether the look was one of indifference, anticipation or dislike; it was not a look of love. Charlotte opened her eyes suddenly.

‘Go home,’ she whispered, ‘I can die without your help.’ The man, however, did not seem to hear her. He reached in his pocket for a cigarette, then saw the notice above the bed. ‘Visitors are respectfully requested not to smoke.’ He sat down again in the chair, which wobbled dangerously under his weight, and closed his eyes.

Charlotte’s eyes, too, closed: they would not open again.

Let go, Char Osborn, let go. There’s nothing left — no point in hanging on — the party’s over now. But had it been such a party? Had it...?

1

The Sunday Char died I wondered if things would ever be the same again. To feel so bereft, so disorientated for the loss of one’s ex-wife’s mother verges on the eccentric, I suppose, but I loved her; for all her manifold faults, I loved her.

The day before she died I felt both oppressed and depressed and London sweltered in a grey, sticky heat. I did a bit of shopping in the Kings Road in the morning, then squash with Jack Pemberton, from the office, in the afternoon. He asked me back to dinner afterwards, but I refused. I wanted, suddenly, to be on my own.

The storm started around seven o’clock. I sat by the sitting-room window and watched the lightning crackling over Chelsea Reach and great globules of rain slowly turn the river from slate grey to muddy yellow. I was on my third Martini when George rang.

‘Guy? I’ve been trying to get you all day. George here.’

‘Sorry, I was playing squash, but I’ve been in since six thirty.’ Somehow George always manages to put one on the defensive; it was none of his damned business where I’d been.

‘Char’s not too good.’ Was this one of his euphemisms? Was Char, in fact, dying? Why else, God help him, would he be ringing?

‘How bad?’ I asked.

‘Well, you know what these doctors are; she’s got bronchial pneumonia, her breathing’s terrible. They say there’s nothing more they can do.’

‘What about hospital? Last time—’

‘Too ill to be moved.’ Was there a note of triumph; hard to say.

‘They’ve given her the Last Rites and all that sort of thing, but of course she’s had them before, when she had that stroke two years ago — you remember.’ Yes, I remembered, and what a party that had been. Dr Weil insisted on ordering up a bottle of wine, and there we all were, George, Beth, myself and a nurse or two, sipping away like mad, allegedly helping Char into the next world and by the following morning she was sitting up in bed laughing her guts out.

‘I’ve been with her all day.’ George assumed his pathetic ‘ill-done-by’ voice, ‘but Mrs McTavish, that’s the new warden, said to go home for a kip and come back later.’

‘D’you want me to come down?’

‘Not yet. I’ll let you know.’ He sounded evasive.

‘What about Beth and the others?’ I said. ‘Have you told them?’

‘Look, could you ring Beth, then she can ring the others. I seem to have lost her phone number. Everything’s so chaotic here.’

‘I’d rather not speak to Beth, if you don’t mind. I can give you her number, if you’ve really lost it.’

‘Oh, alright, but I thought you two were back on speaking terms.’ Now he sounded huffy and put upon. Why the hell shouldn’t he tell his step-daughter her mother was dying?

‘You’ll let me know, won’t you, if...’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I’ll let you know.’ Odd how neither of us could mention the word death.

The storm stayed around until gone eleven. I made a bit of supper and watched some nonsense on TV, but all the time thought of Char: as I last saw her, as I first saw her, and all the time in between. I went to bed, but couldn’t get to sleep, not until the small hours, anyway, and woke to the bells of Battersea Church ringing for Holy Communion. I lay in bed listening and then the phone rang.

‘George again. Sorry to wake you, but Char died between two and three this morning. I thought you’d like to know.’

For the life of me I couldn’t think of a damned thing to say. Then at last: ‘Did she speak? Were you with her when—’

‘I was with her, but she never spoke again, not after the priest left her.’

‘I should like to see her,’ I said, ‘just once more.’

‘Well...’ He sounded doubtful. ‘They want to get the body out of the Home as soon as possible. They need the bed, you see.’ Char was just a body now.

‘What about at the undertakers, couldn’t I see her there?’

