The Beauty of the Dead and Other Stories (2 page)

As he sat there finishing the pudding and the tea, Grimshaw heard the heavy front door open and swing to, and then quick feet mounting the stairs.

He knew that it was the doctor. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and went upstairs too, following the diminishing chips of snow on the newspapers that covered the turkey-red carpet on the stairs.

In the bedroom the doctor was sitting on the edge of the bed with a stethoscope in his ears. He took off the stethoscope and turned to look at Grimshaw as he came in.

‘You ought to have a fire in here. I distinctly said that yesterday.'

‘She says she's warm enough.'

‘Never mind what she says. It's ten degrees colder today and it looks like being colder,' the doctor said. ‘You must get a fire in here this afternoon.'

Grimshaw did not speak.

‘There's another thing. It's more than time your wife had proper nursing.'

‘She don't like strange people about,' Grimshaw said.

‘Never mind that. What about relatives?'

‘She ain't got none. Only a sister. And she never comes near.'

‘Wouldn't she come if she knew about this?'

‘She might.'

‘Then get her to come. If she can't come you must tell me. I'll get a trained nurse instead. Of course I can't force you, but – '

The doctor got up from the bed and packed away the stethoscope into his bag. The woman on the bed did not stir and Grimshaw, looking at her for a sign of acquiescence or denial, did not speak.

As he went out of the door the doctor made a sign to Grimshaw, and Grimshaw followed him downstairs.

‘Now listen,' the doctor said. ‘The fire and the nurse are both very essential. If you don't give your
consent to a nurse I am afraid I can't be responsible for what happens. Do you understand?'

‘Yes.'

‘How is she sleeping?'

‘Says she sleeps all right, doctor.'

‘Well, keep on with the medicine. I'll give another injection tomorrow.'

When the doctor had gone Grimshaw went upstairs again. He walked slowly, aggrieved and resentful at the idea of a stranger intruding in the house: a strange woman, with fresh bright hands scratching like pins at the virgin skin of the furniture, a woman breaking in with new and regular routine on the old sanctified system of the house. He did not want that. And what about her? If he knew anything about her she didn't want it either.

Still he was troubled, and was greatly relieved, on going into the bedroom, to hear her voice from the bed, gentle and small and scared, entreating him:

‘You ain't goin' to get Emma in, are you?'

‘She wouldn't come here,' Grimshaw said. ‘You know that.'

‘You ain't goin' to get a nurse or nobody in? I'm all right. I don't want nobody.'

‘I'll do jist as you like,' he said. ‘You want somebody, I'll get 'em in. You don't want nobody, you neent have nobody.'

‘I don't want nobody.'

He was relieved, almost glad. He stood by the bed, over her. She was so small and frail and tired-looking, in spite of her high colour and the large veins on her hands, that he experienced a moment of tender anxiety for her, a spasmodic flutter of gentleness that had nothing to do with the starved cold remains of the rice pudding, the rags with which he had stopped up the window, the miserliness that in her eyes and after so many years did not seem like miserliness at all. The emotion fluttered his heart and he made a vague gesture or two of restlessness across his unshaven face with his yellow, dirt-clotted hands. ‘You have somebody in if you want somebody,' he said.

‘No. I don't want nobody here,' she said desperately. ‘I don't want nobody traipsing all over the place.'

‘All right,' he said. He picked up the dirty rice pudding plate and the dirty cup. ‘You goin' to git some sleep now?'

‘I'll try,' she said. ‘Where are you going to be?'

‘I'm going to be up in the workshop.' He shuffled his way among the crowded snow-gleaming period pieces towards the door. ‘Shall you be all right?'

‘I shall be all right,' she said.

Grimshaw went downstairs again, put the dirty crocks into the sink and then went out across the asphalt yard behind the house and into the workshop
at the end of it. Snow was falling faster and more softly now, settling everywhere in a crust of an inch or so, so that he made no noise as he walked. The big door of the workshop soundlessly pushed back an arc of snow as he opened it, and when he shut it again behind him the whole world seemed to dissolve into a great calmness. Falling softly into the dead air and catching itself now and then on the dead twigs of the plum tree growing on the wall of the workshop, by the window, the snow seemed to be the only living thing in the world.

