OPENER / ANDREW TUCK
To have and to hold
I have been pretty good at keeping quiet on this front for weeks now – I didn’t want to push my luck with you too far. But let me share one final update. Earlier this year I wrote about the death of my partner’s aunt, Meg. She had no children and so we took care of her at the very end and, ever since, have been sorting through the long legal process needed to settle up the estate. Probate has now been granted, which means that the sale of her house can go through, hopefully any day now. And this week, in another important step, the ashes were interred in the plot where her husband is buried.
The service was simple, nicely emotional, and with just a handful of people standing around a very tiny hole in the ground as the vicar did his “ashes to ashes” business. Indeed, the hole was so small that I wondered whether the passersby peeping into the churchyard thought that we had somehow persuaded the vicar to come in all his regalia for the interment of a much-loved pet. “Mrs Floppy-ears, I now deliver you into the hands of the almighty Bugs Bunny.” Anyway, it was all over in 15 minutes.
One good thing is that Meg always enjoyed having fun company (and a nice glass of wine) and as well as having Charles with her in the graveyard, the next two plots are her mother’s and that of a favourite cousin. Indeed, this corner of the graveyard now feels less like a final resting place and more like the placement for a dinner party that will go on and on. Perhaps instead of bringing flowers to leave by the gravestone, it would have been more fitting for us to leave a bottle of malbec and a tray of vol-au-vents.
Anyway, I must say that interring is a far less troublesome venture than scattering ashes. When my dad’s remains were dispersed on a damp autumn day in a copse of silver birch trees, a gust of ill-timed wind (of the meteorological variety) suddenly carried the ashes in the direction of where I was standing. At the end of the service I looked at my brogues – and there he was, resting not in heaven but on my Aldens. It would have been unseemly to wipe him off with the handkerchief in my pocket so I just walked back to the car through the longest grass and the mossiest spots that I could scout, hoping that he would get the hint. Strange, he had never been clingy in real life.
There is another link between my late parents and Meg and, I fear, many old people: glue. This is not a metaphor about how people used to stick together; I mean glue. It has taken weeks to decide where all of Meg’s things should go and, as it’s a little easier for me, I have mostly been the one to decide what heads to the tip, what we give to charity, what’s kept and what’s sold.
Like many people of her generation, Meg had a lot of ornaments, some centuries old, some recent trinkets. But again and again as you pick up, say, a jug or some cherubic figurine, you notice that a handle or a pudgy foot is held in situ by the ooze of age-browned glue. You inspect a dainty porcelain lady gaily swishing her ballgown and spy that she is missing her fingers – or in some instances a whole arm. I am not sure what grand ball these ladies were once supposed to be rocking up to but they now seem to be attendees at the annual Factory Accidents Fundraiser. Sadly, the next appointment in their dance cards will be the municipal dump.
After my mother’s departure, I unwisely suggested to my sisters that I would get rid of boxes of similar knick-knackery on Ebay. For weeks I would find myself heading to the Post Office before work to send off another pottery dove or gluggle jug to a buyer with equally questionable taste. But I soon learnt to inspect the items very carefully pre-dispatch after a gentleman in Lancashire wrote a very angry message to point out that La Lladró shepherd was not quite right in the head. It seemed that in some distant dusting accident, my mother had decapitated him and then stuck his noddle back on with glue. What’s more, she had gone a bit freestyle and had him looking at an angle that was likely to leave him with terrible neck pain in later life. A fuller inspection of her collection of figurines revealed a bunch of people more patched up than First World War servicemen.
But this week, on the morning before the interment, we did the toughest drop at the charity shop. Into a mountain of boxes we packed the contents of her wardrobes. It reminded me of how cool she was into her nineties. Everything in this world was pristine: shoes from Ferragamo, blouses from Diane von Furstenberg and Moschino, and dresses by Jean Muir. Somehow their departure from the house suddenly made it seem very empty. And when we returned after the service, the smell of her perfume had vanished.