‘I suppose so,’ he sounded grudging. ‘Are you coming down? There’s a hell of a lot to be done and I don’t feel too well this morning. It’s been a bit of a shock.’

‘I’ll be down soon after ten a.m. Give me time for a cup of coffee and a shave and I’ll be on the M4 by eight o’clock. OK?’

‘OK,’ he said.

Char had three husbands and five children, but it’s me, her ex-son-in-law, who always takes responsibility for her. Is it because I loved her and they didn’t? No, that’s far too simple an explanation. Perhaps I wanted to have the responsibility and they were only too glad to relinquish it. I just don’t know. ‘I’m leaving you to sort things out after I’m dead, Guy,’ she had said, looking at me witchily over the top of her frightful ‘butterfly’ glasses. ‘You can be a sort of literary executor. My children just don’t care, you see.’

‘And you know I do?’ I held out an ash tray to catch the dripping ash from her cigarette.

‘Yes, darling, I know you do,’ she said. ‘Anyway, you are a sort of historian after all, so going through a few papers wouldn’t be too arduous, would it?’

‘It’ll need more than a historian to sort out your affairs, love.’

Char only smiled. ‘But you will, won’t you, my warrior?’ she said.

‘I suppose so...’

I had an absurd thought while I was stirring my instant coffee in the kitchen, later, after George rang. Should I wear a black tie? Death, after all, was a fairly formal occasion. In the end I compromised and wore my better weekend trousers and the corduroy jacket Char used to like. She said it reminded her of ‘nice young poets in the thirties’.

There wasn’t much traffic on the M4. Thunder was still about and those foul little thunder flies were creeping everywhere inside the car. Black clouds billowed over the Downs and the grass looked parched from the long, hot summer. Where, I wondered, was Char now?

‘D’you want coffee, or something stronger?’ George at the door of the grey stone house in the grey stone street. The house he’d bought for Char when everything was breaking up.

‘Coffee would be great, thanks George.’ The kitchen smelt of cat and something else, hard to define. George looked ghastly, his face, sagging, putty coloured, unshaven.

‘Can’t do a bloody thing,’ he burst out suddenly. ‘It’s Sunday, you see.’ He led me into the long, dark sitting-room. Char’s stuff all over the place: the photo on the mantelpiece of her and George’s wedding just after the War, Char in pre-War shoes and a tiny hat like a muffin perched on her forehead, George in uniform, looking handsome and happy. We sat down.

‘Shall I,’ I asked, ‘make a list of what we’ve got to do?’

‘If you like,’ he said morosely. ‘We have to make a start somewhere, I suppose.’

Later, I walked down the village street to the St Hilda’s Home for the Elderly: fear rolled around in my stomach. Char’s body, by this time, had been removed to the Chapel of Rest. ‘In this weather, Mr Horton, it has to be done quickly,’ Mrs McTavish, the new warden, had said over the phone. The flowers were bright in the cottage gardens; red salvias in tidy regimentation round the car park.

‘Ah, Mr Horton. We haven’t met, but Mrs Seymour spoke of you often.’ Mrs McTavish, jolly, ginger haired, red faced. A smell of cooking Sunday lunch.

‘Wasn’t Mrs Seymour’s death rather sudden? I mean she’d had pneumonia before…’

‘Mercifully quick, Mr Horton, mercifully quick. Your mother-in-law was lucky, believe me. She retained her faculties up to the end. Over eighty and with all the problems she’d had...’

The blue eiderdown on Char’s bed was neatly folded back, the window open. A couple of cardboard boxes filled with books, letters and mangled bits of knitting and those frightful scarlet bedroom slippers she would wear were all that remained of her in the little room. I felt sick.

‘I’ll leave you alone for a few minutes, Mr Horton.’ Mrs McTavish, the soul of tact; no doubt well versed in situations like this. ‘If you wouldn’t mind just going through her things and putting to one side those you want kept, we’ll dispose of the rest. How is the Major coping?’

‘Bearing up,’ I said. ‘What about her clothes?’ I realised suddenly they were still hanging neatly in the deal wardrobe.

‘If you could go through them as well, Mr Horton, it would be a great help. Perhaps the daughters might want something. Are they coming down?’

