4. THE UNDERTAKER'S TALE

I suppose many undertakers might have fascinating tales to tell...

“That schoolmistress must have been more than a bit of a witch,” commented Dingleboot’s pupil, “hitting a sweet young child like that, and with a weapon.”

“But look at what the sweet young child became,” pointed out the Deity. “She became the most loathed politician in modern times! She was, after all, the Minister of Publicity which was a euphemism for her being the Minister of utter lies and dreadful falsehoods. Maybe a bit more of the schoolmistress’s treatment might have made Edna Tomkins think a bit more careful about some of the things she said and did in her adult years.”

The pupil nodded, and looked down from his ethereal height through the thick and turgid atmosphere breathed by living humans and at the scene in The Westminster Arms.

The door had opened and a newcomer bearing a foaming pint of best ale stepped in.

“Have I missed the opening rally?” he asked in sombre tones, “the first few tales of the evil witch? You know who I mean… the woman, thankfully now spiked, who quite blandly tried to tell me that black was white and death was life...”

“And who are you, sir?” asked the Judge, “we’ll have no late submissions here! Our debate must be in its proper order!”

“Is there an order?” asked the prostitute, “I just thought it was fun!”

The newcomer sat down in a vacant chair which had somehow appeared at the table and set his drink before him.

“I am an undertaker,” he said in a sepulchral voice, “and I find myself here to elucidate my part in human affairs.”

“If you’re an undertaker your part is to bury us, not to have a part in the affairs of the living,” grunted the judge who was feeling most judgemental.

“Ah, sir, but the dead once were living,” assured the undertaker, “and it’s my task in life to ensure that the dead have dignity even though they may not always have deserved it in life. Everyone has a skeleton in a cupboard somewhere, sir, even the judiciary,” he added with a knowing smile, making the judge look uncomfortable enough to want to sink back in his chair as if a cloak of invisibility had descended upon him.

The Undertaker took a sip of his foaming ale.

“It was a long time ago,” he huffed in the same sepulchral monotone that he had used so far. “It was the crack of dawn and I had a dead person delivered by milk-float. You know what a milk-float is? An electric vehicle designed solely for the distribution of bottles of milk in the mornings? The sort of thing that rattles and clanks and wakes the sleeping innocents before they’re ready to be woken? And that milk-float was being driven by the most beautiful young woman I had ever seen, and dressed in a diaphanous creation the like of which was sheer flawlessness. And then, such perfect skin … such clear eyes, and lips … I would have walked a hundred miles back then for just a touch of those fair lips upon my own. She introduced herself as Edna Tomkins and said that the corpse on her milk-float was her intended and that he was fast asleep and couldn’t be woken, and would I help?

“Well, wishing to obey every whim of the luscious beauty I gazed upon the corpse and wondered how I might awaken him, for he was a pale-faced, even grey-faced, but handsome young man who the ignorant may have thought to be asleep, though he gave every appearance of being dead, and you will appreciate that I am fully conversant with such people. I have seen corpses, my friends, in all stages of death, from the pinkly fresh to the foul-smelling and stinkingly decomposed, and this one was at neither end of that spectrum, but somewhere mid-stream, so to speak.”

“And yet you say that the beautiful young woman described him as sleeping?” asked the librarian.

“She was adamant!” confirmed the undertaker, “and she went on to explain at great length how the wretch came to be so somnolent. She said that he had imbibed a quantity of her grandfather’s home-brewed elderberry wine, and it had been so strong that he had fallen into a deep sleep from which he couldn’t be aroused. I pointed out to her that the elderberry wine may have helped his eyes flutter sleepily, but that it was the dagger that was still sticking out of his heart that had caused him to pass away. ‘No man can survive the penetration of his heart by a steel blade’ I told her, ‘and this man has a steel blade right in his heart. It is so far in it may well have come out the other side, and my conclusion, dear lady, is that he is dead. Deader than a very dead thing, in fact...’

“Well, she gave me a look that caused all sorts of things to occur, including a sudden toughening of the member in my trousers, for she was so beautiful my flesh was out of control. I have never seen such a look on any face since … the pink cheeks, the clearest of eyes, the white teeth, the cherry-red lips, and all combined with the gentlest tilt of her bosom, encased, as it was, in the flimsiest of floaty fabrics.

“’But he is only asleep,’ she said, fluttering her darling eyelashes, ‘you must see that, Mr Undertaker, it must be clear to you, and surely you will put him in a casket for his own good, and from there into a furnace where he may be cremated before his flesh is cold, and all before silly questions are asked...’

“I might have pointed out the irrationality of it all, of cremating one she insisted was still alive, for instance, but for that brief few moments I was under her spell and saw things only as she insisted they were and not as they actually were. I knew he was dead. He had been murdered. The blade was there for all to see, but she apparently hadn’t noticed it and I decided that I wouldn’t notice it either. After all, death is final, isn’t it? He couldn’t become anything worse than dead, could he? So I agreed to perform the funeral. I was completely and utterly beguiled by those eyes and that mouth and those rosy cheeks… I was, to put it shortly, under her spell.”

“And did you?” asked the librarian, “did you perform the deed that she begged of you? I know what it can be like, being under the spell of Edna Tomkins!”

“Did I indeed,” sighed the undertaker, “I had no choice, for the spell was cast. This young woman, this beautiful young woman, had twisted a certain truth into an uncertain lie, had removed rationality from my world, had talked me into consigning a dead man into the crematorium’s flames, and all in the belief that the corpse still lived. She had twisted everything that was real until it became part of a new reality, and because of the annoyance in my trousers amongst other things, I went along with it.”

“And then?” asked the policeman gently.

“As I left her, as I went to perform the gruesome deed of interring a murdered man into a coffin, gently, so gently she might not have felt it and in order to show sympathy and comfort, I patted the soft diaphanous fabric covering her bottom until I felt the warmth of her flesh with my fingers.

“It was then that she looked at me. ‘I won’t ever forget that,’ she said, and I knew what she meant.

“It was a threat that has tormented me to silence ever since, until this very moment when I have told you my part of the saga of Edna Tomkins, for as I said, it was she who had me dispose of the corpse of an unwanted lover.”

“What a terrible story,” murmured the judge.

“But one that is so very, very credible,” sighed the librarian.

© Peter Rogerson 23.09.18