Today

David Miller

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781848876064
• eBook ISBN: 9780857893901
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

SHORTLISTED FOR THE SPEARS NOVEL OF THE YEAR AWARD August 1924. John Conrad arrives at his parents' home on the outskirts of Canterbury, where family and friends are assembling for the bank holiday weekend. His crippled mother has been discharged from a nursing home, his brother drives down from London with wife and child. But as the guests converge, John's father dies. Today follows the numb implications of sudden death: the surprise, the shock, the deep fissures in a family exposed through grief. But there is also laughter, fraud and theft### the continuation of life, all viewed through the eyes of Lilian Hallowes - John's father's secretary - never quite at the centre of things but always observing, the still point in a turning world. Today is a remarkable debut, an investigation of bereavement, family and Englishness, beautiful in its understatement and profound in its psychological acuity.

Thursday, 7 August

JOHN KORZENIOWSKI ASSUMED he had been the first to wake.

The house surprised him. He lay in his bed, listening for the sounds of others moving around, watching the curtains barely fluttering in the morning breeze. There were things to think about, to plan. He found himself wondering what shape the gravestone would be. It would not be there for the service, but he thought about it, a rocky piece like his father’s thumb. He wondered if his mother was lying in her bed, imagining what might happen that day.

Miss Hallowes had telephoned him the day before, calling from the hotel near where she lived and asking to speak to him, only to him, simply to let him know that she would be there at the church. She had arranged with Hunt’s for a wreath to be sent to the cemetery, but she would be there herself too.

John had asked her what she would wear and she had looked at the telephone, standing in the small booth in the hotel, listening to the sounds of glasses being tidied behind her, her face creased in concern, and raised a hand to her hair. Gazing at the mouthpiece with her grey eyes, she said, ‘I will wear what I always wear’ – and he was aware of the operator’s breathing on the same line – ‘what I wear to all my funerals.’

John unwrapped the sheets from his body and rose, sitting on the bed. He sat and considered blankly the words all my funerals. He had never been to a funeral, I am going to see my father buried, he said to himself, and the phrase would keep echoing in his head, in variations: I am going to bury my father. My father is to be buried. I will be there when my father is buried. All ways of saying, My father is dead, without saying it. He would go to more funerals: his mother’s, perhaps his brother’s. Curle’s. He might get married, and have to attend his own wife’s funeral, or even their children’s if he ever became a father, like his brother. John felt the calm of this first funeral, the beginning of some storm that would not end. He found his glasses.

He looked out at the orchard, the garden, the park. He could see swallows and, out of the blue, a kite swooping down from on high, diving deftly for the kill. The blueness of the sky had that early-morning hazy whiteness which promised a blazing afternoon. No wind, by the looks of it, just the threat of heat.

He heard Scally bark. The evening before, he had been about to take the dog out when his mother had called him as she had done three times a day every day since his father’s coffin had arrived on Tuesday. One time she said to him, shaking, ‘I’m so sorry,’ and again, ‘I’m so sorry, Jackilo.’ John was arrested by the sudden thought that she had failed him.

‘I should have been there,’ she said aloud. ‘What else could I have done? Could I have done something for him? But I did all I could.’

‘You did everything, Mama.’

‘Jackilo,’ she had called from her chair in the hall. ‘Can we?’

John had walked over to the chaise longue where his mother was gazing at the front door, took her hand and then, holding her up, walked with her to the darkened drawing room opposite. There were four steps and it took them several attempts to get there, Jessie squealing in pain, wincing in agony.

That afternoon she said to John dreamily, ‘He didn’t even die in his own bed.’

They had sat and talked about Lady Colvin and when her funeral was to be, and then their conversation moved to others who had died, to her youngest brother, his Uncle Frank, a man John hardly knew and barely recalled.

‘He’s buried there, in South Africa; London, East London, it’s called. I’ll never see his grave.’ Jessie looked at her son and said, ‘You might,’ with an encouraging smile that seemed to John like a push into open waters.

