The Graveyard Position (3 page)

“
Really? Did
you? I considered going over myself when they let in…
women.
I never thought the Anglicans would be so perverse, not to say heretical. But in the end I didn't, I don't really know why.”

“Couldn't bear to lose all those C of E hymns, probably. It would have been a wrench for me. I suppose it was the attraction of the
certainty
of the Roman Catholics that made me want to cross the divide.”

“I know! Such a wonderful comfort! And yet that very certainty could be a snare and a delusion, couldn't it?”

Merlyn seemed to feel his feet getting itchy as Cousin Francis showed his usual inability to hold fast to any consistent line of belief. Turning slightly, Merlyn hailed in her chair his aunt Marigold, now over seventy, but not apparently relaxing any part of her grip on life.

“Wonderful to see you again, Auntie. It's been much too long. And how have you been keeping?”

He squatted down beside her chair, and the old lady, eyes gleaming maliciously at the sight of a captive audience, began to itemize her medical history of the last twenty-odd years. She seemed to be enjoying, in a heartless way, his inevitable boredom. Over by the wine and the sausage rolls and the prawn sandwiches, Rosalind regarded Merlyn. She had watched his every move around the room and had overheard a large part of his conversations.

“Look at him! It's disgraceful!” Getting no response from her husband, she became specific. “He's worming his way in here!”

“Looks to me as if he's already wormed,” said Barnett. Merlyn certainly was the center of everyone's attention—indeed the only focus for it. Even the elderly maid looked at him rather than at the better-known family members. When he had listened to Aunt Marigold for twenty minutes—paying her account, to his credit, the sort of attention a medical specialist might have given to an exceptionally interesting case history—he stretched, kissed her, and with a wave of his hand wandered off.

“Well, this has been interesting,” he said, coming to rest beside his aunt Emily. “Clarissa will have been watching us all, and been delighted. In fact, I'm not sure she isn't actually with us at this moment—in spirit, of course.”

“I never greatly liked that aspect of Clarissa's life,” said Emily, with pursed lips, her sourness gaining the upper hand over her more feeble desire to appear welcoming. “After all, she was in many ways a very worldly woman.”

“Not worldly, just interested in life,” said a spruce man, not much older than Merlyn himself, in a smart suit and a bow tie more suitable for a wedding. “By the way, I'm your cousin—”

“Eddie. Of course I remember you,” said Merlyn, holding out his hand. Another bull's-eye. Eddie looked gratified. “I think you're right about Aunt Clarissa. All life was interesting for her. Probably that's what made her such a good clairvoyant.”

“Do you remember when I got hold of
The Kama Sutra
?” asked Eddie, sliding back effortlessly into his schoolboy persona. “Clarissa shrieked with laughter at all the pictures of the various positions. She thought the couples would need a pair of mechanics to disentangle them.”

Merlyn laughed loudly.

“Yes, she'd have loved the job of prizing them apart herself, wouldn't she? She never had much personal interest in sex, but plenty in other people's sexual habits…. Poor old Clarissa. And now she's taken up the only position left to her, the graveyard one.”

Aunt Emily, whose expression had been darkening with every exchange, turned away and stalked off. Merlyn and Eddie refrained from laughing at her back, but only just.

“Don't mind Mother,” said Eddie. “She has vinegar instead of blood. So what are you doing now?”

“Doing?” said Merlyn carelessly. “Oh, you mean work. Paid employment. Well, my paid employment at the moment, and for the last few years, has been in Brussels, so you can guess who shells out my monthly bonanza.”

Eddie was impressed.

“The Common Market? Good Lord, you
must
be on to a good thing. The gravy train to end all gravy trains.”

“People have an exaggerated idea of how much EU employees rake in,” claimed Merlyn. “Not
much
exaggerated, but slightly exaggerated. We do very nicely. It's important work.”

There seemed to be a suggestion of a wink in Merlyn's eye, and Cousin Eddie felt empowered to ask, “So what do you do? Legislate about straight bananas or how to define chocolate?”

“I presume you read the
Sunday Telegraph,
” Merlyn said, with a suddenly assumed lordly air. “Actually I'm one of the first secretaries in the Department of Economic Standardization, with special responsibility for Eastern Europe.”

“Good Lord! What do you actually do?”

Merlyn's hauteur was shed instantly.

“We're still trying to define the department's remit.”

They laughed together, as in the old days.

“And you'll be going back there now?”

“Oh dear me, no. I've got three months' leave on three-quarters of my pay. Jolly nice of them, but they decided that the last three years have been exceptionally grueling for me, with all the old Communist-bloc countries having their applications vetted. And of course I pleaded special circumstances.”

Cousin Eddie looked at him.

“Clarissa's death? I shouldn't have thought that the death of an aunt warranted three months' leave.”

“You don't know the EU. And of course I emphasized that Clarissa practically brought me up.”

Eddie raised his eyebrows.

“You stayed here with her for about eighteen months, so far as I remember.”

“But several times earlier too. And she was always ringing up to see that I was all right before I, in the end, came up here to live for good.”

“So what are you going to be doing?”

“Establishing my identity, I suppose. I wasn't expecting to have to, but—”

He gestured toward Rosalind and Eddie's mother.

“So, another long-drawn-out claimant saga, then?”

“I don't think so. Most of those were fraudulent, I seem to remember. Perkin Warbeck wasn't one of the Princes in the Tower, and the Tichborne claimant wasn't who he said he was. Nowadays it can all be done scientifically, so there is no doubt.”

“So you'll be staying on here?”

“Yes, I'll be around for a bit,” said Merlyn. “Taking an interest and settling up my affairs.”