On a set of three trestles, in the middle of the workshop, lay several planks of elm covered with sacking. Grimshaw took off the sacking and stood looking at the new, smooth wood. Presently he ran one flat crude hand along the surface of the uppermost plank. The wood had a beautiful living response which smoother things, like glass and steel, could never give. Under the slight pulsation of pleasure that the wood gave him he put his other hand on the plank and ran that too backwards and forwards. The wood was smooth, but he knew that he could get it smoother than that yet. He had spent all yesterday afternoon planing it. Now he could spend all afternoon rubbing it down. In time he would get it as smooth as ebony. It had been several years since Grimshaw had made a coffin. In his day as a carpenter there was always a
hurry for a coffin, but now he did not want to hurry. Even though he knew she was dying, he wanted to make this coffin with care, with his own hands; he wanted to make it lovingly. He wanted to put a little decent scroll-work on it and silver handles, and make it as smooth as ebony. He had had the handles for a long time, put away in a box on the top shelf at the end of the shop. They didn't eat anything. The elm was the best he could get. It would be a beautiful coffin and there was another thing: because he was making it himself it would come out cheaper.

There was the grave too. He thought about it at intervals as he worked on at the job of rubbing down the elm throughout the afternoon, with the snow falling more thickly than ever outside and the snowlight falling more and more brightly on the wood-shavings, the tools and the elm, the snow at last standing like flowers of coral on the black branches of the plum tree. In the silence he could think of the grave without interruption, and gradually it took shape in his mind as a beautiful thing.

He had long since decided that the grave was going to be something more than a hole in the ground. Every inch of it was going to be lined with painted tiles. There were three or four hundred of these tiles packed away in a chest upstairs: painted with flowers, birds, bits of scenery. He had watched her collect them
over a period of years. He had watched her gradually collect her own grave together, and now no one in the world was going to be buried more beautifully.

He worked at the elm until, even with the snow-light, it was impossible to see any longer. He packed up at last and went back into the house, not realizing until he crossed the yard in the three or four inches of snow how bitterly cold it still was. When he realized it he went back into the workshop and scraped up a handful of shavings and wood-chips and took them into the kitchen. The fire was dead, and he put a match to the shavings and the wood, piling a handful of leather-bits on top. He swung the kettle over the trivet, and then went upstairs again.

It was very dark on the stairs and almost dark in the bedroom. He went into the room very quietly, greeting her with a whisper, ‘You all right? You bin to sleep?' which she did not answer.

He stood by the bed and looked down at her. She lay exactly as he had left her, but he knew that there was something different about her. At last he put down his hand and touched her face. Her eyes were cold and closed and he realized that she had gone to sleep and had died without waking up again.

For some moments he stood looking at her, perfectly motionless. Then his thoughts went back to the workshop. Then gradually he came to himself and
began to move with the gentle deliberation of a man who has for a long time had something deeply planned in his mind. He pulled back the horse blanket and the quilt and began to lay out her body.

It was quite dark when he had finished, and downstairs in the kitchen he lit the tin lamp that stood on the mantelpiece. The kettle was boiling and he poured water on to the stale tea-leaves for the third time that day, adding half a spoonful of fresh leaf to the pot. He poured out a cup of tea and spread himself a slice of bread and shop lard, salting the lard, eating it standing up.

When he had finished the tea he took the lamp and walked across the yard into the workshop. It was still snowing and again an enormous calmness closed in behind him as he shut the door, the calmness of snow and darkness and the thought of death.

He turned up the lamp and set it on the bench and began to work straightaway at the coffin. From that moment, and on through the night, he did not know whether it snowed or not. He did not know anything except that the conception of the coffin took shape under his hands. He did not feel the crystallization of any emotion. He kept back his emotions as a policeman keeps back the crowd from the scene of a disaster.

