An Awfully Big Adventure - Beryl Bainbridge [63]
Soon she grew bored with watching and wandered away down the path towards the road. There was a hearse parked at the kerb outside the church and a man in a black bowler hat polishing the bodywork with a yellow duster. ‘They’ve begun,’ he said, and she nodded and quickened her step obediently.
The door made a terrible creaking sound when she pushed it open. She saw a coffin on trestles below the altar steps and a vicar in a white surplice with his back to the aisle. The window behind the altar had been replaced with a piece of board across which someone had scrawled in black paint ‘This side up’. A single light burned unshaded above the communion table, turning the scene into a badly lit play. She would have backed out again if the mourners, disturbed by the noise of the door, hadn’t swivelled round to look at her. There were three of them, two women and a man, all old and white-haired, each with a shepherd’s crook of a walking-stick propped against the pew in front. There was no one else there save for a hidden organist who presently began to thunder an untuneful hymn.
It was a short service. The church was so vast and empty that the vicar’s words rolled away into the gloom. One of the old ladies blew her nose and the explosion echoed round the walls to fade like the barking of a dog.
Stella pretended it was Uncle Vernon in the coffin. She concentrated but felt nothing. Dying wouldn’t be such an awfully big adventure for Uncle Vernon – he was too old. She substituted Meredith. Still she couldn’t feel sad; if anything she was angry at his deceitful slipping away. She imagined herself lying there, the life gone from her. Uncle Vernon and Meredith were weeping. She was beginning to feel quite mournful when she remembered that Meredith was a Catholic and wouldn’t be allowed in the church.
The door behind her cranked open. She turned and saw the man in the bowler. He looked beyond her and lifted one finger in a beckoning gesture. Four undertaker’s men slid out of the shadows of the vestry and, picking up the coffin, bore it up the aisle. The vicar paced behind, holding his prayer book, his hair floating up and down in the draught from the door. Stella would have fled if she hadn’t thought it sacrilegious to race ahead of the dead. She stood with closed eyes, listening to the measured footsteps.
When she opened them again one of the elderly ladies had drawn level with her. Her stick slithering on the flagstones, the old woman halted, swaying. Stella put a hand under her elbow to support her. Together they tottered to the door. As they came out onto the path a muffled roar sounded from the football pitch.
‘Thank you for coming,’ the old woman said. ‘He would have been pleased.’
When the coffin had been lowered into the hole and the suitable words uttered, the vicar searched for Stella’s hand in the overlong sleeve of O’Hara’s coat.
‘Did you know the deceased well?’ he asked.
‘Yes and no,’ she said.
‘Put your trust in the resurrection,’ he told her, and hurried away, face purple with the cold.
Stella walked to the poplar-trees and peered over the wall into the field. She saw a figure lying on the ground and O’Hara holding Geoffrey’s arms behind his back. Everybody was shouting.
O’Hara and Freddie Reynalde dragged Geoffrey from the pitch and marched him out of sight behind the clubhouse. Exhorting him to breathe deeply they paraded him up and down beside the wire fence. He was trembling and so drenched in sweat that his hair lay like streaks of black paint upon his forehead. In bursts he wept, angrily.
The spectators began to leave the field. Chivvying his players into their coats and scarves, the Empire stage-manager herded them back to the coach. Within Dotty’s hearing a home pirate remarked that he thought it had all been a storm in a teacup. She prodded him fiercely in the buttocks with the tip of her brolly, accusing him of disloyalty.
‘Nothing excuses violence,’ she shouted. ‘It was a disgraceful outburst.’
The pirate looked unrepentant.