Missing Don

by Ian Inglis

I was sitting at the breakfast table with a freshly brewed pot of coffee when I received the phone call telling me of Don’s death. He’d been in Uzbekistan for several days when the bus in which he was travelling from Tashkent to Samarkand was in collision with a lorry outside the town of Jizzakh: seven passengers were killed, as were both drivers. Don Beech, my elder brother, was forty-five years old.

It was a trip he’d been talking about, planning, postponing and resurrecting for some time. Unlike myself, he preferred to travel alone. Given his reputation as an unashamed extrovert, a raconteur who welcomed the spotlight, this might sound strange, but he used his journeys as valuable opportunities to relax, to recover his balance, to regain some sort of equilibrium in the hectic, even chaotic, lifestyle he had chosen to follow. To those who did not know him – or did not know him well – his renowned willingness to assume the role of story-teller, to take centre-stage, could arouse resentment. It was easy to understand why. He was an entertainer. His adornments, his exaggerations, his flamboyant vocabulary and use of language were often startling, and he was seen by some as boastful and arrogant. But they were wrong.

For many people, of course, that fact that he was gay was all they needed to know about Don, as if his sexuality was the most – perhaps the only – significant component of who he was. But for me, it was merely one among a multitude of characteristics that helped to define him: he ate fruit with every meal; he went for long walks in the countryside; he loved the music of modernist composers including Faure, Debussy and Satie; he enjoyed crosswords and word games; he collected pottery from around the world; he drank French wines; he read and re-read the novels of Latin American writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa; he was a keen gardener; he had an encyclopedic knowledge of the films of Alfred Hitchcock; he never wore a suit or a tie…all these and many more were, in my mind, equally important facets of my elder brother’s life.

My two younger sisters, Sarah and Christine, insisted that I should deliver the eulogy at his funeral. Our parents were dead, we had no uncles or aunts, Don had no permanent partner, and as the senior member of the family, I seemed to be the obvious choice. I agreed, relieved that the legal and logistical issues surrounding the return of Don’s body from Central Asia to the UK would give me several weeks to prepare what I wanted to say.

‘Be concise. Be succinct,’ Sarah said. ‘It’s impossible to encapsulate a life in five or ten minutes. Don’t even try. And concentrate on just a few points. People quickly get bored.’

Christine disagreed.

‘No. Paint as full a picture of Don as you can. An honest assessment, warts and all. Let people know what he was really like.’

I told them I’d be perfectly happy to step aside and let one or both of them speak at the funeral. They declined, but offered to supervise all the arrangements, including the selection of hymns and other music.

‘The hymns? You’re thinking of a church service?’

‘What else?’

The religious genes in our family had been divided along gendered lines. Sarah and Christine had inherited our parents’ Christian principles, and were regular attendees at St Luke’s Church, while Don had distanced himself from any kind of religious activity in his early teens, and I—keen to emulate him—had quickly followed his example. There were other ways in which the divisions between us had developed too. Our sisters went to university; Don and I did not. They married and had children; we did not. They followed their careers, Sarah as a teacher, Christine in banking; we meandered (in Don’s case, it might be truer to say he galloped) through a variety of jobs. They had been unaware of my brother’s homosexuality and, like our parents, were taken aback by his revelation when it came; I had known for some time—indeed, it was Don himself who had told me.

When he was twenty, Don became engaged to Stella Firth, a girl he’d met at sixth-form college. After a few months, he suddenly broke it off. We shared a bedroom in those days and as we lay in our beds, on a summer evening, too hot to sleep – it was the week of my fourteenth birthday and the country was in the grip of an extended heatwave – I asked him if he thought he and Stella would remain friends.

‘I’m not sure she’d want to.’

‘Why not?’

‘I think it’d be difficult for her.’

‘Why? You still like each other, don’t you?’

‘I like her very much. But not quite enough. Not in quite the right way. Not in the way she wants me to.’

At first I thought he simply meant that he wasn’t in love with her. But I remember being struck by the finality of what he said. I waited for him to continue and when he didn’t, I asked if he’d met another girl. There was no reply, and – call it insight, call it fraternal instinct – I understood.

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘That would be difficult for her.’

‘Yeah. For both of us. Goodnight, Jamie.’

‘Goodnight.’

***

Once the funeral arrangements were in place, I telephoned Stella Firth to tell her of Don’s death and she asked if I could call in to see her. She was standing in the front garden of her refurbished stone cottage when I arrived.

‘I thought I’d better keep an eye out for you,’ she explained. ‘I’m easy to miss out here.’

Although I hadn’t seen her for twenty years, she appeared little changed.

‘It’s good of you to invite me over,’ I said.