Mother and son now stood in the drawing room, with nothing to say. The silence between them said everything. There was little light. There was the chink of crockery from the kitchen. The opened coffin had quietly appalled John. What lay there was recognizably his father, strangely swaddled in white given that in life he had almost always worn black. Curle had said he looked glorious, resplendent in death.

Now his father’s face was blotched by a browning purple, the beard on his chin almost indecent. He looked like his father yet was not his father and this was what he found hardest to understand with every visit he and his mother made to the corpse. There was nothing there. There was sagging skin and hair, the something that used to be there, but even then – where was the soul? John wanted to prod the flesh and see if there was anything there. Had there been a soul? When he had kissed the forehead of what had once been his father the flesh had been cold and dead. John felt no loss, simply absence, shapeless, soundless nothing. By the last time, all he could do was hold his mother up and look blankly at the wall above the recently sealed coffin. Now, there was nothing even to see.

Jessie’s fingers pressed on John’s forearm. She bowed and made to move towards the door. Once they were out, and the door had been closed, Jessie made her way back to the chaise longue by the fireplace.

John said, ‘Scally wants a walk,’ and he had taken his leave of his mother that way, duty to a dog giving him a space to breathe once more.

*

John wore the clothes he had the day before. He would change after breakfast. He wanted to get downstairs and eat before anyone else, so he could clear his mind and prepare himself for the day somehow. He put on neither socks nor shoes and walked quietly down the corridor, past his father’s room. When he was downstairs he nipped round to the garden door and turned left, to the lavatory.

He was buttoning himself up when he saw Curle, in his pyjamas, in the garden. Curle had heard the water gurgling in the drain and looked over in his direction. He smiled and, through the window, said warmly, ‘Good morning.’

John felt a sudden disappointment that he was not going to be alone as he had hoped, but was also struck by how good it was that Curle was there, doing what he had always done. John opened the door to the garden.

‘Thought there might be something here,’ Curle said. The garden was fresh, lush, basking in the after-dawn. It smelled of green. He looked down the orchard to the yew hedge, closing the door behind him, his palm still on the handle, the grass all of a sudden shockingly there between his toes. In the garden he saw runner beans and their odd flowers beside them, like starfish dried in the sun, only thinner. My father is to be buried this afternoon.

‘Slightly optimistic of me.’ Curle held up a rotting apple and a bird-pecked carrot in one hand.

John chuckled gently. ‘Audrey’s squirrel shit, then?’

‘No, I’ve done better than that,’ and, chucking both apple and courgette over the hedge behind him, Curle bent down and raised a trug with peaches and nectarines, strawberries and apples. ‘Enough for you and me, at least.’

As they stood in the kitchen – Curle washing then drying the fruit, John chopping the skin and flesh – John recalled days in his school holidays, when he was too young and never held the knife, only the towel. Curle had always said that the only way to enjoy fruit was to pick it and eat it while it was still warm from the morning sun. Curle mixed the cut fruits with yoghurt and crushed nuts in a bowl.

John finished making tea. Drying his hands, he spotted three ants making their way to the tap.

‘Not precisely your father’s idea of a breakfast,’ Curle said, his lips pursed. He discovered a serving spoon by the sink and dolloped some of his mixture onto a plate for John, then for himself. ‘Audrey’s up with your mum. No sign of Borys or Joan. I heard the baby in the night, but it’s all a bit – all a bit quiet.’

‘I’ve never done this, Dick,’ said John after two mouthfuls. He could still smell the soap on his hands. ‘What am I meant to do? Am I meant to do anything?’

Curle swallowed. ‘None of us have, John. You are burying your father, I’m there watching a dear friend, a great writer ...’ Curle stopped. He sipped some apple juice. He took a deep breath, his eyes closed, his nose suddenly snapped back like Scally’s, his neck stretched. He said, ‘Be there for your mother, and be there for Borys and ...’

Curle stopped again. He looked at John and raised his glass as though to toast him, watching this lanky young man through burgeoning tears.

John looked at him and knew then that Curle was the next best thing he had to a brother. Both were struggling to be men.

Curle smiled peaceably, glugged down the rest of the juice and then rose and came behind him, resting both his hands on John’s shoulders. ‘Be yourself, John. It’s all you’ve ever done and all you should do. All we can be.’

