Books Do Furnish a Room (7 page)

When they were halfway up the
aisle, level with a fairly wide area of unoccupied seats, Widmerpool turned
sharply, grinding his heel on the stone in a drill-like motion, a man
intentionally emphasizing status as military veteran. His back to the altar, he
barred the way, almost as if about to stage an anti-liturgical, even
anti-clerical demonstration. However, instead of creating any such untoward
disturbance, he shot out the hand of a policeman directing traffic, to indicate
where each was to sit of the group apparently under his command.

This authority was by no means
unquestioned. Discussion immediately arose among the others, no doubt similar
in bearing to whatever disagreements had taken place in the porch. Jeavons,
from where he was sitting up at the front of the church, beckoned vehemently to
Alfred Tolland in an effort to show where a place could be found among the
family. The two of them knew each other not only as relations, but also as
fellow air-raid wardens, duties during the course of which an inarticulate
friendship may have been obscurely cemented. However, Alfred Tolland was at
that moment too dazed by the journey, or oppressed by other circumstances in
which he found himself, to be capable of reaching a goal so far afield. He
stood there patiently awaiting Widmerpool’s instructions, scarcely noticing
Jeavons’s arms swinging up and down at semaphore angles.

These directions of Widmerpool’s
had not yet been fully implemented, when Pamela, pushing past the others, precipitately
entered the pew her husband was allotting to Alfred Tolland. She placed herself
at the far end, under the marble fascicles of standards, lances and sabres that
encrusted the Henry Lucius tomb. Whether or not this seating arrangement
accorded with Widmerpool’s intention could only be guessed; probably not, from
the expression his face at once assumed. Nevertheless, now it had happened, he
curtly directed Alfred Tolland to follow, without attempting to reclassify this
order of precedence. There was a moment of gesturing between them, Alfred
Tolland putting forward some contrary suggestion – he may just have grasped the
meaning of Jeavons’s signals – so that very briefly it looked as if a wrestling
match were about to take place in the aisle. Then Widmerpool shoved Alfred
Tolland almost bodily into the pew, where, leaving a wide gap between himself
and Pamela, Tolland immediately knelt, burying his face in his hands like a man
in agonies of remorse. At Widmerpool’s orders, Quiggin went in next; Craggs and
Gypsy into the pew behind. They were followed by Widmerpool himself.

The last time I had seen Pamela
in church had been at Stringham’s wedding, child bridesmaid of six or seven, an
occasion when, abandoning responsibilities in holding up the bride’s train, she
had walked away composedly, later, so it was alleged, causing herself to be
lifted in order to be sick into the font. ‘That little girl’s a fiend,’ someone
had remarked afterwards at the reception. Now she sat, so to speak, between
Henry Lucius and his descendant Alfred Tolland. Would Henry Lucius, ‘not
indifferent to the charms of the fair sex’, rise from the dead? She had closed
her eyes, either in prayer, or to express the low temperature of the nave, but
did not kneel. Neither did Quiggin, Craggs or Gypsy kneel, but Widmerpool leant
forward for a few seconds in a noncommittally devotional attitude that did not
entirely abandon a sitting posture, and might have been attributable merely to
some interior discomfort.

The dead silence that had
momentarily fallen was broken by Widmerpool levering himself back on the seat.
He removed his spectacles and began to wipe them. He was rather thinner, or
civilian clothes gave less impression of bulk than the ‘utility’ uniform that
enclosed him when last seen. The House of Commons had already left its
indefinable, irresoluble mark. His thick features, the rotundities of his body,
always amenable to caricature, now seemed more than ever simplified in outline,
positively demanding treatment in political cartoon. The notion that a few
months at Westminster had brought this about was far fetched. Alteration, if
alteration there were, was more likely to be accountable to marriage.

Craggs too shared some of this
air of a figure from newspaper caricature, a touch of the Mad Hatter mingling
with that of King Lear. His shabbiness, almost griminess, was certainly
designed to convey to the world that he was a person of sufficient importance
to rise above bourgeois convention, whatever its form. Smiling to himself,
snuffling, fidgeting, he gazed round the church in a manner to register
melodramatic wonder that such places could still exist, even for the purpose
that had brought him there. Such views were certainly held by Gypsy too – who
had refused to attend her old friend Mr Deacon’s funeral on strictly
anti-religious grounds – but unmitigated anger now appeared to prevent her from
knowing, or caring, where she found herself. Quiggin looked as if his mind were
occupied with business problems. On the other hand, he might have been thinking
of the time when Erridge had taken Mona, Quiggin’s girl, to the Far East. That
difference had been long made up, but circumstances could have recalled it,
giving Quiggin a strained uneasy expression.

