Going Home by Lucy Deedes
The quiet of the house was broken by the sound of a stuttering vehicle, far down the hill. Dulcie stood by the window and saw first a puff of dust, then a positive sandstorm; the laboured gear-grinding of a car under pressure continued until a long estate car shot into sight, scattering the sheep on the road and sending them galloping away, their bells jangling. It swerved into the driveway and reversed triumphantly up to the front door.
Two men got out, straightening their jackets and pulling off their caps to greet us. Thomas spoke to them, beckoned them into the cool darkness of the hallway and pointed upstairs. One of the men opened the boot of the car and behind Thomas, matching their pace to his slow tread, they tramped up the shallow stone staircase. At the tight turn of the stairwell the group stopped and there was an animated consultation involving swooping hand gestures. Dulcie wondered whether she should follow them up but decided instead to bring a tray of coffee and cups into the hall and wait until she could do something useful.
After a few minutes, one of the men descended and went outside to the car, returning with what looked like a canvas tent under his arm, wrapped around long poles. He carried it upstairs and Dulcie sat awkwardly on a hard hall chair, considering the gilt-framed portraits which lined the walls and thinking how well they looked on these rough white walls, better, perhaps, than they had on the regency wallpaper of home.
Then heavy footsteps crossed the landing above, and the maid and her husband joined Dulcie in the hall and stood behind her, their hands folded. The first man appeared, walking backwards down the stairs and holding the front end of the canvas stretcher. He, as the leader, attempted to hold his end higher, as the second man stooped over to hold his end lower, keeping Patience’s body, entirely wrapped in her precious Indian shawl, at something approaching the horizontal. It might have been a silent and respectful procession but there was as much discussion and cautionary cries as though they were manhandling a piano.
At length, level ground was reached and Maria stepped swiftly forward, whilst Thomas was still above us at the kink in the stairs, and slid Patience’s body along the stretcher, where gravity had allowed it to slip towards Man A. She then flipped the shawl straight and drew it up to cover the patrician nose, the frizzled sheep’s-wool hair.
‘Wait!’ Thomas said, reaching at the bottom stair. The men stopped.
‘I carried her in, and I will carry her out.’ He took his place at the side of the stretcher and between them they shuffled down the steps and slid Patience into the back of the ancient Volvo.
The men bowed to us and the car departed at a stately pace, its dignity only mildly impaired by the missing letters on the legend stencilled on its side: ‘Se vicios Fúneb es’.
Like the way the overall awkwardness of the proceedings is condensed in Dulcie’s moment on the hard chair in the hall, remembering home. A sense of being uncomfortably caught between two cultures.
From Simon: This feels like a scene from a longer narrative, full of intriguing clues and questions. In the first paragraph, the sand, and the sheep with bells round their necks tell us we’re probably not in England. The choice of narrator is skilful, too. Dulcie is part of the household, involved at some level with Patience, the dead woman, but she does not go upstairs with the men. Instead, she sits ‘awkwardly on a hard hall chair’. And, from there, we get her observation of the ‘gilt-framed portraits’, looking better on the ‘rough white walls’ than they had ‘on the regency wallpaper of home’. This detail is fascinating. It suggests to me that the reference is to the dead woman’s ‘home’ and ‘Going Home’ – demonstrating once again how important titles can be – means that her body will be going ‘home’ (back to the UK?) for her funeral. The physical awkwardness of the stretcher being manhandled is effective. The dignity of death is threatened, but Maria intervenes to set things right. Then comes the most intriguing moment of the piece, when Thomas says, ‘I carried her in, and I will carry her out’. There is a whole backstory there, and the reader wants to know more, to start to fill in the missing details… as they should in a good piece of writing. As to the precise location, there is a generous hint in the last two words… but then again, that particular language is spoken in more than one country in the world.