Scally was hovering by the legs of the table, his tail wagging with almost comic speed, like an overwound miniature metronome. Curle bent to attempt to feed him a slice of pear, but the dog would only lick the taste off his fingers.

Curle continued, ‘That’s all I can say, dear fellow. You’ll know what to do, how to be. And don’t be afraid to cry. I can’t – you can.’

Curle went over to the sink to rinse his plate and wash his hands. He looked at John and did not then pretend to dry his eyes. ‘I’m going to go and buff my shoes in the garden. Come and join me – when you want to.’

John stood still by the kitchen table for a while, and then stood, mindlessly tidying the rest of their breakfast things for Audrey. When he opened the door to the store cupboard to replace the butter, he looked inside, and walked towards the shelves. He touched a jar and looked at the wooden shelf. There, in his father’s hand, he saw a label stating Redcurrant Jelly, ’22 and in that instant John felt his eyes begin to water again, an involuntary thing, and his whole body seemed as though it had been sliced, and shredded, cut down.

*

There were the usual empty pleasantries when their uncles arrived, most of the talk directed by Borys, asking about what roads they had journeyed down, which turnings they had taken, how their cars had performed.

John said to Uncle Albert, ‘How are Belle and Enid?’

‘Very good of you to ask, my boy, very good. They’re very well and send you both love and best wishes at this ... on this ... at this time.’

‘What’s Enid up to?’ John wondered aloud.

‘Typewriting – very promising opportunities at the Post Office for her.’

‘And the bowling?’

Albert George looked mildly surprised but his mouth broke into a gentle smile. He gave John a conspiratorial look. ‘Better than her typing,’ and they laughed.

‘And Brendon?’ said John to his other uncle, Walter.

‘To tell you the truth,’ Walter growled, ‘he looks like an angel and behaves like the devil. Soon as the army want ’im, they can have ’im.’ John recalled a smiling boy of seven or so, with his strawberry blonde hair and a face peppered with freckles, burning bright blue eyes, and perfect baby teeth.

‘He must be eleven—’

‘Twelve,’ said Walter, ‘so not that long to wait.’

Their conversation stuttered into a silence none of them knew how to fill. Neither Albert nor George had seen much of either of Jessie’s children.

‘So,’ began John, ‘shall I tell you the ... well, the order of play?’

Borys had begun his usual twitching.

‘No need,’ said Charles Lyons, joining them. ‘Let me tell you. Cars here at ten thirty or so, and then the police will come, and we’ll set off for the church at ten to eleven or so. Sneller’s cars will be here at the beginning and at the very end, so to speak ... So, all you need to do is be ready for quarter to. Once you’re there, you’ll be directed to your seats by the stewards – Borys, John, you’ll be on the right-hand side of the church, at the front, the first pew. Mr George, and ah – Mr George – you’ll be behind them. With Mr Curle and – well, after that’s settled, we’re in Father Sheppard’s hands.’

Borys farted loudly.

‘Gosh!’ he said. ‘Sorry, everybody,’ and he moved to the other end of the room as Lyons said, ‘All done then. Ask me any questions as and when?’

Walter said, ‘You can answer that one,’ and he and Albert roared.

‘We better go up and see Mum and the girls,’ Albert suggested and Walter nodded.

John went upstairs to get dressed. He did so slowly, not forgetting to place the pen in his left inside pocket. He tied his tie tight against the top shirt button. It felt like battle. He wanted this to be done, over, finished, to be yesterday. But the day had barely begun.

*

John came back down in black, his white shirt stiff with Audrey’s starch. He sat out in the sun, squinting at the yew hedge and shining his brogues like an automaton. He could hear the swish, brush, brush, swish as his hand went to and fro behind the heel, by the side, over the toecap, slowly shining the leather. He spat lightly on the polish and began brushing again. He had begun humming, under his breath, a hymn he had sung at school.

There, suddenly, was Uncle Walter who cheerily observed, ‘You were always so ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Dramatis Personæ
• Contents
• Saturday, 2 August
• Sunday, 3 August
• Thursday, 7 August