One of the least resolvable
problems posed by Widmerpool’s presence was his toleration of Gypsy as member
of the party. Once – haunted by that dire incident in the past when he had paid
for her ‘operation’ – he would have gone to any lengths to avoid even meeting
her. If, as Craggs’s wife, she had to come, that would have been sufficient to
keep Widmerpool away. Some overriding political consideration must explain
this, such as the idea of attaching himself to a kind of unofficial deputation
paying last respects to a ‘Man of the Left’. In Widmerpool’s case that would be
a way of establishing publicly his own
bona
fides
, sentiments not sufficiently recognized in himself. Acceptance of Gypsy could be
regarded as a gesture of friendship to the extremities of Left-Wing thought, an
olive branch appropriate (or not) to Erridge’s memory.

The more one thought about it,
the more relevant – to employ one of their own favourite terms – were Quiggin
and Craggs, in fact the whole group, to consign Erridge to the tomb; in certain
respects more so than his own relations. It was true that Erridge’s abnegation
of the family as a social unit was capable of exaggeration, by no means so
total as he himself liked to pretend, or his cronies, many of those
unsympathetic to him too, prepared to accept. The fact remained that it was
with Quiggin and Craggs he had lived his life, insomuch as he had lived it with
other people at all, sitting on committees, signing manifestoes, collaborating
in pamphlets. (Burton – who provided instances for all occasions, it was hard
not to become obsessed with him – spoke of those who ‘pound out pamphlets on
leaves of which a poverty-stricken monkey would not wipe’.) In fact, pondering
on these latest arrivals, they might be compared with the squad of German POWs
straying across the face of George Tolland’s obsequies, each group a visual
reminder of seamy realities – as opposed to idealistic aspirations – the former
of war, the latter, politics.

The train of thought invited
comparison between the two brothers, their characters and fates. Erridge,
high-minded, willing to endure discomfort, ridicule, solitude, in a fervent anxiety
to set the world right, had at the same time, as a comfortably situated eldest
son, a taste for holding on to his money, except for intermittent doles – no
doubt generous ones
– to Quiggin and others who represented in his own
eyes what Sillery liked to call The Good Life. Erridge was
wholly uninterested in individuals; his absorption only in ‘causes’.

George, on the
other hand, had never shown much concern with
righting the world, except that in a sense his death might be regarded as
stemming from an effort at least to prevent the place from becoming worse. He had not been
at all adept at making money, but never, so to speak, set the glass of port he liked after lunch – if there were any excuse – before,
say, educating his step-children in a generous
manner. A competent officer (Tom Goring had praised him
in that sphere), his target was always the regular soldier’s
(one thought of Vigny) to do his duty to the fullest extent, without, at the same time seeking supererogatory burdens or
looking out for trouble.

With newsprint still in short
supply, Erridge’s obituaries were briefer than might have been the case in
normal times, but he received some little notice: polite reference to lifelong
Left-Wing convictions, political reorientations in that field, final pacifism;
the last contrasted with having ‘fought’ (the months in Spain having by now
taken mythical shape) in the Spanish Civil War. George was, of course,
mentioned only in the ordinary death announcements inserted by the family.
Musing on the brothers, it looked a bit as if, in an oblique manner, Erridge,
at least by implication, had been given the credit for paying the debt that had
in fact been irrefutably settled by George. The same was true, if it came to
that, of Stringham, Templer, Barnby – to name a few casualties known personally
to one – all equally indifferent to putting right the world.

The sound came
now, unmistakable, of the opening Sentences of the burial service. Everyone
rose. Coughing briefly
ceased. The parson, a very old man presented to the living by Erridge’s
grandfather, moved slowly, rather painfully forward, intoning the words in a
high quavering chant. The heavy boots of the coffin-bearers shuffled over the
stones. The faces of the bearers were set, almost agonizingly concentrated, on
what they were doing, that of Skerrett, the old gamekeeper, of gnarled ivory,
like a skull. He was not much younger than the parson. A boy of sixteen
supporting one of the back corners of the coffin was probably his grandson. The
trembling prayers raised a faint echo throughout the dank air of the church, on
which the congregation’s breath floated out like steam. Such moments never lose
their intensity. A cross-reference had uncovered Herbert’s lines a few days
before.

