The Laying on of Hands - Alan Bennett [19]
Amid the general rejoicing even Carl looked a little more cheerful, though it was hard for him to be altogether wholehearted, the dead man just having been dropped from a club of which Carl was still a life member and from which he stood no chance of exclusion. There were one or two others in the same boat and knew it, but they clapped too, and tried to rejoice.
Though his companion the novelist was gratefully weeping, the publisher’s thanksgiving was less wholehearted. Aids never did sales any harm and gave a tragic momentum even to the silliest of lives, whereas it was hard not to think that there was only bathos in a death that resulted from being bitten by a caterpillar. Still, the geology student seemed naive and possibly suggestible, so Clive’s death could be made—and moralistically speaking ought to be made—more ambiguous than it really was. Nobody liked someone who had had as much sex as Clive to get off scot free and that included the idle reader. No, there was a book here even so; the absurd death was just a hiccup and smiling too, the publisher joined in the clapping.
But clapping whom? Father Jolliffe decided it might as well be God and raising his voice above the tumult he said: ‘Now (and for the third time of asking), shall we pray?’ This even got a laugh and there was a last whoop before the congregation settled down. ‘Let us in the silence remember our friend Clive, who is dead but is alive again.’
This, however hallowed, was not just a phrase. Clive’s imagined death had been baneful and fraught with far-reaching implications so that, devoid of these, his real (and more salubrious) demise did seem almost a resurrection. And in that cumbrous silence, laden with prayers unmouthed, loosed from anxiety and recrimination many do now try and remember him, some frowning as they pray with eyes closed but seeing him still, some open-eyed but unseeing of the present, lost in recollection. In the nature of things, these memories are often inappropriate. Some think, for instance, of what Clive felt like, smelled like, recalling his tenderness and his tact. There was the diligence of his application and pictured in more than one mind’s eye was that stern and labouring face rising and falling in the conscientious performance of his professional duties.
‘I sing his body,’ prayed Geoffrey to himself. ‘I sing his marble back, his heavy legs’—he had been reading Whitman—‘I sing the absence of preliminaries, the curtness of desire. Dead, but not ominously so, now I extol him.’
‘I elevate him,’ thought a choreographer (for whom he had also made some shelves), ‘a son of Job dancing before the Lord.’
‘I dine him,’ prayed one of the cooks, ‘on quails stuffed with pears in a redcurrant coulis.’
‘I adorn him,’ imagined a fashion designer. ‘I send him down the catwalk in chest-revealing tartan tunic and trews and sporting a tam o’shanter.’
‘I appropriate him,’ planned the publisher, ‘a young man eaten alive by celebrity’ (the dust-jacket Prometheus on the rock).
None, though, thought of words and how the bedroom had been Clive’s education. It was there that he learned that words mattered, once having been in bed with an etymologist whose ejaculation had been indefinitely postponed when Clive (on being asked if he was about to come too) had murmured, ‘Hopefully.’ In lieu of discharge, the etymologist had poured his frustrated energy into a short lecture on neologisms which Clive had taken so much to heart he had never said ‘hopefully’ again.
Nothing surprised him, nothing shocked him. He was not—the word nowadays would be judgmental, but Clive knew that there were some who disliked this word, too, and preferred censorious, but he was not judgmental of that either.
Words mattered and so did names. He knew if someone disliked their name and did not want it said, still less called out, during lovemaking. He knew, too, his clients’ various names for the