Excerpt Five: Quill

Quill From Part Two: "Gridiron"

Quill
By Neal Drinnan

It costs me never a stab nor squirm
To tread by chance upon a worm.
"Aha, my little dear," I say,
"Your clan will pay me back one day."
"Thought for a Sunshiny Morning," Dorothy Parker

A clot of regret passed through Rose Elliot's heart as she contemplated the buffet table in the dining room. She wished she hadn't bothered to bring the sausage rolls and sponge cake that remained untouched at its centre. Blaise had said not to go to any trouble; he said he'd organised caterers, so there'd be nothing at all to do. Still, she'd wanted to do something. She hadn't wanted to arrive empty-handed. Even for this.

As it was, people were eating sushi, oysters -- and all sorts of carefully prepared canapés she couldn't have put a name to. She was embarrassed now by her conspicuous plates of home-made fare. Berni loved sponge cakes, she remembered. She used to make two or three a week, and he would have gobbled down a whole one after school if she'd let him. Her head bobbed gently with the memory. Spoiled his tea he would have, always had a sweet tooth, did Berni. There were no dishes to be done either. A dishwasher hummed away busily in the kitchen while two attractive youngsters in crisp white aprons and monogrammed catering uniforms attended to everything else.

Rose clutched her best handbag in her lap and she was still gripping a clump of tissues in her tiny liver-spotted fist. She stuffed the white bundle into the sleeve of her blue cardigan -- the one she usually wore to church -- with mother-of-pearl buttons and a Scotch thistle brooch that permanently adorned it. She couldn't decide whether she was hot or cold, and her frock crackled with static as it shifted against the nylon slip beneath it. People smiled at her as they passed -- like they always do at gentle, white-haired ladies wearing pale-pink lipstick and spectacles. They especially did today, with a practised, difficult smile kept in heart-shaped lockets for drizzly days. Rose's plump feet wriggled out of her good navy shoes, reviving pleasantly with the cool of the air. She never usually wore them for more than a couple of hours on Sundays.

She had been sitting like that since they returned from the chapel, if you could call that place a chapel. All that talk about the spirit's journey and Berni's gift for shining light onto darkness. The celebrant -- a celebrant at a funeral, would you believe -- didn't look like a man of God to her and made scant mention of the Lord. He'd worn an earring, too.

"Whosoever gather in My name, said the Lord. Well, we are all the whosoever, regardless of what others might think," he'd cried from the pulpit. According to the celebrant, it was Elliot's struggle against the church, its dogma and double standards, that brought him so much closer to God. "Some of us see no opposition, no conflict of interest between the differing types of love -- and our expressions of these will not be tempered by religious nor societal convention. If it's love, the Lord won't mind! Life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death. Not Berni. Who amongst us today could say Elliot Bernard ever acted without love?"

He'd certainly thrown down the gauntlet there, she'd thought, but there had not been one murmur of dissent.

"Elliot had the most extraordinary acceptance of his own death. Cheerfully he commanded Blaise, Teresa and myself to bring books to the hospital, in order that he might find the perfect quotes for his own eulogy or to be used in his forthcoming autobiography. I don't think he realised how painful it was for us to "stage his disappearance," as he so gallantly described it. I'll read you one that caught his eye. This quote comes from Haldane's 1927 collection of essays, Possible Worlds. He was a Scottish mathematical biologist, of all things -- not Elliot's usual source of inspiration, I think you'll agree. ‘My suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but even queerer than we can suppose... I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any philosophy.'

"Elliot's mother, Rose, has asked that I read out this little prayer she used to recite to him as a child:

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John
The bed be blest that I lie on.
Four angels to my bed,
Four angels round my head,
One to watch, and one to pray,
And two to bear my soul away."

As Rose took another petite sip from her brandy, she noticed the lacquered playing-card box with its ivory cribbage board inlaid on the top. That had been her mother's. There were a number of things around the flat that had come from home. She supposed that Blaise would get to keep it all now, unless she asked. Apparently there was some law nowadays that said the partners got everything unless you were prepared to make a fuss -- and, typically, Berni had forgotten about the little things in his will.

They say it's the same as marriage, but married people don't leave each other for years like Blaise left Berni. Married people don't run around the world and lead separate lives whenever the fancy takes them. And, if some of those things she'd read in Berni's books were actually true, well, married people certainly don't behave like that. It's all well and good to play at being grown up and responsible when the idea suits, but a shared address and a few flippant endearments do not a marriage make! When you've run a farm with the same husband for forty-five years; when you've had two children by him and cooked a billion meals for your family; when you've done without new clothes for years at a time because the crops were worthless, and used odd balls of wool to knit jumpers -- then you're talking marriage.

Even Rose's own struggles weren't sacred. Berni had helped himself to her marriage for his autobiography. They'd be wanting her to comment on that too, no doubt. There were even hopes of a film. There were always hopes of a film. She'd never been to see the one they made out of Corpus Delicti. It never played back home, but if it was anything like the book, Rose would happily give it a wide berth. Apparently, it had been commended at Cannes. Berni had wanted to go but his health hadn't permitted. Now Blaise was selling another film script to another movie company. It just went on and on. There never seemed an end to anything with Berni. Even his death left years of projects in its wake.