END TIMES

Arthur Balfour knew that something was awry; very much so. Yet, try as he might, he could not figure out what it was and, the more he tried, the more muddled things became in his mind.

Everything seemed so familiar but, on the other hand, so, so different.

At the age of twenty five, Arthur had lost his sight following a car accident that had caused heavy trauma to his brain. Three operations had not been able to restore his vision and, from the moment he’d been told that he would spend the rest of his life in darkness, just the thought of that Thunderbird that he had expended his entire inheritance on, was enough to reduce him to tears. The car that he had coveted, the envy of all his colleagues at the brokerage firm, he now hated with a vengeance.

His burgeoning career in the world of finance was over and, if not for his father, bringing him into the family business, even though it would be two years before he was properly able to function and pull his weight, he had no idea how he would have managed. But, gradually, he had pulled himself out of the state of self pity that he had lapsed into and applied himself, becoming the third generation of Balfour and Son though he was still privy to bouts of private depression whenever he reflected on the blow that fate had dealt him.

Arthur had always been a fashionista, a clothes horse, ahead of the trends, his suits, custom-made at great expense, his shoes, Italian, hand-crafted from the softest leather and buffed to perfection. But what was the point of fine clothes if one could no longer see how good one looked in a looking glass? His new job had meant that his one, dour, black suit was all that was needed along with a black tie.

As if his new career path was not off-putting enough, his damaged corneas, less transparent and cloudier than the norm, also proved to be unattractive and off-putting to customers and his father had had to insist that Arthur wear dark glasses when at work further plunging him into darkness and aggravating the gloom that he struggled to keep hidden.

In time, of course, as was natural with the loss of such a vital faculty, it only served to enhance Arthur’s remaining senses, in particular, his hearing and smell, nature’s way of compensation, one might conjecture.

Dong!  

There it was, his grandfather clock. Or, to be more precise, the tall, standing German clock that his own grandfather had brought to the business he had started, sixty years previously. That single sound, so familiar, was the five minute warning, programmed mechanically into the timepiece; an alert that the actual hour would shortly be sounded.  

Arthur waited pensively. Knowing the exact time would help him to re-establish his bearings and, hopefully, jog him out of this weird, forgetful fogginess that embraced him.

Finally, the bell of the clock rang and, as never before in his life, Arthur listened intently, counting every chime until the last toll faded away. Ten! So it was 10am, and it was a Monday. That much he had figured out. It could not be 10pm because Arthur always switched off the sound lever when he exited the business each evening.

And it was a Monday, he could tell, because on the other four working days of the week, the first burial services were scheduled to take place at the early hour of 8am and so the sound lever would not have been replaced until closer to 11am, after they had returned here from the cemetery or the crematorium, whichever the customer had chosen. On a Monday, however, the quietest day of the week, the first chapel service, prior to the ride to the burial site, did not usually take place until 10.30am.

Arthur was buoyed by this simple piece of detection. Another thought occurred to him: if this was now 10am on a Monday, as he had deduced, then, assuming that there was a 10.30am service scheduled for today, it would be due to start in thirty minutes. He racked his brain trying to recall whose service it might possibly be but, after twenty years in this business, ten as owner upon his father’s demise, one funeral seemed to fuse into another in a never ending cascade of death.

For Arthur, I should have said, was a funeral director.

Breathing deeply, he inhaled the familiar smell of formaldehyde, or, more accurately, the mixture of this chemical amalgamated with methanol, sodium borate, sodium nitrate, glycerin and water that was used as an embalming fluid in all funeral homes, and which, no matter how one tried, using a vast concoction of perfumed scents to disguise the overpowering stench associated with deceased bodies, one could never really vanquish.

Indeed, so prevalent was it that it had long become a part of the scent that was Arthur Balfour. Though Arthur would shower twice per day and would wear a variety of eau de colognes, always, somehow, it was formaldehyde that would rise to the top, exuding from all pores, the longer the day wore on.

Arthur’s wife, Mildred, had, initially, accepted that this sightless man was good husband material. owning his own business, albeit a rather macabre one, and being blind, meaning that he could not actually recognise that Mildred, who had long given up any dreams of being married, was not what one might call a “catch” being almost ten years older than Arthur and relatively unattractive.

Unfortunately, once the twins, Harry and Jonathan, had been born, Arthur had found, to his dismay, that Mildred had closed up shop when it came to conjugal rights; the odour of death that clung to Arthur after a day at work being more than she was willing to tolerate any longer. In time, she could not even bring herself to share the same bed and, though she continued to shop, clean and cook, Arthur returned home one evening to find that his wife had moved him into the spare room.

Of course, he still had the love and devotion of the two boys who seemed oblivious, as they grew up, to the distinctive smell that announced Arthur’s homecoming every evening. Yet, in time, even they, taunted by their peers at school as to Arthur’s morbid method of earning a living, began to slowly distance themselves from their father a fact that Arthur was only made aware of when the boys began to refuse lifts to school and, on one particularly awful day for Arthur, requested that he not come to hear them perform in the annual school play, something the poor man had been looking forward to greatly.

