From the perspective of the drafty sandstone opulence of Newbourne College, down in the "right" end of town, it would have to be admitted that the Chapel of Our Lady of Ransom's had "upstart red brick" written all over it. It was airy and light, and had simple lines that were conducive to modest meditations. It was a place where one could breathe. Father Barnes loved spending time here and had gathered around himself a small flock of girls, like flotsam from a spiritual wreck surfing a tide of spiritual hypocrisy, who helped him prepare for services and clear up afterwards.
So Harry was gone. Gone over that finest and sharpest of life's edges into oblivion, or eternal rest, depending on one's point of view. It would not have done for the school to be involved in the funeral itself, Eva thought, watching the flame of her prayer candle dance in an invisible breeze in its stand. She was aware of intermingling currents of sadness, gratitude, and an affirmation of her own survival, as well as a feeling that she needed to make war on someone.
Funerals had uncomfortable associations with the disposal of bodies. In the world of corporate education, even religious corporate education, teachers are not supposed to die in the saddle. They are supposed to make a predictable series of good career moves and then retire in multi-pensioned, demortgaged superannuation, to die quietly in discorporated discretion. Death comes as an affront to the corporate world, like a harsh spotlight mercilessly trained on a plywood set that the cast has been working so hard to pretend is real. The ritual of the memorial service allowed the school to pay sanitized tribute to a person who had embarrassed it with his mortality. At least Harry had had the decency to die during a half term holiday, so that the funeral was over by the time everyone came back to school. The memorial service was a convenient device whereby people who had been incorporated into the corporate culture could be excised from it through the exclusion of their bodies. This meant not only that Harry could be praised and disposed of at the same time, but happily also, in the absence of a body, that the reality of death itself could be denied.
Needless to say, the more culpable the workplace had been in the death of an employee, the more sickening the eulogy could be expected to be. Eva was already inwardly bracing herself for it. Fittingly, the eulogy on this occasion was to be given by Drummond Maclean, Ransom's Director of Studies, whose own principal contribution to the shortening of Harry's life had been his demand for award-winning musical output on the one hand, in whose glory he was always the first to bask, while doing his damnedest to throttle the rehearsal time required to achieve it on the other. There was, of course, no inconsistency in this. It is the function of management to uphold standards at human expense. And as the management of Ransom's were so fond of pointing out: "No one is indispensable." "It is a pity though," Harry himself had often pointed out, "that they never seem to apply this wisdom to themselves."
As her colleagues made their way into the pews in front of her, Eva sat it all out, as it were, for Harry, trying to watch them all through his eyes and recall the phrases he would have used to describe them. He would undoubtedly have reserved his undiluted vitriol for the managerial cannibals who now duly stooped their shoulders, clasped their hands together, pursed their lips and knitted their eyebrows in corporate, crocodile mourning, somehow managing, despite the paper thinness of their empathy, to tiptoe their way reverentially forward to the front pews, where they would be seen to be making the appropriate display of ostensibly restrained, but in reality entirely nonexistent grief. Predictably, at the meeting of the Senior Management Team the evening before, Harry's death had been described as "awkward."
"The only place Maclean and Styles have ever felt any pain is in their bank balances and their career ladders," Harry had always liked to say.
"Harry's body may have been displaced, but his spirit continues to snap at their heels a little," thought Eva, smiling to herself, causing Barbara Styles to twist her carefully arranged furrowed brow as she walked past. "That must have hurt!" chuckled Eva to herself, with a stab of grief that Harry was not there to see it.
There was a hymn, sung with decorous indifference, through which Eva floated by trying not to think how Harry would have conducted it in morning assembly. En masse, the corporate behinds of Ransom's seated themselves on the reproduction pews of the chapel. Eva's mind wandered to a recollected picture of Harry making himself a cup of coffee and a slice of toast in the staffroom, laughing and telling her his latest joke, a trace of wayward Marmite streaking his chin. He would never tell another.
"He will always be with us!" boomed the Morningside voice of Drummond Maclean, causing Eva, who had judiciously prepared a handkerchief for this purpose should it prove necessary, to cry out loud and muffle her laughter by burying her face in it. It was all she could do to keep her balance and not slide off the pew on to her hassock. She even found it necessary to pinch herself in the thigh in order to regain control of her renegade emotions. A few heads from the SMT pantheon in the front row turned to see who was responsible for this unseemly display and Eva was treated to several peremptory gazes of glacial contempt before the sound of Maclean's voice drew their attention back to the front.
"It is not fashionable in these egalitarian times," Maclean went on, pronouncing the word "egalitarian" as if it were a source of lethal contagion, "to extol the virtues of duty and discipline." Eva clenched her lips between her teeth and closed her eyes tight as a delinquent image was conjured in her mind of Harry, dressed in black leather, disciplining a troop of naked and eager Ransom girls with a whip. Finding herself shaking again despite her best efforts, she resorted once again to the surreptitious thigh pinch and the cliché of her handkerchief. Resurfacing from behind the pew many seconds later, red-faced from suppressed emotion, she found Father Barnes looking straight at her, wearing a multilayered expression of complex sensitivities, ranging from tender, enquiring sympathy to humorous, conspiratorial delinquency. The unfeigned humanity of his gaze unlocked her tears, which now fell in hot, salty drops and with a thick veil of silence that drowned out Maclean's words for several minutes. It was unbearable to her that Harry should be so completely there with her and so utterly absent. She bowed her head and waited for the wave to pass.
Another hymn, also ideologically purged of hims, followed, the body of Ransom's standing up as one and singing in unenthusiastic unison, making Eva feel like a toy bobbing up and down in a pool of tears. When they had all reseated themselves in a sympathetic creaking of pews, there followed a moment of silence, before Father Barnes made his way quietly to the lectern. His glance met hers for a brief second, as if to say, "this is for you."
"The reading from the New Testament," he went on, lowering his gaze, "is taken from the Gospel according to St Luke, Chapter 9, verse 60:
"Leave the dead to bury their dead; you must go and announce the kingdom of God." There was an intake of surprised breath on the front row, and Eva, although feeling drained from her tears, raised her red, sore eyes.
After the service, she waited, glad of a moment of quiet, for everyone else to file out and for the mutterings and hand shakings to be over, before slowly getting up and walking towards Father Barnes in the doorway. He took her hand to shake it. "Thank you," she said simply.
"Thank you," he replied.
"I don't know what came over me," she said, wafting her handkerchief in the general direction of her swollen face in a gesture of superfluous explanation.
"I think you've been Ransomed," he said.
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