Silent Noon

Strange, seeing my sisters old. At the graveside sobbing silently, holding each other. I’d watched their protective offspring steer them through the maze of marble, young faces sternly wrapped in grief. The grandchildren behaving when they should be running wild. When I think of my sisters they are always running; through the landscapes of their own making, across wide lawns and open fields, away from Mother, away from church on Sundays; the furniture of the Vicarage an assault course, its wide corridors and endless rooms a labyrinth of imagined worlds. Their screams and laughter the static of our sober lives. The Rector is a fossil and his memory poor. He gets things wrong about mother and the young people seem bothered. I just want to get away. The rain is coming down and I need warmth and can’t bear the concerned faces. Today I became Great Aunt Florence – a feeble character in an afternoon radio play, the maker of chutneys and lemon curd, next in line for a hole in the ground. Good. The lounge is rowdy and people seem angry and happy. There is no music, but in a different room a drunk is singing Silent Noon in a fine slurred baritone; the people are cheering him on. I sit next to a serious youth slumped in a corner by the bar; after a while he offers to buy me another Brandy - I remind him of his grandmother. He’s an apprentice joiner and likes the smell of fresh planed pine and linseed warmed by the afternoon sun; he’s designing coffins for the rich while his mentor spends his days looking at pornographic magazines and sleeping in his office. There’s a girl he likes in the next village, but he doesn’t know if she’s keen. He describes all the things he likes about her. After a time we can think of nothing more to say, but the bell has rung anyway and he still stands to say his goodbyes at the door. I dream on the way home. I’m crouched beneath my father’s open window. I can hear him writing, the scraping of his pen on the paper, flicking through books, taking others from shelves. He has a fire lit even though it is late August – the first sign of his illness – somewhere out in the gathering gloom I can hear the girls larking and worry he will hear and that there will be trouble. He blames mother for their wildness and they cower among her pleats confused by the quiet fury of this stranger. Sometimes at breakfast we will forget and start at noises from above, fearing ghosts – listen to bumps, the creaks of floorboards, struck dumb – not putting two and two together, forgetting he’s home. He is catching up with parish business before he leaves again – one last time. His chair creaks. Through the open window I hear the crackle and scratch of a needle on worn vinyl grooves, but no song plays…and now mother is calling.