When the twins started secondary school, Mildred decided that it was time to move out altogether and notice of divorce proceedings were served on Arthur at the graveside of an actual funeral, something that caused a stir among the congregation and had a detrimental effect on the business, Balfour and Son, Funeral Directors. To be fair to Mildred, at least, she had gone to the trouble of having the documents transcribed into braille, a most thoughtful consideration.

The loud creak of the main door alerted Arthur to the fact that somebody had entered the chapel of rest. He had long been meaning to oil the hinges but had never quite gotten around to it. Now, he listened attentively to the sound of feet treading on the parquet floor; mourners were beginning to arrive. Once he knew the final count, he might be able to ascertain the importance of the person being grieved and this, in turn, could drag from his muddled brain the identity of the deceased.

An individual, followed by a couple, one of whom had a limp, Arthur was sure. Over the next few minutes, a few more stragglers arrived and Arthur determined that the count was just eight people; a very poor turnout, indicating that the expired man or woman had not been a very popular person when alive. Suddenly, the old clock chimed three times, the signal for the half hour: 10.30am, the time for the remembrance service to begin. There would be no more mourners

When Arthur’s wife had left him, his world had, momentarily, collapsed. As if things weren’t bad enough already, now, he found himself returning home to an empty house each evening, a microwaved meal, a TV programme that he could not even see. One night, instead of going home, he had taken himself to a local bar.  

Though he had never been a drinker and there was little joy to be had sitting alone in a corner listening to the happy chatter and laughs of strangers, he had found that, after a few drinks, his misery seemed to recede just a little and life became a touch more bearable. Within a few months, Arthur had also become a secret imbiber during working hours; bourbon being his tipple of choice.

Though the decline was gradual, it was inevitable. Arthur, this once vain, fashion conscious dandy, started to neglect his appearance, often unshaven, suit unpressed, shoes unpolished and, of course, himself, unwashed; that stench of formaldehyde becoming ever more noticeable, mixed, now, with the added porous odour of rye. 

People talked, word spread and business suffered. Small defects, paint jobs, carpet replacement, even the cleaning of the premises -all went unattended, only adding to the general air of neglect that pervaded Balfour and Son and the proprietor himself. Realising that neither of the twins, with whom all contact had now ceased, would ever join him in the business, the sign above the parlour was changed to simply Balfour, Funeral Director, a further lonely, dispiriting moment for Arthur.

As time wore on, staff abandoned the sinking ship, bills went unpaid. Mildred’s onerous divorce settlement sapped all of the savings that Arthur still had and he was forced, in desperation, to dip into the business account. The worse things got, the more Arthur turned to the bottle for solace. 

In times gone by, it had been possible to make good money by selling expensive caskets but, with cremation now being four times more popular than funerals, this lucrative option had disappeared. Eventually, the bank came calling and they did not like what they saw. Within a month, unable to make up the arrears on his mortgage, Arthur was served with a foreclosure notice on the house and, this time, the documents were not in braille.

Homeless, Arthur had taken to sleeping in the small garret above the business premises. At night, he pondered on times long gone by and asked himself how things had gotten so bad. He recalled the words his grandfather, a wise man, had imparted when Arthur had first joined the business.

“Arthur, you must understand what you are getting into. This line of business is not for everyone. We deal in death and, as such, are scorned by society. People only turn to us when they have no choice and a body needs to be humanely disposed of. Life is finite and nobody wants to be reminded of their own inevitable departure from this world. For that reason, we, people like us, live in the shadows”.

Live in the shadows. How right his grandfather had been. Fate had been cruel to Arthur, there was no doubt. And here he was fighting to survive, his sole remaining customers being those who simply couldn’t afford the prices charged by Walkers, the other funeral directors in town and the beneficiary of Balfour’s lost trade. What, he asked himself, was the point?

Arthur heard the organ in the chapel begin to warm up. The service was about to begin and, still, he was trying to remember whose service this was. A nervous cough from the meagre congregation was picked up by Arthur’s acute hearing. It was a familiar cough. Surely not. Could it be? Muriel?  

Suddenly, the fog evaporated. All became clear. He remembered, with a sinking feeling, carrying the small stepladder up the stairs to the garret. He recalled the red cordon ropes from the chapel which he had painstakingly joined together to form the noose. These people, few as they were, had come, this day, to pay their respects to him, Arthur Balfour. He wished that he could see them, to know those who had remained faithful in some form or another. Were his beloved boys here, he wondered?  

But, in his broken and inert heart, he knew it was time for his soul to depart; to live for eternity in the shadows, just as his grandfather had warned. There was no escape. Here he was inside the last of the deluxe mahogany caskets that he had been unable to sell; the lining of bright, ruby red silk which, once, had provided the ultimate in good taste, now his funereal shroud.

He was dressed, he realised, in his finest blue pinstripe suit, one of those that had hung in his wardrobe, neglected, for so many years. As well, a pair of his Italian shoes, buffed and gleaming. In true undertaker’s style. The shell that was his embalmed body had been made perfectly presentable for his departure: the eyes, permanently closed, no longer hidden by dark glasses, a smile upon the lips. 

In fact, thanks to the master craftsmanship of an unknown mortician, Arthur had never looked better.  For the first time in years, Arthur felt a surge of joy. How appropriate, he thought… at least, I’m going out in style.