4 BRAVE FACES

I pace the guest room while waiting my turn in the bathroom, with two subjects occupying my mind. Our son was gone, I had had just three days to get used to that fact. How did I feel? Quite neutral, actually, as we had never really bonded through his childhood, as he won scholarships and was away at private schools much of the time. When he was home he always had his nose into the earliest computers and games consoles, writing new programs and designing platforms that eventually launched his successful business career. No, while I loved and admired him, we avoided ever being physically close, not like the multilayered bonds he had with first his mother and then the love of his life, the beautiful Adrienne. 

Pauline’s declaration a few short hours ago, that she was instructing her lawyer to produce the forms that would lead us to being divorced after 46 years of marriage, was a shock that I simply hadn’t expected, and I felt more grief over the loss of our relationship than I had any real reason to. We had lived apart for a long time, and those little resentments, like her unwillingness to follow me to Sandburg, which had noticeably damaged my diocesan life, had fuelled my dislike of her stubborn refusal to support my career over the years; the divorce would almost certainly affect any slim chance of an archbishopric in the time remaining to me, and I discovered that the regret pained me more than the guilt associated with my ambition in clerical orders.

I look at the king size bed looming large in the room, regarding it as mere furniture and no longer an instrument through which tonight the reality of our marriage could have been reaffirmed and sustained until our next future meeting. 

No, after tonight our exchanges will be through our respective lawyers, our conversations no longer candid, our worlds apart, with no more birthdays or anniversaries to celebrate together, until Adrienne’s twins forged new ones for us to attend, not together but as separate individuals. There would never again be a togetherness between us, once this final ritual, the farewell to the son bearing my name, was consigned to the consuming earth from which all life springs.

Pauline shimmers in the candlelight on the landing above the staircase, encased as she was in a bottle-green evening dress covered in sequins that seem to come alive as she moves. In the candlelight, her appearance is so much more romantic than the stark light that the garish incandescent lamps of modern life usually imposes upon us. John had received all his beauty, in quite masculine form, from Pauline's genes, he fortunately suffered little noticeable likeness at all by way of mine. 

Pauline, even in the first third of her seventh decade, has a timeless quality about her looks. She had kept her firm, trim shape, while I was softened by too many banquets, too much time preparing speeches and sitting through too many interminable meetings and synods. I determine that, now I am soon to be single again and no longer had to play the role of a father, that I would embark on a regimen that would restore my body to health and vigour. I owe that much to John, God rest his beautiful soul, that I become a loving and doting grandfather to his offspring. I have no doubt that they would be beautiful, so loving them, while tempered by my natural reserve, it would never be a role taken on with any reluctance on my part.

I hold out the crook of my arm by way of invitation to the woman who was once my lady, who once held my heart in thrall until she decided to throw me away with so little apparent regret. My arm is offered alongside a wan smile, all I am able to raise with so much weight depressing my heart and soul. 

Pauline returns mine with her smile, which plays on her lips, where I look for an answer to my question. I don't trust myself to consider if her smile has reached those sad eyes. I know mine are sad, not so much that things between us had changed, I have accepted that, but that the changes to my life were so sprung on me that I am still struggling to cope with the enormity of it all. So far I feel unable to sift through the bustle of the last few hours and balance the pain of separation from both wife and son with the joy of unseen new life to come. Pauline tucks one of her slim, elegant arms, with barely a hint of bat wing about them, into mine, and we step gracefully down that glorious staircase to the first floor. 

I had traveled here as a bishop and had intended to be a bishop at the funeral, but tonight I am dressed in a formal black dinner jacket, with a bright purple cummerbund and a slim white dog collar instead of a bow tie above an extravagantly frilly shirt, to appear formal but in party mode, even if the party mood eludes us in our grief. We appeared to be an elegant couple, beauty and the beast maybe, but we are each doing our level best to keep up appearances in the circumstances of the additional ordeal laid before us.

We both know our way to the ballroom in this huge, rambling house, but even if we hadn’t, the sound of music would have led us to it straight away. A pair of smart liveried servants open the double doors for us and together we sweep into the room, one that would comfortably accommodate a couple of hundred dancers, but is littered with only about a dozen pairs dancing like planets in the huge expanse of space, with just a few tables and chairs for resting between dances at one end close to where the band were playing.

The dancers turn towards us as one and the band stops playing, almost as if a switch had been turned off. The dancers descend upon us with greetings and words of condolence that wash over us like a tidal wave. 

Of course we’re acquainted with them all, if in various degrees of familiarity, but we were all part of the larger Eldrake family. Adrienne, stays to one side regarding the scene, allowing all her family to have their part in the greetings, but all the guests move away as Adrienne’s parents take centre stage and embrace us one by one and take us off arm in arm to a small doorway at the side of the ballroom, followed by our daughter-in-law some half a dozen paces behind us. As Adrienne closes the door behind us, I hear the band restart where they left off and, presumably, the energetic dancing continues behind the door and without us.