The Epitaph

There we were, hunched round the kitchen table. The four of us sat in the same room again. I can’t remember the last time we did and I wondered if this was the last time we would have any reason to. It felt odd to be back in the house, let alone all of us together. You’d never have known we’d grown up together judging by the suspicious glances we threw at each other. Jane, no doubt, in some form of assessment; were we fatter, showing signs of age or badly dressed. Richard, quiet, inscrutable. Alan, assuming the role of family statesman in his absence, was clearly resented by the rest of us. Alan is the oldest by ten years, he stayed nearby, visited daily, became him, unlike the rest of us. We had all moved on, moved away, grown and nurtured our own identities. He grew and nurtured roses and root vegetables. The only person I knew who could say he grew and ate turnips and not be joking. He had an air of tedium about him that I tried bitterly to have tolerance for. The long and onerous way he took to say anything, with a slight lisp and stammer and it would always be about something like the scandal of Mr Edwards winning this years ‘Spring Blooms’ contest. I was not interested, I never was, I wanted to say. I never did. And me, oh, I don’t know, jaded, frowning, I suppose.

Hail, golf ball big, apocalyptic, lashed the house making the windows death rattle. It was windy too. I wouldn’t go so far to say howling, that would be exaggerating, but almost and it felt like the opening scene of a horror film. The letter only added to my sense of the horrific. I was caught between playing out the rest of the scene where we all listened, frozen with fear, as small tapping noises rose up from the cellar, a picture flying from the wall and trying to concentrate on Alan. Alan liked to preside. He was presiding over an envelope. I knew before it even began that who opened the envelope was going to create the first round of bickering.
“Let’s get this done then, I’ll open it shall I?” Alan announced as he picked the envelope up off the table.
The question was rhetorical, but Jane and Richard decided to argue. I knew it. What was the point? It didn’t matter. I helpfully suggested that maybe we could each take a tear until it was open like pass the parcel. Dramatically, Jane snatched it from Alan and ripped it open.
“If you’ve torn the letter I won’t forgive you and you’ve torn right through where it says ‘Last Will and Testament’ on the envelope, I don’t believe it!” Alan shouted.
His hands shook and small beads of sweat teased themselves out from his now flushed face. He took it from her.
“Please, no resuming of debate over who reads the letter, this is ridiculous,” I said as all eyes turned to me.
“Yes, you’re always above this sort of thing aren’t you?” Jane muttered spitefully. “As it happens, yes, and I’m glad of it. Jane, you ripped it open, Alan, you’ve taken the letter out, let Richard read it, I couldn’t give a shit,” I replied.

So Richard began reading. In the unlit kitchen, cold as ever, seats hard, the lack of ornament, we listened to the contents. I wanted to say that this was too macabre for me, too macabre even for him. Who writes ‘Last Will and Testament’ on an envelope these days and makes people sit around reading it?

Richard cleared his throat, "This is my last will and testament." We know, we know, I thought. That's why we're all here enduring and forebearing.
Richard went on, stumbling a little over the spidery handwriting, "I leave the house to Alan as you all have your own homes far away from here and he'll look after the garden and keep this place as it's always been for the rest of you to visit whenever you'd like to." This seemed like a pointed comment to me, we rarely visited.
"I leave each of you the sum of one thousand pounds. I lived a simple life. I couldn't save much, but managed to save a little to give to all of you." Richard's eyes narrowed and his voice faltered. I think he was trying not to cry. I just saw it as another pointed remark that he had led a simple life where we all had not. Alan being the exception, of course.
"My main request is that you all stay here together and write an epitaph to be put on my headstone. The headstone is down at Albert and Cooks in the village. Alan will arrange it. It is my final wish that you all do this for me." And there it ended.

Richard looked at me and held the letter out for me to take it. I didn't. Jane made a grab for it and read it hastily, head moving with the lines, eyes wide. She didn't say a word though, she didn't have to, her face was etched with enough irritation to dispense with words.

