She didn’t know why she’d come down this way at all, this wasn’t the way to Auntie’s grave.
That was because she’d come in by the eastern entrance instead of the western. She’d never done that before. For once, she’d bought flowers at a shop, not at the gates. Suddenly it seemed very important to her to “give” Auntie the flowers. Auntie had asked for them and specifically for roses. Was the grave up along this aisle or that? The cemetery was so big with so many paths, some of them winding, so many tombs that looked the same. Some of the trees were evergreens that might more suitably have been called everblacks, their leaves were always dark and dull. Others had limp green leaves hanging down. Only the grass and the tiny flowers in it, yellow and white, were bright and varying from season to season.
It was still broad daylight and would be for hours, even if that light was half obscured by cloud. She should be heading for the crematorium and the western gate but didn’t know how. She walked down one aisle and up another, turned right and then left again. She’d know the grave when she saw it, by the name on it of course, but first by the angel, covering his eyes with one of his hands and in the other holding the broken violin. The trouble was that the cemetery was full of stone angels, every other tomb seemed to have an angel on it, some holding scrolls, some stringed instruments, though these were mostly harps, some on which the angel wept with bowed head. Minty began to feel like weeping herself. She knew she ought to go out of the gate she’d come in by and re-enter by the other, but that would mean passing the man who sold flowers. He might think she’d stolen hers when he wasn’t looking or even taken them from someone else’s grave, a not uncommon proceeding, she’d heard.
An angel holding something loomed ahead of her at the point where the aisle met a path at right angles. This must be it, this was where, kneeling on the earth, she had looked up and seen Jock’s ghost approaching. Even before she had reached it she saw that the angel was the same, with the same covered eyes and holding the same broken violin. But when she pushed aside ivy tendrils and read what was engraved on the stone she saw that it was different. This wasn’t Maisie Julia Chepstow, beloved wife of John Chepstow, but
Perhaps it would do. And if Auntie’s ashes weren’t here that might not be so important. Something different on this woman’s grave was the stone vase that was part of the molding round the base of the platform the angel stood on. It was dry, and green moss crept close up to its lips. As she had done before, Minty found flowers on a nearby grave, flowers that were withering, threw them into the bushes, and used the water they had been standing in to fill the mossy bowl. She arranged the roses, breaking off their stems to shorten them, and in doing so tore her hands on their thorns. The blood-letting relieved her in a strange way she hadn’t experienced before, though the dirt that must be on the rose stems was distressing. There should be a water tap somewhere in here, there probably was, but she didn’t know where.
She stood up and turned round, walking on, away from the gasometer. That must be the right direction for the western gate. Yet it wasn’t. She began to be frightened. Suppose she could never find the way out, but must wander on for hours, searching for years maybe, forever among the overgrown graves with cats walking over them and making live people shiver. This was surely a place of ghosts, with the myriad dead lying everywhere beneath the ground, but hers weren’t here. There was only dimness and a kind of heavy peace, and in the distance the hum of traffic on Harrow Road. No other people, alive or phantom, no birds singing. She came suddenly into an open place with the huge colonnaded temple that was the crematorium before her. It was always frightening but from this angle more so with its high blank wall and the gathering gray clouds behind it, the wilderness of the neglected place coming close up to its footings. Minty imagined its great door swinging open, its stained-glass window shattering, and ghosts coming blindly out, their hands upraised and their robes streaming. She began to run.
Notices directing you were everywhere but they never seemed to point to what she wanted, never to Auntie’s grave. She read the one ahead, she didn’t know why, as she pounded along, afraid to look back in case she was pursued. It said: Exit. The relief was enormous. She knew where she was now, approaching the western gate that was opposite her own street and where the flower seller was. By the time she reached it she was walking quietly, managing a smile and nod for the flower man. And there was no one and nothing behind her.
It was rare for Minty to feel happy. Fear drives away happiness as much as sorrow does and she was mostly afraid. She lived in a climate of unnamable fears, terrors that could only be kept within bounds by strict routines. Something else had allayed them, had once or twice entirely banished them, and that had been what she’d never known in her first thirty-seven years, the feeling she’d had for Jock. When she’d told him, after he’d made love to her, that she would never be like this with another man, for she was his forever, she was expressing for perhaps the first time in her life her true and honest feelings, unaffected by cleanliness or tidiness or eating prejudices. And what he gave her back, or she thought he did, had given her a strange, unfamiliar sensation she didn’t know how to name. Happiness. She felt it now, returned in some small measure, as she left the cemetery and walked toward Syringa Road.
With Jock it had been relatively long-lived. If he hadn’t died, she sometimes thought dimly, not knowing quite what she meant or wanted, if he’d stayed alive and with her, those feelings she’d had and he’d inspired might have changed her into a different woman. This present scrap of happiness was doomed to be short, she knew it while it was with her, succeeding raw terror, for fear was returning as she approached her front door. She was afraid of what awaited her inside and she even thought of knocking on the Wilsons’ door, spending half an hour with them, having a cup of tea, a chat, maybe telling them about her experience looking for Auntie’s grave, of which, now it was over, she could see the funny side. What, a woman who’d lived a stone’s throw from the cemetery all her life, unable to find her own auntie’s grave! If she went into Sonovia’s house she’d only have to come out again and enter her own. She couldn’t stay in next door all night.
She put the key in the lock and turned it. Although it wouldn’t be dark for hours, she switched the hall light on. Nothing. Emptiness. She went upstairs, fearing to meet Auntie on the way, but there was no one, nothing. Very faintly, through the dividing wall, she could hear music, the kind of music very young people like. That wouldn’t be Mr. Kroot’s radio, it must be Gertrude Pierce’s. A strange woman she was, playing teenagers’ music. Minty ran a bath, using the kind of gel that makes foam, washed her hair in it, scrubbed the blood off her hands with a nailbrush. The punctures the thorns had made were a hundred tiny wounds. The music was turned off and silence followed. Minty dried herself, dressed in her usual clean T-shirt, clean trousers, socks. She never wore sandals, even in hot weather, because the streets were dirty. Things could burrow their way into your feet and give you a disease called bill-heart-something, she’d read about it in Laf’s newspaper. That was in Africa but she couldn’t see why it wouldn’t happen here.
She wasn’t hungry. Those sandwiches had been very filling. Maybe later she’d have a scrambled egg on toast. You never knew where the egg came from but it must be out of a chicken and, anyway, she’d cook it very thoroughly in a clean saucepan. Out of the kitchen window she could see washing sagging on the line in Mr. Kroot’s garden. It looked bone dry, had probably been there since before Gertrude Pierce came into Immacue. Minty went outside. It hadn’t been hot all day, there was too much cloud for that, but it had been gently warm and still was. She studied next door’s washing. So much sagging had taken place, one of the poles that supported the line leaning over at an angle of forty-five degrees, that the edges of the sheets and towels were on the ground, actually touching the dry, dusty grass. Minty was shocked but there was nothing she was prepared to do about it.
Sonovia’s voice called to her over the other fence, “Minty! Long time no see.”
In fact, it wasn’t very long. No more than two or three days. Knowing it would please, Minty told her, with many glances over her shoulder, about Gertrude Pierce coming into the shop, not realizing she worked there. Sonovia laughed, especially at the bit about her being amazed Minty knew her name. Some twenty years ago Mr. Kroot was reputed to have made a racist remark, though where and to whom he’d made it no one seemed to know,
