all and sundry get a drink at the end of it.’
I also wondered how abnormal it was to be standing at a funeral and thinking like this. But then our life together, Ted’s and mine, hadn’t been usual. Mel’s family had been normal, or Caz’s, or Graham’s. Not ours.
Mel was sitting a few seats behind me. She had never met Ted, but she insisted that she wanted to come, out of respect and to keep me company. Caz and Graham were with her. They had met him a handful of times, at my wedding and the children’s birthday parties, and the occasional Christmas celebration in the intervening years.
‘I liked your dad. Of course I’m coming to his funeral,’ Caz declared.
Ted had liked her, too. I remember him flirting with her at my wedding reception. He had probably cornered her in some alcove, before cupping her round face between his two hands and breathing in the scent of her skin as if she were some exotic flower. ‘I could create such a perfume for you,’ he would have murmured in her ear. This routine worked like a charm with a surprisingly wide range of women. Not with Caz, of course, although it would have been a matter of pride for him to have a go. But with plenty of others. More than I could or would want to remember.
Lola and I sat on either side of Jack in the front row of seats. Lola was wearing black trousers and a tight red jersey that made her glow like a damask rose in the colourless desert of the chapel.
Rosa damascena, from which the essential perfume oil attar of roses is distilled. In Bulgaria, principally. I was surprised by how much I remembered about Ted’s craft.
Lola blotted her tears with a folded Kleenex and glanced down at the two black feathered wings of mascara printed on the tissue. Jack sat upright and stared straight ahead of him, dressed in a tidied-up version of his school uniform.
When I broke the news to him, on the morning after Ted’s death, he said, ‘I see.’ And after a moment’s thought, ‘It’s very final, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. Although he’s still here in a way, because we remember him and because we’ll go on talking about him as long as we are alive.’
Jack gave me one of his withering looks, as if he saw right through this threadbare platitude, but he didn’t pass any comment.
Apart from the six of us, the other mourners were Ted’s two first cousins on his mother’s side, who had come down from Manchester. There was no other family left. Then there was a handful of Ted’s neighbours, led by the large and forthright Jean Andrews, and the landlord and a couple of regulars from the pub Ted used to go to. I had never met any of these people before, but they filed up to me at the chapel door, and shook my hand and told me how sorry they were. A great character, your dad, they said. Thank you, I murmured. And yes, he was.
There was also an old woman wearing a ratty fox fur over a shapeless bag of a coat and a crumpled black felt hat with a bunch of silk-and-wire lilies of the valley pinned to one side. Muguet, Ted called the flower. It was one of his favourites. The yield of natural oil from the blooms was minimal, and so the fragrance was usually artificially created.
The woman in the black hat had nodded coolly to me as she walked in, but she didn’t introduce herself or offer condolences. I assumed she was one of those eccentrics who like to see a decent send-off, regardless of whether or not they actually knew the dear departed.
There were perhaps twenty-five people in all. Muted piped organ music whispered around us.
On being given the nod by the crematorium officiator, who wasn’t exactly a vicar and who certainly wasn’t lively enough to qualify as master of ceremonies, one of the cousins hobbled to the lectern. He read that passage from Canon Henry Scott Holland about not having gone away, but being in the next room, still with you. I thought it was a fine and comforting piece of writing, but unfortunately untrue. Ted was completely gone. The shadow of himself that he had lately become had followed the younger man, with his Spencer Tracy looks, his laugh and his silk ties and his perfumes, off and away out of our reach.
Lola’s shoulders shook and she pressed the Kleenex to her face. I reached around Jack to rest my hand in the smooth dip between her shoulder blades.
After the reading there was a hymn, ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’, which I had chosen for no more significant reason than that Ted sometimes hummed it while he was shaving. He would turn his face from side to side, catching the best of his reflection in the mirror above the bathroom sink as he whisked on the soap lather with an old bristle brush. Then with his lips twisted aside he would razor a long, crisp channel through the white foam, all the way from his cheekbone to his jaw. The humming was counterpointed in my memory by the dripping and clanking of pipes in our chilly bathroom.
Or maybe I never actually saw any of this ritual, only imagined that I had. And maybe I also imagined the conspiratorial half-wink he gave himself as the words of the hymn played on in his head, all things wise and wonderful, as if he were saying to himself, that’s you, my boy.
After the hymn the officiator gave a short address. Lola and the cousins and I had provided as much background as we could about Ted and his life, and it was a good attempt at a tribute, given that he had never met him. Practice helped, I supposed, since the man was probably doing this several times a day. He spoke of Ted’s popularity, his love of life and its opportunities, and his gifts as a perfumer. We were just shuffling to our feet again, to the first notes of the organ voluntary that the cousins had suggested to accompany the coffin’s slow slide between the curtains, when Jack scrambled past me. I thought for a second that he might be going to be sick, which had been one of his specialities as a younger child, but he pushed me back when I went to follow him. He marched up to the lectern and took his place behind it, and the recorded music was abruptly switched off. Lola and I glanced nervously at each other. He had given no indication that he wanted to make his own tribute and I regretted that I hadn’t thought of asking him.
Jack cleared his throat. ‘My grandad,’ he began. We waited in silence. ‘My grandad told me when I was just a little kid that pigeons are vermin.’
After another beat of silence I heard from the back of the room a snuffle that might have been suppressed laughter. I stared hard at Jack, seeing his stiff hair and the way his baby’s face would settle into the aggrieved lines of pre-adolescence. He didn’t blink.
‘At our other house before … before Mum and me and Lola moved, they used to sit on all the upstairs windowsills and on the gutters, and Grandad didn’t like all the … all the … mess they left. He pointed at it when I was going to bed one night and said it was smelly and they were dirty. And I looked at their feet, the ones that were standing on the windowsill, and they were all, like, scabby. Their plumage was dirty as well.’
This all came out in a breathless rush. Plumage was a very Jack word. Lola was signalling to him, little patting movements with her hands that meant slow down, speak slower, but he didn’t see her. His gaze was fixed on the back of the room.
‘I said, are all birds dirty, then? And he said, I remember it really well, he said no, birds are beautiful, they’ve got the gift of the air, all the freedom of the sky and it’s just the poor pigeons who live in London and eat rubbish and everything and sit on top of our dirt that makes them dirty. So they’re vermin in the same way as rats, because rats are really clean creatures, in fact. He told me that as well. Anyway …’
Jack paused and now he did look at his audience, letting his eyes slide over us. He had got into his stride. We all sat without moving.
‘Anyway, after that I got interested in birds.