‘Oh, why wouldn’t I? You were very nearly my brother-in-law!’

We sat in the conservatory at the back of the cottage, overlooking acres of barley.

‘Don kept in touch with me,’ she said. ‘Does that surprise you? Not regularly, but now and again—the odd letter, Christmas and birthday cards, even the occasional visit. Of course, he was always on the move, never bought his own place, never really wanted to settle down. He told me it was so he could move on at a moment’s notice. But he phoned me a couple of months ago and told me about the trip he’d arranged to Uzbekistan.’

‘It does surprise me,’ I admitted.

‘I avoided him after he ended our engagement. But, as time went by, it seemed childish, spiteful, to ignore him. Attitudes change. I didn’t stop liking him. And it wasn’t as if he’d done anything wrong, was it? It would have been wrong if he had married me. Wrong for both of us. Of course, I was upset at the time. He was such a handsome man. And so popular. That was the thing. Everybody liked him. The life and soul, as they say.’

‘When he called it off…did you know it was because he was gay?’

‘No, not straight away. It’s difficult to explain. When we were together, he was almost too gentle. It was very nice, but it was as if he didn’t want to…I don’t know…hurt me, spoil me? And so, I did begin to wonder. And then he told me, and it all made sense.’

On the spur of the moment, I said, ‘I wish you had been my sister-in-law.’

‘Yes. I was looking forward to being part of your family.’

‘Will you come to the funeral?’ I asked.

‘Oh, yes.’

The short drive back to my house took me past the secondary school we had all attended. I parked the car and sat for some time looking across the playing fields, remembering Don the footballer, Don the athlete, Don the cricketer. From my early childhood, I had been accustomed to my family and their friends contrasting – with varying degrees of approval – Don’s obvious confidence with the shyness of most boys of his age: ‘he’s got the gift of the gab alright’; ‘he could talk the hind legs off a donkey, that one’; ‘he wants to watch out – he’s so sharp he’ll cut himself if he’s not careful’; ‘he’s too clever for his own good.’ I paid them little attention: as far as I was concerned, Don was my brother and that was the way he was. In my eyes he could do no wrong. I idolized him, I looked up to him, I tried to imitate him. My childhood was built around the example he set, And it was at school that I first began to understand how he was perceived by others. It was during a morning assembly in the first term of my first year. As one of the new intake of pupils, I was seated at the front of the hall; Don was at the back with his own final-year group. Fowler, the headmaster, was lecturing us – as he often did – about the importance of homework, when he suddenly stopped.

‘Donald Beech! Are you listening?’

Four hundred pairs of eyes swivelled in my brother’s direction. Don stood up.

‘Yes, I am, sir.’

‘Really?’ said Fowler. ‘From here, it seemed to me that you were talking, not listening.’

‘I can do both, sir.’

Muted laughter broke out around the hall. Fowler cleared his throat.

‘Well, for heaven’s sake! Let’s not deprive the school of the opportunity to appreciate this remarkable gift. Join me on the stage, here, now. Let us all hear what it is that you were saying to your friends.’

Fowler was a decent enough man, whose sense of humour was often at odds with the severity of some of the other teachers. Nonetheless, I feared for Don, but he showed no signs of nervousness as he stepped on to the stage.

‘Begin, Master Beech,’ said Fowler. ‘Repeat, word for word, the conversation I so rudely interrupted. Take your time. The whole school is keen to learn from you.’

Don moved to the front of the stage and looked around the hall. He caught my eye and smiled. I can remember every word he said:

‘After I’d finished my homework last night,’—at this point, he turned briefly to Fowler, who nodded appreciatively—‘I wandered into the garden to clear my head. Although we’d had rain earlier in the day, it was a warm night, the scent of the flowers and plants hung in the air, and the skies were clear. I looked up at the constellations and chose a star at random. I couldn’t tell you which star it was, and in a way that’s not important. I gazed up at the star for a long, long time. I began to wonder if on a planet circling that star, all those billions of light years away, there might be another boy, an alien boy, of about my own age, staring back at me across the vastness of the galaxy.’

The hall was completely silent, pupils and staff straining to hear Don’s every word.

‘I found myself imagining what his world might look like, what he might look like, what his daily life was like. Was his planet afflicted, as ours is, by wars and conflict? Were illnesses and disease as common there as they are here? Was his view of the world, of the universe, of space and time, based on religion or science or magic? I remembered Hamlet’s words to Horatio: “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” I began to see—no, not to see, to sense – shifting sets of patterns and shapes, colours, sounds, very different from those we see and hear here on Earth. I began to feel emotions for which we have no vocabulary. I felt as if a curtain was being drawn back by invisible hands. As the image cleared, I saw the boy step forward, raise his hand in greeting and—’

He stopped.

