Travels with my aunt / Путешествие с тетушкой. Книга для чтения на английском языке

My aunt led me back to the sitting-room, where Wordsworth had laid out three more Venetian glasses with gold rims and a water jug with colours mingled like marble. The bottle of Black Label[17] looked normal and out of place, rather like the only man in a dinner-jacket at a fancy-dress party[18], a comparison which came at once to my mind because I have found myself several times in that uncomfortable situation, since I have a rooted objection to dressing up.

Wordsworth said, “The telephone talk all the bloody time while you not here. Ar tell them you don gone to a very smart funeral.”

“It’s so convenient when one can tell the truth,” my aunt said. “Was there no message?”

“Oh, poor old Wordsworth not understand one bloody word. Ar say to them you no talk English. They go away double quick[19].”

My aunt poured out larger portions of whisky than I am accustomed to.

“A little more water please, Aunt Augusta.”

“I can say now to both of you how relieved I am that everything went without a hitch. I once attended a very important funeral – the wife of a famous man of letters[20] who had not been the most faithful of husbands. It was soon after the first great war had ended. I was living in Brighton, and I was very interested at that time in the Fabians[21]. I had learnt about them from your father when I was a girl. I arrived early as a spectator and I was leaning over the Communion rail – if you can call it that in a crematorium chapel – trying to make out the names on the wreaths. I was the first there, all alone with the flowers and the coffin. Wordsworth must forgive me for telling this story at such length – he has heard it before. Let me refresh your glass.”

“No, no, Aunt Augusta. I have more than enough.”

“Well, I suppose I was fumbling about a little too much and I must have accidentally touched a button. The coffin began to slide away, the doors opened, I could feel the hot air of the oven and hear the flap of the flames, the coffin went in and the doors closed, and at that very moment in walked the whole grand party, Mr. and Mrs. Bernard Shaw, Mr. H.G. Wells, Miss E. Nesbit (to use her maiden name), Doctor Havelock Ellis, Mr. Ramsay MacDonald[22], and the widower, while the clergyman (nondenominational of course) came through a door on the other side of the rail. Somebody began to play a humanist hymn by Edward Carpenter, ‘Cosmos, O Cosmos, Cosmos shall we call Thee?’ But there was no coffin.”

“Whatever did you do, Aunt Augusta?”

“I buried my face in my handkerchief and simulated grief, but you know I don’t think anyone (except, I suppose, the clergyman and he kept dumb about it) noticed that the coffin wasn’t there. The widower certainly didn’t, but then he hadn’t noticed his wife for some years. Doctor Havelock Ellis made a very moving address (or so it seemed to me then: I hadn’t finally plumped for Catholicism, though I was on the brink) about the dignity of a funeral service conducted without illusions or rhetoric. He could truthfully have said without a corpse too. Everybody was quite satisfied. You can understand why I was very careful this morning not to fumble.”

I looked at my aunt surreptitiously over the whisky. I didn’t know what to say. “How sad” seemed inappropriate. I wondered whether the funeral had ever really taken place, though in the months that followed I was to realize that my aunt’s stories were always basically true – only minor details might sometimes be added to compose a picture. Wordsworth found the right words for me. He said, “We must allays go careful careful at a funeral.” He added, “In Mendeland – ma first wife she was Mende – they go open deceased person’s back an they go take out the spleen. If spleen be too big, then deceased person was a witch an everyone mock the whole family and left the funeral double quick. That happen to ma wife’s pa. He dead of malaria, but these ignorant people they don know malaria make the spleen big. So ma wife and her ma they go right away from Mendeland and come to Freetown. They don wan to be mocked by the neighbours.”

“There must be a great many witches in Mendeland,” my aunt said.

“Ya’as, sure thing there are. Plenty too many.”

I said, “I really think I must be going now, Aunt Augusta. I can’t keep my mind off the mowing-machine. It will be quite rusted in this rain.”

“Will you miss your mother, Henry?”

“Oh yes… yes,” I said. I hadn’t really thought about it, so occupied had I been with all the arrangements for the funeral, the interviews with her solicitor, with her bank manager, with an estate agent arranging for the sale of her little house in North London. It is difficult too for a single man to know how to dispose of all the female trappings. Furniture can be auctioned, but what can one do with all the unfashionable underclothes of an old lady, the half-empty pots of old-fashioned cream? I asked my aunt.