It was about eight o'clock next morning when he really looked up and saw that the snow had ceased,
that it lay thick and frozen like years of coral-flower on the bowed branches of the plum tree. When he blew out the lamp, the strong snow-light came in at the windows, turning the almost completed coffin quite white. He worked on for just over another hour, not hungry, still not feeling any emotion, fixing the silver handles at last; and then soon after nine o'clock he slid the coffin on to his shoulders and took it into the house.

When he moved across the yard in the foot-deep snow he heard the sound of shovels scraping on pavements as people moved the snow up and down the street. The sound whipped up in him a realization of the outside world. It died almost immediately as he went into the house. He had stopped thinking what the outside world felt or did or thought. He was alone in the house, with her, the coffin and the tiles with their flowers and birds, but he did not feel alone. They had lived alone together for a long time. The furniture and the glass had taken the place, gradually, of people and fields, friends and outside things. No one could understand how they felt, how he himself felt, about the beauty of the things for which they had starved and cheated themselves. There are different ideas of how to live, and he did not expect anybody to understand. That was why she had not wanted a strange person in the house. That was why he wanted to be alone now.

And as he went upstairs, very slowly, bending himself almost horizontal so as to take the coffin, he felt the presence of the things about him acutely, more real than anything of the outside world had ever been. He felt the beauty of the polished wood as he steadied himself between the tables and chairs with a sudden outstretched hand.

In the bedroom the blinds were still undrawn and the room was filled with the strong light of the snow. It melted in the shining surfaces of walnut and mahogany and hung on the ceiling like a cotton sheet. It struck brightly in his eyes after the gloom of the stairs, filling him with momentary tiredness. But he did not stop. He laid the coffin on the bed and after a time succeeded in laying her in it.

When it was all finished he stood away from the bed, with his back to the snow, and looked at her as she lay in the new bright coffin. As he stood there the emotions he had kept back during the night gradually flooded over him. The light of the snow was very white on her face and he stood looking at her with his ugly stained hands loose at his sides and his ugly tired face sunk on his shoulders.

With tears in his eyes he stood like that for a long time, taking in the beauty of the snow-light that was growing stronger every moment, and the beauty of the dead.

The summer my father died my sister and I decided to start a guest house together. Of course we were fools, but I think we both thought it time to make something of the too-large red-brick family house where for so long there had been no family. Mother had been dead six years: and now, for the first time, we were feeling our independence.

All through that summer the weather was lovely. My father had died in March, and we spent the whole of May, June and July re-planning and redecorating the house, putting in new baths, central heating, even a second staircase. We hoped to be ready by August, and all through these weeks of clear dry weather we had every window open and there was that fine exhilarating smell of new paint and new wood in every corner of the house. My father had been a country solicitor of a solid and careful type who felt tradition to be of supreme importance in life. For that reason the disappointment of having two daughters had shaken him greatly, and although he had borne with my sister, who is older than I by seven years, he had
never really been able to bear with me. I have always done my best to understand this and not bear him any ill-will because of it. He wanted sons to follow him in a profession where sons had followed for five generations, and to have had tradition broken by a girl who grew up to be a little irresponsible, rather self-centred and highly impracticable, was a shock from which he never properly recovered. He took a sort of revenge on me, whether by conscious or unconscious means I could never tell, by showing a certain partiality towards my sister. I was hurt by this partiality, but I have since tried to understand it too. What I can't understand is why my father did not make the most revolutionary possible break with tradition and take my sister into the solicitor's profession with him. Dora would have made an admirable solicitor. She is utterly practical, resourceful, conscientious and in a way very ingenious. Her straight brown hair is and always has been parted directly in the middle: so straight and accurate and unchanging that it gives the feeling of being the result of a positive and ingenious mathematical calculation. In the same way her clear, rather white-skinned face has something of the same surely defined, uninspired beauty as a careful copperplate hand in a ledger.