Free Engleby by Sebastian Faulks

looking as though they were on their way out. There was a television showing an early evening news bulletin. I eventually made out my mother, sitting on the end of a bed near the window. She turned round when we approached, but didn’t say anything. She was wearing a headscarf and still had her overcoat on. She raised a finger to her lips. My father was lying on his back with a tube up his nose and a drip attached to his arm. His eyes were closed and his jaw had fallen. His skin was ashy-grey and there was short white stubble showing on his chin; someone had taken out his false teeth. His pyjama jacket was open and there were wires attached with pads to his bony, hairless chest. I thought of his heart, a fat muscle that had always shirked the job.
    I tried to think back to when he’d been younger – healthier. There must have been memories – of the seaside, or of him playing football with me in the park, or carrying me on his shoulders or helping to decorate the Christmas tree. There weren’t. All I could remember was waiting for him at the side door of the paper mill on a Friday afternoon when he came out with his grey envelope. ‘That’s it then,’ he said. ‘Another week. Make sure you never end up here, Mike.’
    I looked at him on the bed. He coughed once and a trail of brownish dead blood came out of his mouth and ran down the side of his chin. Then he stopped breathing. And I thought, I’ll make sure I never end up here, either.
    In one way, Dad’s death was the making of me, and that way was the academic. At the funeral, the vicar took me strongly by the arms and looked me in the eye.
    ‘You may feel alone, but you’re not.’
    I waited for the God-loves-you thing.
    ‘Others have been where you are. I have stood where you stand today. You will survive, however stricken you now feel.’
    I pulled my arm away because I didn’t want to hear this. I actually needed to feel I was alone. Why did I need the grief of others? Wasn’t mine enough? Why did I need to feel that this abandonment was plural, when it was heavy enough singular? The best way ahead that I could see was to drag this thing off and digest it on my own, like a python with an outsize kill.
    Since we didn’t have the kind of house you could ask people back to, the vicar invited the mourners to the rectory. There were some people from the paper mill, a supervisor, a manager, a couple of workmates, some aunts, uncles and neighbours, about three dozen in all, a respectable number. The vicar’s charlady served fish paste and Sandwich Spread sandwiches and tea and fruit cake and sherry if you wanted it.
    The vicar wouldn’t leave me alone. ‘I gather you’re at the grammar school,’ he said.
    All the guests had now stopped being mournful and were making general chat, as though nothing had happened. I kept thinking of the damp earth on my father’s coffin, wondering how soon he would decompose. Did they put an accelerator pack in there, a chemical to kick-start the process, as you might with a compost heap? Was he clothed in there?
    ‘Have you thought of Chatfield?’
    ‘What?’
    ‘The naval school. I gather from the eulogy that your father was in the Royal Navy in the War and served throughout. You might be eligible for a scholarship to Chatfield. I’m a visiting chaplain. It’s worth considering, especially if you’re not settled at the grammar school. I shall have a word with your mother.’
    I didn’t mind the grammar school, but nevertheless in March I did some exams in an unused room, invigilated by Miss Penrose, the art teacher. These were the scholarship papers for Chatfield, a ‘public’, i.e. private, school about an hour’s drive away. It was a famous institution, founded by some naval bigwig for the sons of sailors killed in battle, which had grown to take in ‘ordinary’ boys as well; in fact, I had the impression it was pretty keen to find pupils of any description who could pay the hefty fees.
    Which we couldn’t.