“For Annie, one of the effects of losing her father was that she also lost words. They suddenly went missing.” A short story by Graham Swift.
One morning in April, their father, Ted Holroyd, suddenly died and a few days afterward Annie and her older brother, Ian, both still a little dazed, went to see the minister who, as Annie put it, was going to “do” their father’s funeral.
There was surely some better word than “do,” but Annie couldn’t, for the moment, think of it. “Conduct,” Ian suggested in his big-brotherly way, though with a touch of tongue-in-cheek. Would that make him a conductor, then, Annie thought, not a minister? And she imagined this man they were about to meet turning up at the funeral with a baton or with one of those strap-on machines with which bus conductors used to issue tickets. Both ideas strangely pleased her, though she didn’t share them with Ian. Sitting beside him while he drove, she reached out and touched his shoulder, just a light scuffing with her knuckles. Ian almost flinched. For Annie, one of the effects of losing her father was that she also lost words. They suddenly went missing. Even the words that did present themselves could seem odd and unreliable. “Minister,” for example, was an odd word.Their meeting with the minister was itself about words, since the main purpose of it was to tell the minister things about their father so that the minister, in his address at the funeral, could, in turn, say things about him. This, they both felt, was essentially, as Ian had put it, a “scam.” The minister had never known their father, and they now had to prime this man, whom they themselves didn’t know, so that he could speak about their father as if he’d been a bosom pal. So a better word than “minister,” Annie thought, might be “impostor.” Obviously, it wasa better word. This thing, the funeral of their father, would be a pretense. Yet they had to pretend that it wasn’t a pretense. Was there a word for that?to tell him about their father? They were already coping with the greatest of difficulties: their father had died. And this difficulty had confronted them with an equally great difficulty, which they hadn’t exactly discussed with each other: the fact—of which they had never been so sharply aware—that they themselves would die, that they themselves were mortal. That they were, as it were, “next,” and one day their own children might go to a minister, in just this way, with a similar purpose, and find themselves in similar perplexity. In the car, she’d reached out and touched Ian’s shoulder in the lightest way, yet it had caused his own light touch, on the steering wheel—she’d seen it—to tighten. She’d felt the tensed and tingling Ian inside Ian. If it had been the other way round, he would have felt the Annie inside her. She had only gently brushed him with her knuckles, but it had been like touching something invisibly “live.” A conductor. She was forty-nine; Ian was fifty-one. They both had families. She was Annie Stevens. She hadn’t minded, twenty years ago, changing her name. But now, perhaps, it occurred to her, she should think of herself as Annie Holroyd again, and she even felt a slight sense of having committed a twenty-year treachery. Her dead father was the man who’d “given her away.” What a ridiculous expression. She’d clutched his arm and he’d . . . conducted her up the aisle. Ian didn’t have her difficulty, or theoretical treachery. He was Ian Holroyd and always had been. He had other difficulties—and they were word difficulties, too. He had decided to deliver the eulogy. Firstborn and son—so who else? “Eulogy” was another worrying bit of vocabulary. Ian preferred to call it his “few words.” But what to say? Especially as the minister would be saying something, too. Poor Ian. And then she’d suddenly declared that she would read a poem. She didn’t have to do anything. She could just sit in the front row, if she wanted, a mere spectator, with her mother. But she felt that she should be part of this thing, do her bit. And, if both Ian and the minister would be “speaking,” what did that leave?? And might even have thought, She’s not going to read some poem of herDefinitely not. What an idea. Just a poem. People often read poems at funerals. So she’d committed herself.“I’ll think about that.”Ian had perhaps also been thinking, Well, it’s all right for Annie, just reading a poem written by someone else, not having to say anything of her own. Their mother had decided not to come with them to meet the minister. Her decision hadn’t entirely surprised Annie and Ian. Since their father’s death, their mother’s basic stance had been to disclaim any active involvement in the situation, as if this thing weren’t happening to her, or weren’t happening at all, and her position, unhelpful as it was, had to be somehow respected. It was a sort of prerogative. Annie had even begun to think—though she didn’t tell Ian this—that there was something to be said for it. It had its own odd integrity. Almost at the last moment, their mother had said, as if some more interesting opportunity had come up, “No, I don’t think I’ll go with you. I’ll leave it all up to you, chicks.” It was