“But what—?” Again Cousin Eddie rethought, then decided to remain silent.

“Which really means Aunt Clarissa's affairs,” resumed Merlyn. “We must all decide about the inscription on the gravestone, mustn't we?” he suggested, looking round at the assembled relatives, who were standing in an uneasy circle. “That shouldn't be too controversial, I don't imagine.”

“I thought ‘After a long illness,'” suggested Malachi. “Vague but dignified.”

“You mean not specifying whether the illness was physical or mental?” asked Merlyn.

“Well, yes. They say she went a bit bonkers.”

“I couldn't understand why Clarissa specified she wanted to be buried,” said Caroline in her plaintive voice. “She was such a
modern
person for her age, and burial is so old-fashioned.”

“Oh, that was her wish, was it?” said Merlyn. “There could be all sorts of reasons why she insisted on being buried.”

The whole room fell silent at this, but Merlyn showed no sign of embarrassment. He looked at Rosalind, as if expecting her to make the next move. Tight-lipped, she obliged.

“I think all this discussion about Aunt Clarissa is absolutely disgusting. I mean, at her funeral! Is there no shame? And what's all this about her being mentally ill? Of course we all know she was flighty, had bees in her bonnet. But she's not the first person who's had a thing about the Other Side, and communicating with the dead. It doesn't prove she was mentally ill by a long chalk. And she was no different when she died. She wasn't senile or anything. Just a bit vague as time went by.”

There was a little murmur of support, from Emily and others, but Barnett, who knew his wife's real views about Clarissa, slipped out into the hall.

“Well spoken,” said Merlyn. “Since I hadn't seen Clarissa for some time it's good to know that she hadn't essentially changed. Still, I'm not sure you'll stick to that line, Rosalind…Oh look,” he broke off to say, looking out the large window. “There's Mr. Robinson from number twenty. Doesn't he look old? Those healthy people always age fast after fifty, don't they?…No, Rosalind. I'm betting you'll be quite anxious to claim Clarissa was mentally ill after you've seen the will.”

Again, there was a moment or two of utter silence.

“The will? What do you know about the will?” demanded Rosalind.

“Oh, just what she told me on the phone two or three weeks ago,” said Merlyn. “And now I really must be going. Lots, absolutely lots to do. So kind of you to invite me, Cousin Rosalind. Good-bye for now!”

He slipped out. In the hall Barnett Frere was having a quick and welcome cigarette. Merlyn raised his hand in farewell.

“Thanks so much for inviting me,” he said.

“Don't take too much notice of Rosalind,” said her husband. “She was so fond of her father. Still is.”

Merlyn paused for a moment, as if uncertain what relevance that had. Then he fled.

The relatives, now the only ones left at the wake, looked at him bleakly as he escaped from the room, and followed him with their eyes as he left by the front door. He waved to them as he passed the bay window, and crossed the road to his car.

“What a lot of nonsense he talked!” said Rosalind, attempting to rally the troops.

“I don't see why you call it nonsense,” said Cousin Francis. “He talked a lot of good sense, I thought.”

“He just sucked up to you all,” insisted Rosalind. “Told you all what you wanted to hear. All that stuff about his beloved Cecilia and her balcony. Just the sort of romantic stuff that Caroline loves.”

“How would he know what Caroline loves if he isn't really Merlyn?” asked Eddie.

“He looked in her face,” said Rosalind. “Just like Aunt Clarissa. Many of her best prophecies and character analyses were got by looking at people's faces.”

“I don't think that I—” began Caroline, then stopped. Some of the family said her marriage had failed because her husband was aggravated beyond measure by her inability to finish a sentence. Others thought that was the only thing about her that left anything to the imagination.

“And all that stuff about considering going over to the Catholic Church,” resumed Rosalind. “Just the sort of thing to go to Francis's heart.”

“He didn't seem very up in Catholicism,” said Marigold. “They sing all sorts of hymns at Catholic services, including C of E ones.”

“He was living in Italy,” Eddie pointed out. “I bet they don't sing ‘Onward Christian Soldiers' or ‘Glorious things of thee are spoken' in St. Peter's.”

“Does anyone
really
think he's spent the past twenty plus years mooning over another teenager in Verona and then working in a plum job with the Common Market bureaucracy in Brussels?”

Rosalind's question pulled them all up, and they sat seriously considering whether they found the visitor's curriculum vitae convincing.

“There's an awful lot of ‘Jobs for the boys' going on in the Common Market,” said Eddie, rather halfheartedly.

“How did he become one of ‘the boys'?” asked Rosalind. “A boy from a comprehensive in Leeds, practically an orphan, no smart connections?”

“I think you're missing the point.”

The speaker was Barnett, who had come back into the room, bringing with him the delicious smell of nicotine. He was someone who had married into the family, and one who had never known the young Merlyn. That somehow seemed to give him a special authority. All heads turned in his direction. He collected his thoughts before speaking.

“I don't think he was trying to butter you all up.”

“He certainly didn't try very hard with me,” said Emily.

“All that disgusting stuff about
The Kama Sutra.
Typical Clarissa, but
not
the sort of thing to bring up at a funeral.”

“Actually it was your son Eddie who brought it up. The man we'll call Merlyn Docherty just played along. But Eddie accepted that it was Merlyn he was talking to. And all of us—even Rosalind when she wasn't thinking—spoke to him and about him as if he was Merlyn. And that's what he wanted. That's what he was aiming for. I bet he's smiling now.”

All of them, even those who had liked Merlyn and had no interest in Aunt Clarissa's will, were quiet at the thought of having been fooled. Rosalind was both thoughtful and angry, and her anger was directed as much at herself as at her husband.