‘For the funeral,’ I said. She went then, shutting the door very gently behind her. I sat on the bed, so pristine and virginal, the bed Char had died in, and cried as I hadn’t done since I was a child.

When I got back to the house, George was on the phone. He sounded conspiratorial: ‘...must go now, ducky. Guy’s back and I’ll have to take him out to lunch, I suppose. I’ll ring later.’ The phone went click and he appeared. By this time he’d shaved and looked marginally better; I felt worse.

‘How about lunch?’ he said. ‘They do quite a good pie and salad at the White Hart.’

‘It’s Sunday,’ I said. ‘I don’t suppose they’ll run to a pie.’

‘Well, I’m sure they can knock up a couple of ham sandwiches. There’s damn all to eat in the house. I was going out, you see...’

In the end, I paid my last respects to Char on my own. Halfway through his ham sandwich and into his fourth whisky, George announced he didn’t feel too good. He thought he’d go home and have another kip.

‘So you won’t be coming to the undertakers, then?’ George looked at a point somewhere over my left shoulder.

‘I don’t think I will, if you don’t mind,’ he said. ‘I’m whacked. I was up most of the night.’

‘OK then,’ I said, ‘I’ll go on my own. The man will be at the Chapel of Rest at two thirty to “open up” as he so delicately put it.’ I was on my third whisky by this time and I have a feeling it was beginning to show. George was silent for a minute or two. Muzak played selections from
South
Pacific
and behind me soft West Country voices discussed Somerset’s chances at cricket. Then he said, ‘You can take those silver candlesticks to put round the coffin. I cleaned them up while you were out.’

‘Alright,’ I said. Suddenly I remembered, years ago when we were all young, sitting round the kitchen table at Maple, Char at the head. ‘When I die, I want six candles round my bier and my children to watch over me all night.
All
night, d’you see?’ I wondered if the old devil had remembered.

‘Mr Horton? The Major’s not coming then?’ Mr Combes, the undertaker, immaculate in dark suit, gleaming white shirt and black tie: you could see your face in his polished shoes.

‘Er, no, he didn’t feel too well.’

‘Only to be expected, I suppose. Do come this way Mr Horton. I’ll just pop the fan on, you can’t be too careful in this humid weather.’ He opened the door of the Chapel of Rest with a flourish; he was obviously very proud of it. I must say it was very ‘tasteful’. Only the noise of the whirring fan brought a slightly venal note to the proceedings. Char appeared to be made of wax. I’d never seen anyone look so dead: only her tobacco-stained fingers resting tidily on the coverlet gave any indication the effigy in the satin-lined box had once been human.

‘Would you like a little music?’ Mr Combes whispered in my ear. ‘It helps, sometimes, when saying goodbye to the departed.’

‘No...no, thank you.’ I bent quickly over and kissed the ‘thing’ that had been Char on the lips. ‘Goodbye, my love. God speed.’ After all, she just might have been around somewhere. The lips were surprisingly soft: somehow I had thought it would be more like kissing a statue. Char, however, was not there.

‘The departed, she retained her faculties to the end?’

‘You could say that, more or less.’

Mr Combes surreptitiously looked at his watch. He had, after all, broken into his Sunday afternoon and undertakers, like everyone else, need to have a day of rest sometimes.

‘I’m keeping you,’ I said. ‘Thanks so much for letting me see her.’ He looked relieved and all at once more human.

‘The thing is, we’ve got the wife’s mother coming over to Sunday tea,’ he said.

‘I understand,’ I said. Then remembered the silver candlesticks.

‘By the way, the Major wanted these put round the coffin. Will that be alright? Something of hers, he thought...’ I held up a plastic carrier bag from Tesco’s. ‘They’re in here.’

He looked doubtful. ‘We provide our own furnishings,’ he said austerely, ‘and of course there’s always the risk of theft...’ In the end, however, he relented, albeit reluctantly, and took the bag I was holding out as a sort of limp offering.

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ he said.

‘Thank you again,’ I said and shook him by the hand. Not at all, Mr...er, er...at your service any time. Always remember, life must go on.’

The door slammed behind me in the empty street. It had started to rain again.

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