After all the negotiation and posturing the letter was short. Also typical of him, he never had much to say. I wasn't surprised about the house, that seemed fair enough. It was the last few lines that shocked. I let out an involuntary groan into the silence.
“Show some bloody respect will you? This is what he wanted and we’ll do it,” Alan reprimanded.
“I’ve got to be back in New York by Monday,“ Jane said, “And why do we have to stay here? I have a hotel room at The Lion,” .
“Let’s just do what he wants, he’s dead for Christ’s sake, Let’s just do it!” Richard piped up suddenly. Richard was a barrister now in London, all he did was work as far as I could make out. He always looked exhausted to me, how I felt on the inside.
“What on earth are we going to say? ‘He didn’t say a lot, every day up on his plot, Growing carrots and roses, was fond of afternoon dozes’? It’s absurd,” I regretted saying this as soon as the words were out of my mouth, but it seemed like a deliberate punishment to me to witness us all quarrelling again making an awful job of what he’d asked. I wondered if this was what he had intended.
“Maybe if we each write a line and put them together,” Richard said, trying to help.
“At least one thing we’d like to say then and we’ll try and fit them together afterwards, it’s not a bad idea,” Alan said, looking round hopefully for opinions from the rest of us. We returned to speechless, we’d have to do it and that was that.

Alan made tea, I switched the lights and heating on. We all sat looking at each other, less suspicious now, more anxious. We talked about the funeral and the service and the people we hadn’t seen for years, though Alan had seen them every day. The house seemed to warm up, we curled up in armchairs like we used to and tried to exchange all our grown up adventures and information. How we’d all changed, how we hadn’t spoken to each other properly for years. Were we really all that far removed from one another now? It shouldn’t be this much of an effort. I remember when Alan used to pick us all up one by one and swing us round, we exhausted him with it. I remember the theatres Jane and I made from cardboard boxes and how we charged everyone two pence to watch our show. I remember playing sharks and dinghies with Richard. He always got to be the shark and I was always the screaming banshee in the dinghy. We shouldn’t be so far removed from each other as we seem to be now.

Jane and I made up beds, shook out sheets. She smiled when we were done and we lay on the single beds recalling the adolescent events of this room when we shared it. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen her smile. I teased her about her Bros LP and my vain attempts to drown it out with Bob Dylan. Or the time she had drunk a bottle of Malibu and was sick on the floor and I cleaned it up for her before she got caught. How she kept quiet about me smoking out the window. I told her I was going to spend an hour alone, if she didn’t mind, coming up with my one liner for the epitaph. And this was our evening I think, each of us in our own spaces, hair tugging and grimacing, thinking of something half way decent to say. Occasionally we ran into one another and shared a moment, offered to make the others tea or toast. A little how it used to be, in fact. Jane cried before we slept and I stroked her face until she drifted off just like I used to. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen her cry. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen Jane, the real Jane I mean, the Jane I shared a bedroom with for sixteen years.

Richard and I met on our way to the bathroom. I told him I was glad to see him. We compared the lines we had fumbled together and joked about how bad the rowing might get about coming up with the finished epitaph. Alan would try and rein us in, we said. Not such a bad thing, we said.

In the morning we gathered again at the table over Alan’s bacon and eggs. The day had brought a little sunshine. The wind had dropped. We discussed our lines. Lines that did indeed include roses and potting sheds; it was important to convey his attachment to his allotment. Lines that summed up his quiet, cautious approach to life, but also ones that showed his love for life – whether it was carrots or bringing us together again to remember all this. We laughed as we cut and pasted our lines together. We got as much from the lines and ideas that we discarded as the ones we kept. We sat musing across empty plates over what our own epitaphs might be.
"Yours, Jane, will be about your love of shoes," I waited for a reaction, but she just smiled and said yes, she did love shoes too much.
"What will mine be?" Richard asked, "Obeyed the law, upheld the law, lived the law, breathed the law!" he answered for himself.
"He fought the law, but the law won!" Jane sang.
We all giggled.
"Mine will be 'Spinster, intolerant'," I said trying to look amused when really this idea had darkened my thoughts now.
"Mine will be the same as his, that's what you're all thinking I suppose," Alan chipped in.
"That wouldn't be such a bad thing though, would it?" Richard asked as he put his hand on Alan's shoulder. No, we all agreed that it wouldn't be such a bad thing at all and I wished I could thank him for the reminder.

Up at dawn
In his shed
Afternoons
Back to bed
Loving roses
Loving Bloom
This brood composes
This brood he raised
Of all his toil
Amongst the pots
The earth and soil
Of loving plots.