This Was a Man Read online

  He lowered the pillow gently onto Emma’s face.

  Her hands and legs twitched for a few moments before she fell still, but he continued to press down. When he finally lifted the pillow, there was a smile on her face as if she was enjoying her first rest in months.

  Harry held her in his arms as the first of the autumn leaves began to fall.

  * * *

  Dr. Richards dropped by the following morning, and if he was surprised to find that his patient had died during the night, he did not mention it to Harry. He simply wrote on the death certificate Died in her sleep as a result of Motor Neuron Disease. But then he was an old friend, as well as the family doctor.

  Emma had left clear instructions that she wanted a quiet funeral, attended only by family and close friends. No flowers, and donations to the Bristol Royal Infirmary. Her wishes were carried out to the letter, but then she had no way of knowing how many people looked upon her as a close friend.

  The village church was packed with locals, and others who were not quite so local, as Harry discovered when he shuffled down the aisle to join the rest of the family in the front pew and passed a former prime minister seated in the third row.

  He couldn’t recall a great deal about the service, as his mind was preoccupied, but he did try to concentrate when the vicar delivered his moving eulogy.

  After the coffin was lowered into the ground and the rough sods of earth had been cast upon it, Harry was among the last to leave the graveside. When he returned to the Manor House to join the rest of the family, he found he couldn’t recall Lucy’s name.

  Grace kept a close eye on him as he sat quietly in the drawing room where he’d first met Emma—well, not exactly met.

  “They’ve all gone,” she told him, but he just sat there, staring out of the window.

  When the sun disappeared behind the highest oak, he stood, walked across the hall, and slowly climbed the stairs to their bedroom. He undressed and got into an empty bed, no longer caring for this world.

  * * *

  Doctors will tell you, you can’t die of grief. But Harry died nine days later.

  The death certificate gave the cause of death as cancer, but as Dr. Richards pointed out, if Harry had wanted to he could have lived for another ten, perhaps twenty years.

  Harry’s instructions were as clear as Emma’s had been. Like her, he wanted a quiet funeral. His only request was to be buried beside his wife. His wishes were adhered to, and when the family returned to the Manor House after the funeral, Giles gathered them all together in the drawing room and asked them to raise a glass to his oldest and dearest friend.

  “I hope,” he added, “that you’ll allow me to do one thing that I know Harry wouldn’t have approved of.” The family listened in silence to his proposal.

  “He most certainly wouldn’t have approved,” said Grace. “But Emma would have, because she told me so.”

  Giles looked in turn at each member of the family, but he didn’t need to seek their approval, because it was clear that they were as one.

  HARRY ARTHUR CLIFTON

  1920–1992

  52

  HIS INSTRUCTIONS couldn’t have been clearer, but then they’d been at it since 1621.

  The Rt. Hon. the Lord Barrington of Bristol Docklands was to arrive at St. Paul’s Cathedral at 10:50 on the morning of April 10th, 1992. At 10:53, he would be met at the northwest door by the Very Reverend Eric Evans, canon in residence. At 10:55, the canon would accompany the Lord Chancellor into the cathedral, and then they would proceed to the front of the nave where he should land—the canon’s word—at 10:57.

  As eleven a.m. struck on the cathedral clock, the organist would strike up the opening bars of All people that on earth do dwell, and the congregation would rise and sing, the dean assured him. From that moment until the final blessing by the dean, the memorial service would be in the safe hands of the Rt. Reverend Barry Donaldson, the Bishop of Bristol, and one of Harry’s oldest friends. Giles would only have one role left to play on the ecclesiastical stage.

  He had spent weeks preparing for this single hour, because he felt it had to be worthy of his oldest friend and, equally important, that it would have been approved of by Emma. He had even carried out a practice run from Smith Square to St. Paul’s at exactly the same time the previous week, to make sure he wouldn’t be late. The journey had taken twenty-four minutes, so he decided he would leave home at 10:15. Better to be a few minutes early, he told his driver, than a few minutes late. You can always slow down, but London traffic doesn’t always allow you to speed up.

  * * *

  Giles rose just after five on the morning of the memorial service, as he knew he wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep. He slipped on a dressing gown, went down to his study, and read the eulogy one more time. Like Harry with his novels, he was now on the fourteenth draft, or was it the fifteenth? There were a few changes, the occasional word, one added sentence. He felt confident he could do no more, but he still needed to check the length.

  He read it through once again without stopping, just under fifteen minutes. Winston Churchill had once told him, “An important speech should take an hour to write for every minute it took to deliver, while at the same time, dear boy, you must leave your audience convinced it was off the cuff.” That was the difference between a mere speaker and an orator, Churchill had suggested.

  Giles stood up, pushed back his chair, and began to deliver the eulogy as if he were addressing an audience of a thousand, although he had no idea how large the congregation would be. The canon had told him that the cathedral could hold two thousand comfortably, but only managed that on rare occasions, such as the funeral of a member of the royal family, or a memorial service for a prime minister, and not even all of them could guarantee a full house.

  “Don’t worry,” he had added, “as long as six hundred turn up, we can fill the nave, block off the chancery, and it will still look packed. Only our regular worshippers will be any the wiser.”

  Giles just prayed that the nave would be full, as he didn’t want to let his friend down. He put down the script fourteen minutes later, then returned to the bedroom, to find Karin still in her dressing gown.

  “We ought to get going,” he said.

  “Of course we should, my darling,” said Karin, “that is, if you’re thinking of walking to the cathedral. If you leave now, you’ll be there in time to welcome the dean,” she added before disappearing into the bathroom.

  While Giles had been going over his speech downstairs, she had laid out a white shirt, his Bristol Grammar School tie, and a dark suit that had come back from the cleaners the previous day. Giles took his time dressing, finally selecting a pair of gold cufflinks Harry had given him on his wedding day. Once he’d checked himself in the mirror, he paced restlessly around the bedroom, delivering whole paragraphs of his eulogy out loud and constantly looking at his watch. How long was she going to be?

  When Karin reappeared twenty minutes later, she was wearing a simple navy blue dress that Giles had never seen before, adorned with a gold portcullis brooch. She’d done Harry proud.

  “Time to leave,” she announced calmly.

  As they left the house Giles was relieved to see that Tom was already standing by the back door of the car.

  “Let’s get moving, Tom,” he said as he slumped into the backseat, checking his watch again.

  Tom drove sedately out of Smith Square as befitted the occasion. Past the Palace of Westminster and around Parliament Square before making his way along Victoria Embankment.

  “The traffic seems unusually heavy today,” said Giles, once again looking at his watch.

  “About the same as last week,” said Tom.

  Giles didn’t comment on the fact that every light seemed to turn red just as they approached it. He was convinced they were going to be late.

  As they drove past the mounted griffins that herald the City of London, Giles began to relax for the first time, as it now looked as if t