The Third Shadow

Twenty-two

The following afternoon, Thursday June 12th, was one of those infuriatingly unsettled sorts of days, the kind only a British summer can throw up. The sun was just strong enough to warm a man's face, lulling him for some moments into a vague sense of summer before the next grey-bellied cloud spreads its cooling shadow, has  him reaching for his jacket.  A listless, not-one-thing-nor-the-other sort of day.

Listless, yes... Like the weather, I was feeling a little that way myself. There was the tiredness of course, the countless recent miles beginning to catch up with me. More significant however was the lukewarm evaluation which Ray Tindall, the Durham-based merchant, had given my wine. 'Rather ordinary' was his comment; words as damning as a chef being told his food is a little on the insipid side. He'd taken a few boxes in the end, but not nearly as many as I'd hoped for and at a disappointingly knocked down price. I could only hope what Mr Bartley in Luton had said was true, that a wine producer's profits grow exponentially with the passing of the years. In the meantime, I'd have to do exactly what I'd promised myself I wouldn't do: take out a second loan to see me through until the following year. Not for the first time, I wondered if I hadn't made a huge mistake. An emotional crisis is one thing, bankruptcy quite another. Maybe I should have just seen out the remaining eighteen months of my career, bought myself a little bungalow somewhere, dedicated my retirement years to birdwatching and the cultivation of roses. Wasn't that what normal people did?

A cemetary perhaps isn't the best place for a man to try to regain lost spirits, but that was where I found myself. Beneath my feet lay twin  cremation plaques, small squares of deep burgandy stone surrounded by white gravel. My mother's was the older of the two by just over a year, and hence ever so slightly more weatherbeaten. She was taken away by cancer whilst still in her sixties. As for my father, a long history of angina took the official blame; really though, we all knew that it was a broken heart which did for him in the end.

As I knelt to change the flowers, I realised that the lilies I was removing were still quite fresh. I wondered who'd put them there. Not my brother Frank, certainly - he'd said the previous evening that he hadn't been out that way for several months.

As I placed the new flowers as neatly as I could into the grills, I felt a tear sting at my eye. Maybe it was because I was feeling sorry for myself. Maybe it was the reflective silence of the cemetary, the stress and torment and sheer upheaval of the last two years suddenly crashing down on me.

I brushed the tear away, tried to get a grip: my father wouldn't have approved of such emotional nonsense. I remembered going there with him just before he died. It would have been my mother's birthday, a drizzly midweek day in April. I'd taken a couple of hours off to accompany him. Don't be so bloody daft lad, he'd chided as I'd voiced a few thoughts out loud. There's nuthin' in there but an overpriced urn full of ash. And while he was right - while it's healthier perhaps to accept the truth rather than delude oneself - I wished we could have shed a few tears together all the same. Sang her 'Happy Birthday'.

Ever the pragmatist, ever the scrimper and saver, he'd bought the side-by-side plots a full decade and a half before they were needed; the local undertaker had offered a special discount for pre-bookers still in their fifties. Rather than parsimonious, I instead liked to think that his motives had been purely romantic, that he'd simply wanted to guarantee his eternal resting place next to my mother before possible overcrowding could become an issue. Though I'd never made any concrete provisions myself, I'd always imagined that when the time came Heather and I would have a similar arrangement, that as in life we'd face death squarely in the face. Side by side, shoulder to shoulder.

Though I'm not a religious man, there was something infinitely sad about the thought that she'd now take her final repose next to him. Gordon Foster.