clear that there would be no further debate. This was their mother. Her husband had died, and leaving it up to everyone else was her fallback.But Annie and Ian had looked at each other. When was the last time they’d been called “chicks”? Most of forty years ago. In Kirby Street. One way or the other, before meeting the minister they’d not been disposed to like him. Annie had seen that this was unfair. The poor man would only be doing his job and no one else would be “doing” their father. So she’d said to Ian, “Let’s be nice to him.”liked him, and being nice to him wasn’t so easy. Liking or disliking people was a complicated thing. His name was Shepherd. Well. “Call me Tim,” he said. He had thin sandy hair, hazy blue eyes, and an apparently ineradicable smile. He spoke with a voice that was patient, kindly, and persuasive. What was not to like about him? But she didn’t like him. Hardly had she entered his presence than Annie found herself thinking of Betty Sykes, the mother of her school friend Sally Sykes, and a neighbor of theirs in Kirby Street in the days when she and Ian had been their mother’s “chicks.” Betty Sykes! Betty Sykes could spend a great deal of her time, arms firmly folded before her, in her front doorway, leaning on the frame, eying the street up and down, ready to give lip. Hers was the doorway to No. 33, across the road and along a bit. Betty Sykes didn’t give a cuss what came out of her mouth—and much of it was cusses—or who listened. As a small girl, Annie had often listened, and, against all the evidence, she hadBetty Sykes. She’d even felt, with a child’s strange instinct, that Betty Sykes was a good woman with a warm heart inside her. She possessed some vital spark. Betty Sykes had always had, at any rate, a smile for her, little Annie at No. 12. Then it also came back to Annie, in front of this smiling minister, that her father, Ted Holroyd, now dead, had once said to her mother, Mary Holroyd, after the two of them had been talking, and perhaps not kindly, about Betty Sykes, “Aye, but all the same—’andsome woman.” And had instantly regretted that those words had come out of his mouth. Kirby Street. Betty Sykes! Sally Sykes! How it all came back. Now here she was meeting this impeccably benign minister and she didn’t like him. And she and Ian were here to tell him things about their father. The minister hadn’t seemed too troubled by the absence of their mother. He’d told them, in fact, that, quite often, the widow would not feel “up to it,” and he’d find himself talking, as now, to sons or daughters, or both. His smile seemed undimmable. It was perfectly all right. And he’d meet her anyway “at the occasion,” as he put it. It was strange to hear their mother referred to as “the widow.” The minister had first gone through various practical matters that they would need to know about the funeral. He explained that they would have to put together an Order of Service—the little leaflet that would be handed to everyone to refer to. And to keep, if they wished. There was still time for doing this. With such things, she and Ian needed only to listen and nod. But when it came to the nub of the matter, their father’s life and what was to be said about it, they both found themselves bewildered. They hadn’t done much “homework”; they hadn’t explored it properly between them. Perhaps they’d thought—foolishly—that they might leave it to their mother. Or perhaps they’d thought that it wouldn’t be a problem, it would take care of itself. He was their father, wasn’t he? Did they need to do homework in order to talk about their own father? The idea was even distasteful. Ian, in any case, was concerned that the minister should not use up any “material” that he might need in his eulogy—that there’d be enough “left over” for him to say. But whatThe fact was that, when the moment arrived, they didn’t really know what to tell the minister. They didn’t know what to say about their father, whom they’d known all their lives. They were curiously at a loss. At a loss. Exactly. Or was it simply that the “material” itself was just—well, rather thin? They hadn’t dared say this to each other. Their own father, and his material was thin? He had lived most of his life in the same Yorkshire town. He had spent most of his working life in the same place: Batley’s, as in Batley’s Blankets. He had worked in blankets. What could you say? Then he’d retired. Sixty-five and just in time, since Batley’s had soon retired, too. Or closed down. Then, with unexpected and almost unseemly speed, Ted and Mary Holroyd had flown south, to where their son and their daughter had flown long before, finding jobs, lives, marriages, and children of their own. Suddenly, there they all were, the Holroyds, living in deepest Surrey. And then, quite quickly again, it had seemed, Ted and Mary had gone into “sheltered accommodation.” Quite snazzy sheltered accommodation, as it happened, largely paid for—but did the minister need to know this?