‘And what?’ demanded Fowler.

‘I don’t know, sir. That’s when you interrupted me!’

The whole school exploded into gales of laughter. Some pupils cheered, others clapped. I was bursting with pride. That’s my brother! Even Fowler was forced to smile… he could do nothing else.

I caught up with Don as we were making our way back to our separate classrooms.

‘Was all that true?’ I asked. ‘Or did you just make it up?’

‘What do you think?’

***

Don’s body arrived back in the UK the following week. The coffin was taken to the undertaker – the same undertaker who had arranged the funerals of our parents – and rested there for three days. Christine and Sarah went with their families to say their goodbyes to Don, but I chose not to. I’ve no wish to look at the dead, no desire to add that final, bleak image to my stock of memories of someone I’ve known and loved.

On the morning of the funeral, I was astonished by the number of people who were at St Luke’s – many of whom I’d not seen for years. My sisters had selected three recordings to be played during the service. Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending, performed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, while the mourners were arriving at the church and taking their seats; Pascal Roge’s performance of Satie’s Gymnopedie No 1; “Nimrod” from Elgar’s Enigma Variations by the Berliner Philharmoniker, as the coffin was carried out. They’d left the choice of readings to me. Christine’s daughter Esther read Keats’ Ode To Autumn, and Sarah’s elder son Ben (who’d been in awe of his uncle ever since Don told him he’d seen a UFO in the skies above his home) read a short passage from Jack Kerouac’s On The Road which seemed to me to describe him perfectly:

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live,

mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time,

the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn,

burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across

the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody

goes ‘Awww!’

As I ascended the pulpit to deliver the eulogy, I recalled Don’s assurance when invited by Fowler to address the school. Alongside his evident intention to enjoy himself, he wanted to distract and delight his audience, to confound its expectations, to provide a few memorable moments in an otherwise routine day. I smiled down at his coffin, just as he had smiled at me. I wanted to do him justice. I wanted to make him proud of me in the same way that I was proud of him. I began by outlining the bare facts of Don’s life – his childhood, his schooldays, some of the many jobs he’d had, the places where he’d lived – and stressed how fortunate Sarah, Christine and I were to have had him for a big brother. Because I regarded his sexuality as incidental rather than definitive, I made no mention of it. That was not what made him distinctive.

‘My brother loved to travel,’ I said. ‘He was a wanderer, a nomad, a voyager. In another life, he would have been an explorer. He was at his happiest in the mountains – the Himalayas, the Alps, the Andes. I often think he was like the jongleurs, the troubadours, the wandering minstrels of the Middle Ages, itinerant poets and musicians who fulfilled a variety of roles – jester, critic, chronicler, commentator. I’d go back further than that – to the poets of ancient Greece who entertained their audiences with epic, comic or tragic tales. Don too was a poet: not the sort of poet who publishes in books, who debates the merits of iambic pentameter and rhyming couplets, who considers the uses of metaphor and simile, who prefers the haiku or the limerick or the sonnet. He was a weaver of dreams, a magician, like the shamans of Asia and North America, or the ayahuasqueros of the Amazon basin. Did he exaggerate and embroider? Yes. Was everything he said completely truthful, completely accurate? No. Did he tell lies or set out to deceive people? Never. He was our friend, our companion, and my brother, for which I will always be eternally grateful.’

The service ended and the coffin was placed in the hearse. Sarah, Christine and I stood in the vestibule to thank the mourners as they filed out into the bright sunshine of the churchyard. The last person to leave was Stella. She reached into her handbag.

‘It came this morning. I suppose the postal service in Uzbekistan is even slower than ours.’

She handed me a postcard, a colour photograph of the Telyashayakh Mosque in Tashkent. I read the message:

Just about to catch the bus from Tashkent to Samarkand. Much of the

country is desert or mountainous, but despite a general air of neglect,

there’s a palpable sense of history – Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan,

the Silk Road, etc, etc. There’s also a kind of dignified tranquillity, as if

what goes on elsewhere is an unwanted intrusion. Things happen slowly

here: when I look around me, the word ‘tapestry’ comes to mind. The

weather is hot, the people are friendly, and the night skies are wondrous

 – the whole of the Milky Way. I’ve met a surprising number of travellers

from around the world, some escaping, some searching, and all with their

own tales to tell. I’m happy. I wish I could spend the rest of my life here.

Don

‘And he got his wish,’ she said.

There was nothing I could add. Stella slipped her arm through mine, and together we joined the rest of my family at the head of the cortege, to follow the hearse on its slow, sad journey to the crematorium.