EPIPHANY
Mannie Welsh died on Sunday. He was as old as the century but there was nothing wrong with him. He didn't expect to die. I spoke to him in the morning and he said he'd sent me a letter. The funeral was this morning and when I flew back from Johannesburg, the letter was waiting.
It's dangerous for the old not to use fastmail..
He would have been ninety five this year. He'd never been to hospital and he shouldn't have died. But he did. I treasured the stamps from the envelopes and discovered the countries behind the pictures.
Thanks to Uncle Mannie, the Complete Chambers Encyclopoedia belonging to my best friend Jason, the library, but mostly to Uncle Mannie, a ten year old boy in Durban became the world authority on :
Faith healers in Russia
The circumcision rites of the Yoruba,
Heliodorus,
The matriarchal tradition in Kerala,
Sheepshearing in the Dargle,
The underground churches of Ethiopia,
And the Eurpean Bureau for Lesser Used Languages.
"I bought a packet of snailbait. It is working well. Yesterday there were 7 shongololos and three fat worms, six striped caterpillars and some slugs. The day before, I think because it was so hot, it was less successful, only 4 shongololos, 1 worm but 8 caterpillars, and no slugs. I'm hoping that if there is some rain tonight the slugs will come out and I can get a bucket full. Over the weekend it rained so much that it washed the snailbait away so I had to go across and get another packet. My mint which was doing so well with big leaves died all of a sudden. Something had been chewing off the roots."
The letters started when I was seven.
"The coast doesn't agree with my asthma so unless you come up to Johannesburg we'll never get to know each other."
The last time I saw him was five months ago. I'd stopped at the house to leave a present. He was sitting in the garden. He had a towel on his head, he was wrapped in a blanket, only his feet stuck out into the sun, a swaddled figure stained in orange light from the umbrella. "Ankles are the Achilles' Heel. Have you noticed how the old always seem to be wearing white socks. White with blue veins. If I'm going to make my century I'll do it on Vitamin D."
"E," I corrected him.
"Whatever. What's in a name?"
By then Aunt Lilian had been dead two years.
For a long while they had lived half in love, half in hate, one week they would be talking, the next it would be war.
Aunt Lilian only had two things to talk about, hats and perfume. Later she added dogs. There were other things, but not many that mattered.
Life was a gentle boat sailing gentle waters. They liked it but without enthusiasm.
Until she discovered he'd been having an affair with her sister for eight years. And then they liked lifet less and less.
"The war never stops," he wrote. "You think it has. Everybody has been wearing sprigs of olive for a month. You've done so many dances keeping out of trouble that you are giddy, and then suddenly it's back to the trenches."
But they stuck it out.
And then one day Lilian had a fall and snapped a hip. They operated and pinned it with steel and gave her a stick but from then on it was a quick canter down the hill. Negotiating the passage between the kitchen and the lounge after breakfast one Saturday she tripped on a khelim and split her skull.
At the post mortem the doctor discovered that she wasn't wearing underwear. Apparently she never did. In death she had gained a mystery and a glamour denied her in life.
I looked again at the photograph of the two of them taken on some anniversary, which one I cannot now recall. The old lady florals lying placidly over her lumps and across the hollows between were as bland as before, but now they were robbed of their innocence. An ordinary couple standing on an ordinary verandah, a winter afternoon I deduced from the bare Jacarandas on the left, he with arms folded, she holding a handbag in front while cool fingers of wind crept under her skirt and kept stroking her naked thighs.
"She knew all about retrospective guilt did your Aunt Lilian. In latter times I did the cooking. One couldn't have a cripple lurching around the kitchen. She'd eat her food and say how much she'd enjoyed it and then out of the blue she said, 'now this time you've got the beans right.' Suddenly history was changed. And she'd do it with other things. Little things. You'd get punished retrospectively for all the times you did things wrong. She could have said something at the time, but that was too simple. People like her need a weapon. And they need to build up ammunition. And they choose a moment when you are off guard. And it is all so innocent. They never stop smiling. And why should they? You've just been paid a compliment on your food. Not a word of criticism. You say nothing but you make a note that that is the last time you ever give them beans."
My uncle wasn't a bad man, and he wasn't a good man, he lacked the imagination to be either, but once I'd heard about the romance with Aunt Sophia I looked at him differently.
"Sometimes I miss Lilian, sometimes I forget she ever lived."
The affair with Sophia ran out of steam when Aunt Lilian died. It had flourished in secret and when the danger fell away so did the glue which kept it together.
But they met once a month on a Sunday morning to visit the grave.