—by her and Ian. And Ted Holroyd had taken up golf. Who would have thought it, Ted Holroyd playing golf? But it was what retired people did. And what was in it for the minister? “He played golf.” Not a good subject, anyway. Since, one morning, in his seventy-sixth year, Ted Holroyd had died of a heart attack at the golf course. No, not actually playing golf, let alone at the eighteenth hole, having completed his best round ever, which would have made a perfect story—and Ian would have wanted to keep it for himself—but still in the car park, pulling out his clubs from the boot of his car.So why did her mind keep rushing back to Kirby Street? At one point the minister, who’d jotted a few things down in a notebook and said, “I see . . . I see,” had asked, with his still patient and now coaxing smile, “I wonder if you could give me—well, a sketch of the man himself.” A sketch? What did that mean? Was their father to be turned into a sketch? Annie, who had been slightly coming round to seeing things from the minister’s point of view, now found herself bridling. Even becoming, inside, a bit like Betty Sykes. Folding her arms. I’ll give yer bloody sketch! But the uncomfortable truth was that they struggled to give the minister even a sketch of their own father. Or, to put it another way, what theyAnd poor Ian. What, indeed, was he going to say, if they couldn’t even give the minister enough to be getting on with? But the minister hadn’t seemed too deterred. His default position was undaunted capability. Perhaps he was used to this sort of thing: people coming along to talk to him about their loved ones and then discovering that they had no idea what to say.She didn’t like his familiar “Annie,” or his “might I ask.” And she didn’t like the question, though she knew that Ian would be as interested as the minister in her reply.It was a straight answer, but it sounded shifty. The truth was that she didn’t have a clue which poem. Which poem went with her father.Then the minister paused and for the first time looked a little tentative. His eyes darted between them. “One last thing I should mention. When people say things—or just read them—they sometimes . . . they sometimes break down. They don’t expect to, but they do. If that should happen—if you find yourself in difficulty—just give me a signal, and I’ll take over. You can leave it to me.”“Though I’m sure,” the minister said, his certainty returning, “you’ll both be fine. It will all be fine.”Now the thing itself, the “occasion,” had begun. And, yes, she had chosen a poem. And Ian must have prepared his eulogy, though he hadn’t disclosed what he would say, and she’d felt she shouldn’t press him. His “few words” might be just that. And it had to be hoped that the minister wouldn’t preëmpt any of them. And now the minister was standing at a lectern, about to give his address, his calm and calming smile directed this way and that, to include them all. But he was leaving a careful pause before he spoke, so that they could settle and adjust. A coffin had been placed before them, like a special exhibit, and it was the minister’s task to shed light on this situation. Outside, moments ago, in quite cheerful April sunshine, their mother—who could not deny anymore, try as she might, that this thing was happening and that she had a central part in it—had met the minister for the first time. His consoling and unavoidable arm had been extended toward her. This was the man who was going to “do” her husband. Annie felt that the inadequate yet useful word “do” must be rattling in her mother’s head, too. The minister’s strange white robe had billowed in the breeze. Puddles had gleamed. Car windscreens had shone. There was a vague atmosphere of freshness and merriment, reminiscent of a wedding. Not so far away, a hearse had waited, discreetly yet visibly, with its cargo of something strewn with flowers, for its moment to creep round and pull up. Then it was doing just that, and Annie, beside her mother, both of them wearing little black hats, was suddenly not forty-nine years old and standing at the entrance to—what was the right word, a “chapel,” a “crematorium”?—but nine years old and standing in a simple doorway with not her mother but her father, the man who was in the hearse, under the flowers, in the coffin. It was not the middle of a cemetery in Surrey, which on this April morning looked particularly green and spring-cleaned and even brought to mind the inappropriate words “sheltered accommodation,” but Kirby Street. No. 12 Kirby Street, to be precise. Nearby, though not quite within view, there was open moorland. Not nice moorland, with heather and glinting rocks, just dirty-brown moorland. But it was a nice sunny morning, a Saturday, and she was nine years old, perhaps ten, and was waiting with her father, Ted Holroyd, for another kind of vehicle to pull up. A carpenter’s van. Her mother was somewhere inside the house. She seemed uninterested in the arrival of the van. Ian must have been playing Saturday-morning football. Her father had said, “Don’t you worry, Annie, it will all be fine. Joe will put it right, just you see.” So the carpenter’s name was Joe. And her father seemed to know him. “I want you to know a couple of grapes just rolled under the stove, so you, too, can be burdened with this knowledge.”
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