There was some confusion about where Carole should sit. She had ordered five low mourners’ chairs, but the rabbi (who had stayed far too long as it was) explained yet again that Jewish law did not permit ex-wives to sit on mourner’s chairs, even if they had been married to the deceased for nearly thirty years. She could, if she wanted, sit near her ex-brother-in-law and her daughters, but not next to them. She was only there as a comforter of mourners, not as a mourner. As he put on his high black hat to leave, he reminded her to cover her mirrors, as was required for a house of mourning.
‘All the mirrors,’ he added, with the air of a man who knew a rule-breaker when he saw one.
At least he didn’t make disparaging comments about shiva being held at Carole’s. There had, she thought as she laid out her funeral outfit, been no choice. Melissa lived in Leeds, Jess’s flat was far too small – and on the wrong side of the river – and Holly had builders in so the place was a mess. Marshall, Maurice’s brother, lived in the States, so they certainly couldn’t go there, and even if they could, he was already on his way over. There had been talk of using Maurice’s flat but the girls felt it would be weird, like trespassing. To Carole’s relief, the idea was dropped. Much better to be somewhere that felt like a home.
She counted sixty people at the funeral, not a bad turn out for a Tuesday. The attendees largely consisted of her friends and friends of the girls, with a sprinkling of relatives from both sides. Only a few of Maurice’s friends bothered to make the long journey to the cemetery. Sad but not surprising. Since the divorce, he had let his friendships slip.
‘We tried to keep in touch,’ said one, ‘but he didn’t want to know. Haven’t heard from him for months.’ He shuffled over to the men’s side of the prayer house to hide himself amongst the husbands. His wife hadn’t come.
The rabbi’s eulogy was masterly. He made it sound as if he had known Maurice for years, which was hardly the case, as not only had Maurice been a less than prominent member of the congregation, but the rabbi was newly arrived from Amsterdam, hurriedly drafted in when the previous incumbent died of a heart attack. He painted an intimate portrait of Maurice as a thinker, a perfectionist, a devoted family man, a dedicated professional (all of which he was, up to a point), making Holly, the youngest of the three girls and always the most emotional, hide her face behind a tissue.
The burial itself was grim. It was windy and drizzling, as it seemed to be at every funeral Carole attended, and Maurice’s plot took several minutes to reach. Carole still had a plot reserved next to him. She would have to speak to someone about that.
She felt it her duty to stand at the front, beside the mound of earth that would cover the coffin. Jess, her only single daughter, took her arm and held it tight. After prayers, Marshall was the first to throw spadefuls of soil into the grave, as befitted the remaining brother. Next, the girls and their respective spouses took their turn. Melissa’s husband offered the spade to Carole but she declined.
Once they got back to the house, Carole installed herself on a mourner’s chair, despite the rabbi’s prohibition. She sat on a cushion to raise herself above them, a reasonable compromise, she thought, especially as some of the visitors wished her long life. Despite this, she found it hard to play a mourner, and kept jumping up to check that her ‘helpers’ – the Filipina cleaner and one of her friends – were preparing tea and coffee as instructed.
The house was laden with food. Carole’s sister had turned up at nine bearing bagels, smoked salmon and eggs, and proceeded to butter and boil for the next forty minutes. Soon after that a couple of Carole’s girlfriends appeared, bringing chocolate cake and chicken soup. They embraced her in a cloud of perfume and kisses, smoothing her hair and telling her that everything was for the best. Then Marshall had arrived from New York, bleary and jet lagged, looking more like Maurice than Carole remembered. He held Carole in a tearful bear hug.
‘I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe it.’
He muttered the words on and off all morning like a mantra, as if saying them often enough would make Maurice’s death more real.
Melissa had come down the previous afternoon. Jess and Holly met her at the station and brought her straight to Carole’s house, where she burst into tears on the doorstep, crumpling into her mother’s arms like a small child.
There had been a surreal hilarity in the house that night, all four of them together with not quite enough room for comfort. Holly had intended to go home as it was just round the corner, but somehow all three girls ended up in one bed, although at some point Mel climbed into Carole’s bed, sniffing and wiping her nose on the back of her hand. No one slept much, and at five, although it was still pitch black outside, they all got up and made hot drinks.
Holly said, ‘It’s strange to be doing this without Dad,’ even though they were all grown up and she and Melissa had three children between them and none of them had lived at home for years; even though this wasn’t the family home, so their father wouldn’t have been there anyway; even though Mel had fallen out with him a few years back (for reasons no one could now fully recall) and had only just begun to talk to him again; even though had Maurice been there, he would probably have come in and told them off for making so much noise. They all knew what she meant, and she was right, it was strange.
