always stick to Clarence. You can't tell me much about men I don't know.'
'It don't mean anything. You can read how it was.
They just happened to mention it. Nobody took any notice of that.'
She said sadly: 'Nobody's taken any notice of anything. You can read it here. He hadn't got any folks to make a fuss. 'The Coroner asked if any relations of the deceased were present, and the police witness stated that they could trace no relations other than a second cousin in Middlesbrough.' It sounds kind of lonely,' she said. 'Nobody there to ask questions.'
'I know what loneliness is, Ida,' the sombre man said. 'I've been alone a month now.'
She took no notice of him: she was back at Brighton on Whit Monday; thinking how while she waited there, he must have been dying, walking along the front to Hove, dying, and the cheap drama and pathos of the thought weakened her heart towards him. She was of the people, she cried in cinemas at David Copperfield, when she was drunk all the old ballads her mother had known came easily to her lips, her homely heart was touched by the word 'tragedy.'
'The second cousin in Middlesbrough he was represented by counsel,' she said. 'What does that mean?'
'I suppose if this Kolley Kibber hasn't left a will, he gets any money there is. He wouldn't want any talk of suicide because of the life assurance.'
'He didn't ask any questions.'
'There wasn't any need. No one made out he'd killed himself.'
'Perhaps he did all the same,' Ida said. 'There was something queer about him. I'd like to 'ave asked some questions.' *
'What about? It's plain enough.'
A man in plus fours and a striped tie came to the bar. 'Hullo, Ida,' he called.
'Hullo, Harry,' she said sadly, staring at the paper.
'Have a drink.'
'Fve got a drink, thank you.'
'Swallow it down and have another.'
'No, I don't want any more, thank you,' she said.
'If Yd been there 77 'What'd have been the good?' the sombre man said.
'I could've asked questions.'
'Questions, questions,' he said irritably. 'You keep on saying questions. What about, beats me.'
'Why he said he wasn't Fred.'
'He wasn't Fred. He was Charles.'
'It's not natural.' The more she thought about it the more she wished she had been there: it was like a pain in the heart, the thought that no one at the inquest was interested, the second cousin stayed in Middlesbrough, his counsel asked no questions, and Fred's own paper gave him only half a column. On the front page was another photograph: the new Kolley Kibber; he was going to be at Bournemouth tomorrow. They might have waited, she thought, a week. It would have shown respect.
'I'd like to have asked them why he left me like that, to go scampering down the front in that sun.'
'He had his job to do. He had to leave those cards.'
'Why did he tell me he'd wait?'
'Ah,' the sombre man said, 'you'd have to ask him that,' and at the words it was almost as if he was trying to answer her, answer her in his own kind of hieroglyphics, in the obscure pain, speaking in her nerves as a ghost would have to speak. Ida believed in ghosts.
'There's a lot he'd say if he could,' she said. She took up the paper again and read slowly. 'He did his job to the end,' she said tenderly; she liked men who did their jobs: there was a kind of vitality about it.
He'd dropped his cards all the way down the front; they'd come back to the office: from under a boat, from a litter basket, a child's pail. He had only a few left when 'Mr. Alfred Jefferson, described as a chief clerk, of Clapham,' found him. 'If he did kill himself,' she said (she was the only counsel to represent the dead), 'he did his job first.'
'But he didn't kill himself,' Clarence said. 'You've only got to read. They cut him up and they say he died natural.'
'That's queer,' Ida said. 'He went and left one in a restaurant. I knew he was hungry. He kept on wanting to eat, but whatever made him slip away like that all by himself and leave me waiting? It sounds crazy.'
'I suppose he changed his mind about you, Ida.'
'I don't like it,' Ida said. 'It sounds strange to me.
I wish I'd been there. I'd have asked 'em a few questions.'
'What about you and me going across to the flickers, Ida?'
'I'm not in the mood,' Ida said. 'It's not every day you lose a friend. And you oughtn't to be in the mood, either, with your wife just dead.'
'She's been gone a month now,' Clarence said; 'you can't expect anyone to go on mourning for ever.'
'A month's not so long,' Ida said sadly, brooding over the paper. A day, she thought, that's all he's been gone, and I dare say there's not another soul but me thinking about him: just someone he picked up for a drink and a cuddle, and again the easy pathos touched her friendly and popular heart. She wouldn't have given it all another thought if there had been other relations besides the second cousin in Middlesbrough, if he hadn't been so alone as well as dead. But there was something fishy to her nose, though there was nothing she could put her finger on except that 'Fred' and everyone would say the same: 'He wasn't Fred.
You've only to read. Charles Hale.'
'You oughtn't to fuss about that, Ida. It's none of your business.'
'I know,' she said, 'it's none of mine.' But it's none of anybody's, her heart repeated to her--that was the trouble: no one but her to ask questions. She knew a woman once who'd seen her husband, after he was dead, standing by the wireless set trying to twiddle the knob: she twiddled the way he wanted and he disappeared and immediately she heard an announcer say on Midland Regional: 'Gale warning in the Channel.' She had been thinking of taking one of the Sunday day trips to Calais, that was the point. It just showed: you couldn't laugh at the idea of ghosts. And if Fred, she thought, wanted to tell someone something, it wouldn't be to his second cousin in Middlesbrough that he'd go; why shouldn't he come to me?
He had left her waiting there; she had waited nearly half an hour: perhaps he wanted to tell her why. 'He was a gentleman,' she said aloud, and with bolder resolution she cocked her hat and smoothed her hair and rose from the wine barrel. 'I've got to be going,' she said. 'So long, Clarence.'
'Where to? I've never known you in such a hurry, Ida,' he complained bitterly.
Ida put her finger on the paper. 'Someone ought to be there' she said, 'even if second cousins aren't.'
'He won't care who's putting him in the ground.'
'You never know,' Ida said, remembering the ghost by the radio set. 'It shows respect. Besides I like a funeral.'
But he wasn't exactly being put in the ground in the bright new flowery suburb where he had lodged.
There were no unhygienic buryings in that place.
Two stately brick towers, like those of a Scandinavian town hall, cloisters with little plaques along the walls like war memorials, a bare cold secular chapel which could be adapted quietly and conveniently to any creed: no cemetery, wax flowers, impoverished jampots of wilting wild flowers. Ida was late. Hesitating a moment outside the door for fear the place might be full of Fred's friends, she thought someone had turned on the National Programme. She knew that cultured inexpressive heartless voice, but when she opened the door, a man, not a machine, stood up in a black cassock, saying: 'Heaven.' There was nobody there but someone like a landlady, a servant who had parked her pram outside, two men impatiently whispering.
'Our belief in heaven,' the clergyman went on, 'is not qualified by our disbelief in the old mediaeval hell.
We believe,' he said, glancing swiftly along the smooth polished slipway towards the New Art doors through which the coffin would be launched into the flames, 'we believe that this our brother is already at one with the One.' He stamped his words, like little pats of butter, with his personal mark. 'He has attained unity. We do not know what that One is with whom (or with which) he is now at one. We do not retain the old mediaeval beliefs in glassy seas and golden crowns. Truth is beauty and there is more beauty for us, a truth-loving generation, in the certainty that our brother is at this moment reabsorbed in the universal spirit.' He touched a little buzzer, the New Art doors