The brags of life are but a
nine-days wonder:
And after death the fumes that
spring
From private bodies, make as
big a thunder
As those which rise from a huge
king.

One thought of Father Zossima
in
The Brothers Karamazov
. Reference to bodily corruption
was a natural reaction from ‘Whom none should advise, thou hast persuaded’.
Ralegh might be grandiloquent, he was also authoritative, even hypnotic, no
less resigned than Herbert, as well. I thought about death. It seemed most
unlikely Burton had really hanged himself, as rumoured, to corroborate the
accuracy of the final hour he had drawn in his own horoscope. The fact was he
was only mildly interested in astrology.

By this time the bearers were
showing decided strain from the weight of the coffin. They had reached a stage
about halfway up the aisle, and were going fairly slowly. Suddenly a commotion
began to take place in one of the pews opposite this point. Pamela was
attempting to make her way out. Her naturally pale face was the colour of chalk. She
had already thrust past Alfred Tolland and Quiggin, but Widmerpool, an
absolutely outraged expression on
his face, stepped quickly from the pew behind to delay her.

‘I’m feeling faint, you fool. I’ve
got to get out of here.’

She spoke in quite a loud
voice. Widmerpool seemed to make a momentary inner effort to decide for himself
the degree of his wife’s indisposition, whether she were to be humoured or
not, but she pushed him aside so violently that he nearly fell. As she hurried
into the aisle he recovered himself, for a second made as if to follow her,
then decided against any such action. Had he seriously contemplated pursuit,
there had been in any case too great delay. Although Pamela herself managed to
skirt the procession advancing with the coffin, it was doubtful whether anyone
of more considerable bulk could have freely negotiated the available space in
the same manner, especially after the disruption caused. She had brushed past
the vicar so abruptly that he gasped and lost the thread of his words. A second
later the bearers, recovering themselves, were level with Widmerpool, blocking
his own egress from the pew. Pamela’s heels clattered away down the flags. When she reached the door, there was difficulty in managing the latch. It gave out
discordant rattles; then a creak and loud slam.

‘My God,’ said Norah.

She spoke the words softly.
They recalled her own troubles with Pamela. The service continued. I tried to
recompose the mind by returning to Ralegh and Herbert. ‘Whom none should
advise, thou hast persuaded.’ Was that true of everyone who died? Of Erridge,
eminently true: true too, in its way, of Stringham and Templer: to some extent
of Barnby: not at all true of George Tolland: yet, after all, was it true of
him too? I thought of the Portraits of Ralegh, stylized in ruff, short cloak,
pointed beard, fierce look. ‘All the pride, cruelty and ambition of men.’
Ralegh knew the form. Still, Herbert was good too. I wondered what Herbert had
looked like. In the end one
got back to Burton’s ‘vile rock of melancholy, a disease so frequent, as few
there are that feel not the smart of it’. Melancholy was so often the
explanation, anyway melancholy in Burton’s terms. The bearers took up the
coffin once more. The recession was slow, though this time uninterrupted.

‘I hope old Skerrett will be
all right,’ whispered Isobel. ‘He looked white as a sheet when he passed.’

‘Whiter than Mrs Widmerpool?’

‘Much whiter.’

Outside, the haze had
thickened. The air struck almost warm after the church. Rain still fell in
small penetrating drops. The far corner of the churchyard was occupied with an
area of Tolland graves: simple headstones: solid oblong blocks of stone with
iron railings: crosses, two unaccountably Celtic in design: one obelisk. Norah,
who had never got on at all well with her eldest brother, was in convulsions of
tears, the other sisters dabbing with their handkerchiefs. There was no sign of
Pamela in the porch. The mourners processed to the newly dug grave. The old
parson, his damp surplice clinging like a shroud, refused to be hurried by the
elements. He took what he was doing at a thoroughly leisurely pace. There
seemed no reason why the funeral should ever end. Then, all at once, everything
was over. The mourners began to move slowly, rather uncomfortably away.