They shared memories that celebrated Maurice’s shortcomings more than his strengths: tales of shelves that fell down, baths that overflowed, pans that caught fire.
‘He was no handyman, your father,’ said Carole with a rueful shake of the head. ‘But he loved you deeply.’
This made Mel cry again, which set them all off, though Carole’s tears were more for herself than for Maurice. Jess gave Carole’s hand a squeeze.
‘It’s okay for you to miss him.’
To her surprise, Carole was more affected by Maurice’s death than she had expected. She felt, in some obscure way, responsible. After they separated and she had exacted her financial recompense for years of disaffection, Maurice was not well off. He moved to a dingy one bedroom flat on a side street off the main road in an outer suburb, the upper storey of a 1950s semi-detached house. Carole went to all his viewings in an attempt to assuage her guilt, but was appalled when she first saw the faded decor, old-fashioned bathroom suite and dim lighting of the place that became his new home.
‘Oh dear, this one needs quite a lot of freshening up,’ she said, making a silent inventory of the work that would need to be done: replace the kitchen, lay new carpets, put in a proper shower, get rid of the awful chandeliers, take down the hideous wallpaper and put in some decent cupboards.
Maurice bought it for the asking price and left it exactly as it was. He said he had neither the budget nor the stomach for a makeover.
Carole felt thankful that none of the girls blamed her for his fall in the world. Mel and Holly were shocked that he could even think of living in such a dump, but Jess had been more sympathetic. She had taken something of a wayward path in life so it was not surprising she took his side. She lived in a very diverse part of town (which was how Carole described it to her friends, making a virtue out of necessity) and worked in a poorly paid job doing something with the homeless. She used to make the long trek from Brixton to Edgware at least once a fortnight and called her father every two or three days.
‘Your father,’ said Carole as they sat round the kitchen table in their nightclothes, ‘was a very particular man with definite tastes.’
It was kinder than saying he had been pedantic and more than a little boring, a man who fussed over parking places and took a serious interest in the quickest and least congested routes from A to B. Carole wished she had been able to show him more compassion. It couldn’t have been easy living in that dreadful place with not enough storage space and, as he let slip to Jess on one of her visits, a strange, stale smell he couldn’t expunge no matter what he did. Carole reminded herself that she had tried her best. She had provided him with details of bright flats in purpose-built blocks, and although he had dutifully visited a few, he seemed inexorably drawn to the seedy. Worst of all, he seemed genuinely happy in his new home. Perhaps she had driven him to his death. Perhaps she had been the only thing standing between him and a creeping insanity. No one in their right mind could possibly enjoy such squalor.
They had last spoken three days before he died. She had called him for advice on a small tax matter (whatever his faults, he was still a good accountant). After that, they shared news of children and grandchildren. She told him how Holly’s extension was coming along, and he told her that he and Jess had gone out for a pizza on her last visit. She couldn’t even remember if she had said goodbye, although it would be most unlike her to hang up abruptly. Later that night she had a phone call from a distraught Holly to say he had been admitted to hospital, and another at two in the morning to tell her he had died. Holly couldn’t stop wailing.
Well, it was all too late now. The doctors said a major artery in his brain had burst. Probably an abnormality that had been present since birth. Still, sixty three was not old.
Time to move on.
At some point in the afternoon, Marshall and the girls left their low chairs to stretch their legs. Carole greeted well-wishers with hugs and shrill expressions of delight. Holly and a group of her friends sat on the sofa comparing notes on decorators. Jess made her peace with a male cousin who saw himself as something of a protector and who was disappointed in her for leaving the safe enclave of the suburbs. Mel stood with her husband’s arm around her waist, sufficiently fortified by his presence to accept condolences without breaking down. Only Marshall hung back, looking gloomy and hang-dog. Carole hoped it was nothing more than jet lag. She didn’t think she had the strength to cope with his grief too.
She crossed the room and took him by the arm as if he were a frail elderly person or a child, and presented him to people she thought he might remember or who might still remember him after – what was it? – seventeen or eighteen years in New York. It was an entirely superfluous enterprise. Everyone would have seen him up front beside the girls in the cemetery prayer house. The rabbi had mentioned him by name, and as the only surviving male of the family, Marshall said Kaddish, the memorial prayer. But Carole needed to be active and Marshall looked open to being acted on. He meekly allowed her to wheel him before this person and that, graciously gathering expressions of sympathy like so many bouquets. With each introduction he became a little more self-possessed, so that by the time Carole brought him face to face with an elderly second cousin who popped up only at weddings and funerals, he greeted her with a practised warmth that looked for all the world as if he couldn’t wait for this chance to talk with her about his loss.
