Somerville

Cambridge, England, January 1996 The cortege moved slowly out of the city, past the glances of the curious, and then picked up speed a little as it reached open countryside. The hearse itself was a magnificent old Daimler, probably thirty or so years old but kept in perfect condition. Stately in polished black, its powerful engine took the considerable weight of it silently and effortlessly forward. The next vehicle - also the property of the funeral directors - maintained a steady thirty yards distance behind the hearse. In it were Dr. Rowe, Master of the College, Dr. Poynton, the Bursar, and the College Chaplain, Dr. Asher. They were alone, the sole official representatives of the College. The third car was a private one, containing two men who were said to be from some unspecified government office, one of whom, Frampton, I had met previously. There were no relatives, not because they had chosen to absent themselves, but because there simply were none. The College had made the arrangements, and with a peculiarly Victorian sense of morality had decided that, in the circumstances, it would be better not to have the service in the College chapel but to find some other, more obscure place. Like a leper, I thought, he was to be buried outside the city walls. I was driving the fourth car accompanied by my grandfather, impeccably dressed in dark grey pinstripe and polka-dot bow tie. I was a Cambridge don, he was not, but in dress and bearing he was infinitely more suited to the role than I. More about my grandfather later, but for the moment it suffices to say that it was typical that he would have chosen to attend the funeral. He had met Reggie once at the college. He had taken to him immediately and, on hearing of his death and knowing from me that he had no relatives, he had asked if he might come. He had come up on the train from London. I had met him at Cambridge station and now here we were trundling through Cambridgeshire. It would not have been immediately obvious that we were a part of this dismal procession at all, for I hung well back. It was not that I wished to disassociate myself from the cortege, but I was not sure that my Toyota jeep was a suitable vehicle for this sort of thing. I certainly hadn't bought it with funerals in mind. The church was small and had little to recommend it architecturally. A head-on clash between the foibles of its principal donor and the then fashionable gothic revival had failed to produce an outright winner. It was cold inside and if heated at all it had been done so with such economy as to make no apparent difference. It smelled of dust disturbed, dust sporadically beaten from hassock and carpet to rise and shimmer in occasional sunlight and then to sink and settle in some alternate place. There were about thirty people present including some other members of the teaching faculty. It would be nice to think that they were there out of respect, or even out of a sense of duty, but it was probably just morbid curiosity. If the scale of a funeral can be seen as a posthumous measure of man's success in life, then Reggie Crawford had, quite obviously, been a dismal failure. I wondered what he would have thought of it all. Reggie the cynic would not have been too surprised. "At least in death they have to acknowledge your presence if only to get rid of it." The hesitant agnostic in him would have been amused. "If there is some omnipotent Being up there with a master-plan, his obvious mistake was in delegating the implementation of it to committees which immediately fucked it up." I remembered fragments of conversations we had had over the past two and a half years. There was another side to Crawford that perhaps not too many people had seen. In rare moments he could be extraordinarily passionate, not usually about people, but about ideas, rights and wrongs, and about history. He was deeply sensitive to many issues, but as a very private man he seldom allowed it to show. As that sensitive man, he would have wept openly at his own funeral; not at the fact of his death, but at the sheer, pathetic nonsense of what passed as ceremony. The service did not last long. The eulogy - delivered in that curious high-pitched monotone which clerics favoured as sincere, was cliche-ridden and hollow. It was an insult to Crawford's intelligence and it should not have been, for the Chaplain was himself a distinguished scholar (as a Classicist rather than Theologian) and even an audience of thirty or so deserved a better performance. He even mentioned 'passed to a better world.' Had he got that far, Reggie would have turned in his grave. "When I die," he had once said, "I hope they have the decency to simply announce that I am dead and not that I have embarked on some improbable journey to the other side or to some better place. Quite apart from the presumption of it all, surely one point about being dead is to get a little peace, not to be shunted about in the sidings of some mythical paradise." It was soon over. There was no audible sigh of relief, but the physical signs were there, that almost imperceptible relaxing of the shoulders, a glance at the vaulting, the nose discreetly blown. The coffin was lifted carefully from its stand and carried down the aisle with measured tread by four men from the office of the funeral director. We stood and turned into the aisle to follow it. It was at that moment that I first saw the girl. She had evidently entered the church after most of us and had sat towards the back. With us but not of us. I certainly didn't want to stare, but what I did see was enough for me to know that I felt an immediate attraction. I saw a dark, possibly black, suit, an off-white, almost ivory coloured blouse and auburn hair pulled to the back of the head in a chignon but still having that weighty look of both length and thickness. I think she must have sensed that I was looking at her, for she turned towards me. Our eyes met briefly. There was nothing except a knowing that I had been looking at her. Then she turned away and we had passed by. The burial spot was marked by the customary mound of newly-dug earth and self-consciously we gathered around it, collars turned up against the cold. I waited for the girl in black to join the group but she did not appear, not then anyway. A few more words, incantations of eternity carried off by the wind, and it was over. The Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter of life had somehow been quickly compressed into Death, Inquiry, Inquest and Burial. Reggie Crawford had been dumped, hurried underground like some contaminated material. It started to rain, not heavily but as a moist grey mist. It was the signal to disperse. Dr. Poynton shook hands with the funeral director and then he, with the Bursar and Chaplain, walked to their car and were driven away. The others gradually followed suit, there was really no reason to linger. What had to be done had been done, if not thoughtfully at least efficiently. The girl had still not appeared. It occurred to me that perhaps she was nothing at all to do with Reggie's funeral, but had stumbled into it accidentally whilst visiting the church for some reason best known to herself. Perhaps she was still inside. I moved closer to the grave and looked at it for a while, then walked away. I told my grandfather that I would like to remain for a short while and he simply nodded and said that he would wait in the car. It was quite irrational but I didn't like to leave, not immediately anyway. This was about Reggie, not the girl. I walked around the cemetery for a while, reading headstones, vetting the company in which Reggie now found himself. Then I realised that it really was over and walked to my car. I thought about going into the church again just on the chance that she might still be there, but there were no more cars left in the parking spaces and so I presumed that she must have left. The rain had decided to get more serious. I start