A Very Old Novel.

I was going to write you long and winding stories about my long and winding drive all the way to the south and back again but, quite oddly and unexpectedly, this morning I came upon an old file I had quite forgotten about and I decided to write about that instead. It’s a novel I wrote perhaps twenty years ago. It got roundly rejected by the publishers - they were probably right - and funnily enough I found one of the rejection letters when I was clearing out The Cupboard of Doom before my trip. (I have to clear out the cupboards of doom before I go anywhere in case I am run over by a lorry or found dead in a ditch and my poor sister has to come in and sort out all my stuff. It wouldn’t be fair to ask her to deal with muddle on top of the sadness.)

Anyway, I looked at it and I confess I rather liked it. I like that opening with the little aeroplane. I suspect I had been watching Out of Africa for the eleventy-hundredth time and probably reading The English Patient. It’s got echoes of those.

I thought I’d give it to you because Substack is supposed to be a literary place and I never write any fiction here.

Happy Saturday, my dear Dear Reader. I will tell you the tales of my drive soon, because there were such things to see and I thought many thoughts. (You may imagine!)

PS. I really did know a man who was run over by a bus. That bit comes straight from life. I was thinking of him only yesterday. A clever, mournful, disappointed man, who was my grandmother’s best friend in the world until one day he wasn’t. They had some stupid falling out and then he was killed by a red London bus and that was that. I loved him very much.

CHAPTER ONE

A small propeller aeroplane, climbing high in an azure sky, casting its shadow on parched yellow earth; air, sky, wind, the shudder of engines pushing into wide, unbroken blue. Then –

Funerals, like happy families, are all the same. Or something like that, Rita thought; it was something like that. She had been to enough funerals. The church was dim and low and smelt of must and old stone; churches didn’t get used much now and the scent of age and emptiness lay in them like a shroud.

Rita knew this because she went into churches often; she didn’t go to church, but she loved the buildings themselves, the city churches of Wren and Hawksmoor. She walked around the early town streets in the still hour before the slumbering metropolitan giant stirred itself and filled the day with fume and noise; she liked the flat hour where there were only trucks making anonymous deliveries and street cleaners spreading the aroma of bleach and water; she walked then, to Lincoln fields in the north, Fleet Street to the east, and sometimes to the lost narrow streets behind the British Museum. On her way home, when the morning crowds were swelling and the peace was broken, she sometimes stopped into a church, and wondered what it was that made people believe in things; but she didn’t wonder that much, because in those dark empty spaces she had a moment where her mind could rest and grow slack and she could feel sheltered and safe. So she knew what churches smelt like.

‘I’ve never been to a funeral before,’ said Constance.

They were sitting still and upright in the front pew. They were early and there was only a slight man in a dark suit checking on unknowable religious things (the placing of the sacraments or alter cloths or whatever it was that had to be in the right ceremonial place). There were two coffins at the head of the aisle, as if in some trapped parody of a wedding service, till death us do part.

‘I thought they were supposed to bring the coffins in later,’ said Constance. ‘Aren’t there supposed to be pall bearers?’

‘We thought it was too complicated, with there being two,’ said Rita. ‘There would be a traffic jam and it wouldn’t be seemly.’

‘I’ve never been to a funeral before,’ said Constance again.

‘You should get out more,’ said Rita.

‘Isn’t that strange?’ said Constance. ‘I’m forty-three years old and I don’t know any dead people.’

Rita knew dead people; she had been to funerals. Aids, cancer, suicide; one man who walked up a mountain and fell off the other side for no reason anyone could understand; an asthma attack in a far eastern jungle; an allergic reaction to peanuts (so stupid and banal, that one, she always thought, so pointless and without sense); one elderly gentleman even who got run over by a bus. Rita laughed when she heard that, told gently to her over the telephone; she laughed because everyone used that expression and she never thought it actually happened in real life, just as you never, ever, saw a single human being slip over on a banana skin. But he was crossing a road in Camden Town and a roaring red Routemaster came fast round the corner, and that was another funeral, for her to go to.

‘All funerals are the same,’ she said; she thought perhaps she believed that was true. The cast changed, and the location, and the tone of the thing – some were sombre and traditional, some unexpected and eccentric, some were wakes and some were parties, but the feeling was always the same: a tightness in the throat, a sense of hollowness in the gut, a constriction somewhere; a ghosting childhood memory of Sunday best, a falling sureness of mortality, a regret.

‘Perhaps it’s different,’ said Constance, ‘when it’s your own parents, at the same time.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Rita. ‘It feels familiar.’

‘Not to me,’ said Constance. ‘This isn’t in the book. I don’t know how to act or how to be. I feel as if I have the wrong clothes on and someone is going to send me home to change.’

‘You look fine,’ said Rita. ‘You always look fine.’