It was always the same circuit beginning at the gate in the far corner and ambling through some favourite headstones before arriving at Lilian. They would examine the scroll rearing up like a charmed snake, raised letters in the sandstone, the life of Sophia's father condensed to dates of birth and death with not an incident in between. And they would sit down on the marble surround of the pink veined column the height of a person shackled in chains, and Mannie would rearrange for the last time the posy of flowers he'd gathered the night before in the park behind the house.
Lilian's grave was still a body-shaped hump of earth invaded by weeds and grasses a lank Michaelmas daisy and some Wandering Jew.
"What would you think of my getting a slab with both our names and they could lift it and pop me in when I'm ready?"
"Yours and mine?" Sophia teased.
For a moment a look she'd almost forgotten moved over his face.
"Sounds cozy. But what about George?"
"George who?"
"Your husband George."
"That one. Oh no, I don't think he'd be too keen."
"And he'd give Lilian a terrible fright," Mannie said, "if he got there first." He paused. "And somehow it wouldn’t feel right. George sleeping with someone else's wife."
"I know she's my sister, but if I got there first I'm sure there'd be a certain froideur."
"Your right. I've never been in favour of mixed holidays."
"But doing it now is a good idea."
"That's what I'd like," Mannie said, pointing to an angel on dancer's feet poised on a globe emerging from travertine swirls liked piped cream on a cake. "But who would make it?"
Their duty done, a neat handful of weeds wilting in the path and the ranunculus in the vase, they wandered on.
They would do a detour to see great uncle Archibald Welsh's Gothic stone with letters appliquéd in cut copper.
"How awful to be dead," she had once said to Mannie.
"Awful? Not at all. It must be wonderful to be in heaven."
"I never thought you a genius, Mannie, but I'd not realized how lacking in enquiry you were."
Two other Welshes had alabaster cubes, giant nursery bricks, angled from the base holding urns shrouded in carved velvet cloths from an Edwardian parlour.
"There's quite a crowd in here, Jane, Hannah, William, Harry, Clement, Polly, George, Helen, Horace, Mary and James. Imagine the fights."
When they had finished, Sophia would amble north down the road to her house, the very house where "the events," as aunt Lilian had chosen to call them, had taken place. And he'd wander slowly in the other direction taking a new route each time.
And it was Sundays that he always wrote to me, setting aside an hour before lunch.
"I ate late on Friday as I had to wait for the electrician. He is coming again tomorrow. The plumber came as well to fix the sink upstairs. In the cricket there were still 19 overs to be bowled when they stopped the commentary. We had at that stage three of their wickets for 72 runs, our innings closed at 316 all out. I'll have to wait till news time to find out the rest. The plumber has just gone. One of their chaps, one of their best batsmen, scored only 8 runs an hour. Tomorrow is a rest day. Tuesday morning they continue and in the afternoon there is rugby."
Sophia cried a lot at the funeral. I tried not to cry but the thud on the wood as we dropped bits of soil and flowers onto the coffin made me realize for the first time that this was the end.
Earlier we had gone into the back room, just the two of us, and peered at him through the little glass window before a man with wet eyes slithered in on tip-toe and screwed down the lid. Disembodied music from invisible openings in the paneling swirled around our feet, our bodies and above our heads and up to the melamine rafters.
They'd done a good job on his face and maybe on the rest of his body though it was only the face, the collar of his blue and white shirt, a fraction of tie and suit that was visible.
Mrs Gerber who had seen the accident said that he must have been looking the other way as he had stepped off the pavement. He didn't stand a chance.
"Always such a meticulous man. Perhaps something distracted him?"
"By the time you read this I'll be side by side with your aunt. Whether she'll talk to me is another matter. But it matters less than my friendship with you. I want you to understand that what I'm going to do is something I have to do. They'll have said 'poor old man' a hundred times by now, 'it must have been quick, I'm sure he felt nothing,' and all the other things which people say to comfort themselves but I want you to know that I left when I thought it was time. This week working in the garden cleaning out the fly trap, heaping the little bodies into piles, there I was, God in my universe, making big decisions over hundreds of lives. I had an epiphany. I realized that if I got to the millennium which I could with ease, there would be nothing left to live for. So I've decided to leave now before I become bored, while life still has something to offer.
"It will be our secret. I want you to promise to say nothing to anyone. There is, after all, no point.
"P.S I've left everything in a bit of a mess to avoid any suspicion.
"P.P.S I'm not sending this by fastmail in case it should arrive at an awkward moment. I would hate to cast a shadow over the funeral."