Carole felt a sense of accomplishment as she surveyed the room. People praised the catering (she had used the pricier of the two local delis), and many said how generous she was to offer her house, especially after ‘all that heartache.’ It was true. She was a generous person, open and sociable, not at all the small-minded, mean-spirited woman Maurice had made her out to be. It was good to know that everyone in the room was, if she could put it like that, in her camp. Except, perhaps, Marshall. And a small, wiry, dark skinned man sitting on his own, whom she couldn’t place. She glided over, remembering stories of needier members of the community who attended funerals of complete strangers for the free food afterwards. If he was such a man, she would be gracious, as befitted a good hostess.
‘I don’t think we’ve met,’ she said, holding out her hand. ‘I’m Carole. Maurice’s ex-wife.’
The little man jumped up and took her hand between both of his. He wore a dark suit and tie, and was balding on top.
‘My name is Kamal,’ he said. ‘Maurice was my good friend.’
Carole couldn’t think of a thing to say. She had never heard Maurice mention a Kamal. His friends were called David or Gary or Alan.
‘How did you know him?’
‘He came to my café every day. We used to play chess.’
‘Chess.’
‘Yes. He told me it was the best part of his day.’
Carole would have backed off, but the man was still holding her hand.
‘After we played chess, we talked. Always we talked. He was my friend.’
‘Your friend.’
Carole heard herself echo the man’s words and felt an unpleasant turning sensation in the pit of her stomach, as if she were in a lift that was going down too fast.
‘My very good friend. I will miss him so much.’
As he held Carole’s hand captive, he talked of a Maurice she did not recognise.
‘He loved to sing! All the old show hits, Oklahoma, Singing in the Rain, Cabaret.’
The first two Carole could just about accept, but she couldn’t imagine him performing anything from the last.
‘And how he enjoyed his food. Always he ordered double helpings of my Baba Ghanoush. “Kamal you make the best Baba Ghanoush in town,” he say to me. “Nice and spicy.” ’
Kamal beamed at the recollected compliment. So much for the indigestion tablets Carole used to carry in her handbag.
‘And what a storyteller. We would have tears of laughter. Yet so kind, so kind, always time to listen to everyone’s problems.’
The nonsensical words continued to tumble out.
At last Carole managed to extricate her hand.
‘Thank you for coming,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’
She needed to get out of the room.
Upstairs, she locked herself in the bathroom. As she sat on the side of the bath, she wondered if the man – Kamal – had made a mistake. It could not be her Maurice. He was a man ruled by routine and detail, not at all the type to while away his time singing songs and playing chess with – she hesitated to use derogatory terms even in the privacy of her own head – with a man like Kamal. Yes, he must be mistaken. Tomorrow she would check if another Maurice had died on the same day.
But Kamal had conjured up a new Maurice she could not dislodge. She saw him standing on tables, belting out songs from his youth. She saw him imitating the sinuous moves of a belly dancer, shirt half undone, chest hair showing. She saw him sitting on his sagging bed, taking off his shoes and socks before falling asleep fully dressed. She saw his flat filled with people like Kamal, outsiders clinging together with the solidarity of otherness. She saw Maurice sitting amongst them, arms round their shoulders, offering shelter, solace, understanding.
The vision shook her. They had buried a man she didn’t know. A happy man who lived his life with courage, tolerance and joy. She had never allowed this man to emerge. If she had, he could have taught her to be less afraid. And if she had been less afraid, she could have loved him.
Someone knocked on the door. She heard Mel’s voice. ‘You all right, Mum?’
‘Give me a minute,’ she called out. ‘Just putting on some lipstick.’
As she stretched her lips, she caught her eye in the mirror. What a lot of silly nonsense. That’s what came of not enough sleep and too much coffee.
She flung open the door. ‘See? I’m fine.’
She hooked her arm through Mel’s, and together they eased themselves down the narrow stairs to rejoin the few remaining visitors. To her relief, Kamal had left.
‘Any bagels left?’ she said to Mel.
‘We made up a plate for you and put it the kitchen.’
She kissed Mel on the forehead and went to fetch her food.
Abigail Seltzer is a Scottish writer and mental health professional based in London. Her short stories have been published in the 2013 Lightship Anthology, Storgy, Gutter, Bandit Fiction, Mechanics’ Institute Review, Visual Verse (as Alex Petrie) and Charlie Fish/Drabbles. Her newsletters are published at abbys.substack.com
Idle Ink 