"So in the end Beesty and I were given our orders to go to the undertaker and choose a splendid coffin. Bronze would be the thing, she thought, because it would be possible to engrave directly upon it.
"'Engrave what?' I asked. I will say for her that she had the grace to colour a little under her skilful make-up. 'The Staunton arms,' she said. 'But there aren't any -' I began, when Beesty pulled me away. 'Let her have it,' he whispered. 'But it's crooked,' I shouted. 'It's pretentious and absurd and crooked.' Caroline helped him to bustle me out of the room. 'Davey, you do it and shut up,' she said, and when I protested, 'Carol, you know as well as I do that it's illegal,' she said, 'Oh, legal!' with terrible feminine scorn."
5
At my next appointment, feeling rather like Scheherazade unfolding one of her never-ending, telescopic tales to King Schahriar, I took up where I had left off. Dr. von Haller had said nothing during my account of my father's death and what followed, except to check a point here and there, and she made no notes, which surprised me. Did she truly hold all the varied stories told by her patients in her head, and change from one to another every hour? Well, I did no less with the tales my clients told me.
We exchanged a few words of greeting, and I continued.
"After we had finished with the undertaker, Beesty and I had a great many details to attend to, some of them legal and some arising from the arrangement of funeral detail. I had to get in touch with Bishop Woodiwiss, who had known my father for over forty years, and listen to his well-meant condolences and go over the whole funeral routine. I went to the Diocesan House, and was a little surprised, I can't really say why, that it was so businesslike, with secretaries drinking coffee, and air-conditioning and all the atmosphere of business premises. I think I had expected crucifixes on the walls and heavy carpets. There was one door that said 'Diocesan Chancellery: Mortgages' that really astonished me. But the Bishop knew how to do funerals, and there wasn't really much to it. There were technicalities: our parish church was St. Simon's, but Denyse wanted a cathedral ceremony, as more in keeping with her notions of grandeur, and as well as the Bishop's, the Dean's consent had to be sought. Woodiwiss said he would take care of that. I still don't know why I was so touchy about the good man's words of comfort; after all, he had known my father before I was born, and had christened and confirmed me, and he had his rights both as a friend and a priest. But I felt very personally about the whole matter -"
"Possessively, would you say?"
"I suppose so. Certainly I was angry that Denyse was determined to take over and have everything her own way, especially when it was such a foolish, showy way. I was still furious about that matter of engraving the coffin with heraldic doodads that weren't ours, and couldn't ever be so, and which my father had rejected himself, after a lot of heart-searching. I want that to be perfectly clear to you; I have no quarrel with heraldry, and people who legitimately posess it can use it as they like, but the Staunton arms weren't ours. Do you want to know why?"
"Later, I think. We'll come to it. Go on now about the funeral."
"Very well. Beesty took over the job of seeing the people from the papers, but it was snatched from him by Denyse, who had prepared a handout with biographical details. Silly, of course, because the papers had that already. But she achieved one thing by it that made me furious: the only mention of my mother in the whole obituary was a reference to 'an earlier marriage to Leola Crookshanks, who died in 1942.' Her name was Cruikshank, not Crookshanks, and she had been my father's wife since 1924 and the mother of his children, and a dear, sad, unhappy woman. Denyse knew that perfectly well, and nothing will convince me that the mistake wasn't the result of spite. And of course she dragged in a reference to her own wretched daughter, Lorene, who has nothing to do with the Staunton family – nothing at all.
"When was the funeral to be? That was the great question. I was for getting it over as quickly as possible, but the police did not release the body until late on Monday – and that took some arranging, I can assure you. Denyse wanted as much time as possible to arrange her semi-State funeral and assemble all the grandees she could bully, so it was decided to have it on Thursday.
"Where was he to be buried? Certainly not in Deptford, where he was born, though his parents had providently bought a six-holer in the cemetery there years ago, and were themselves the only occupants. But Deptford wouldn't do for Denyse, so a grave had to be bought in Toronto.
"Have you ever bought a grave? It's not unlike buying a house. First of all they show you the poor part of the cemetery, and you look at all the foreign tombstones with photographs imbedded in them under plastic covers, and the inscriptions in strange languages and queer alphabets, and burnt-out candles lying on the grass, and your heart sinks. You wonder, can this be death? How sordid! Because you aren't your best self, you know; you're a stinking snob; funerals bring out that sort of thing dreadfully. You've told yourself for years that it doesn't matter what happens to a corpse, and when cocktail parties become drunken-serious you've said that the Jews have the right idea, and the quickest, cheapest funeral is the best and philosophically the most decent. But when you get into the cemetery, it's quite different. And the cemetery people know it. So you move out of the working-class and ethnic district into the area of suburban confines, but the gravestones are really rather close together and the inscriptions are in bad prose, and you almost expect to see jocular inscriptions like 'Take-It-Aisy' and 'Dunroamin' on the stones along with 'Till the Day Breaks' and 'In the Everlasting Arms.' Then things begin to brighten; bigger plots, no crowding, an altogether classier type of headstone and – best of all – the names of families you know. On the Resurrection Morn, after all, one doesn't want to jostle up to the Throne with a pack of strangers. And that's where the deal is settled.
"Did you know, by the way, that somebody has to own a grave? Somebody, that is, other than the occupant. I own my father's grave. A strange thought."
"Who owns your mother's grave? And why was your father not buried near her?"
"I own her grave, because I inherited it as part of my father's estate. The only bit of real estate he left me, as a matter of fact. And because she died during the war, when my father was abroad, the funeral had to be arranged by a family friend, and he just bought one grave. A good one, but single. She lies in the same desirable area as my father, but not near. As in life.
"By Tuesday night the undertakers had finished their work, and the coffin was back in his house, at the end of the drawing-room, and we were all invited in to take a look. Difficult business, of course, because an undertaker – or at any rate his embalmer – is an artist of a kind, and when someone has died by violence it's a challenge to see how well they can make him look. I must say in justice they had done well by Father, for though it would be stupid to say he looked like himself, he didn't look as though he had been drowned. But you know how it is; an extremely vital, mercurial man, who has always had a play of expression and even of colour, doesn't look like himself with a mat complexion and that inflexible calm they produce for these occasions. I have had to see a lot of people in their coffins, and they always look to me as if they were under a malign enchantment and could hear what was said and would speak if the enchantment could be broken. But there it was, and somebody had to say a kind word or two to the undertakers, and it was Beesty who did it. I was always being amazed at the things he could do in this situation, because my father and I had never thought he could do anything except manage his damned bond business. The rest of us looked with formal solemnity, just as a few years before we had gathered to look at Caroline's wedding cake with formal pleasure; on both occasions we were doing it chiefly to give satisfaction to the people who had created the exhibit.