Coffin Scarcely Used

Coffin, Scarely Used

Colin Watson

Chapter One

Considering that Mr Harold Carobleat had been in his time a town councillor of Flaxborough, a justice of the peace, a committeeman of the Unionist Club, and, reputedly, the owner of the towns’ first television aerial, his funeral was an uninspiring affair.

And considering the undoubted prosperity of Mr Carobleat’s business establishment, the ship brokerage firm of Carobleat and Spades, its closing almost simultaneously with the descent of its owner’s coffin into a hole in Heston Lane Cemetery was but another sign that gloria mundi transits as hastily in Flaxborough as anywhere else.

There were those, of course, who were pleased to interpret both circumstances otherwise than philosophically. They hoped for scandal, even posthumous scandal, to compensate for what had been, by their standards, a singularly uneventful burying and the tantalizingly straightforward eclipse of a well-known local business. They were in no mood to accept the explanation that a firm with only one principal (Mr Spades was a fiction that derived from some good-will arrangement made by Mr Carobleat when he took over the concern in 1935) could reasonably be expected to share his demise.

But, then, uncharitable speculation was no novelty in Flaxborough. It flecked the canvas of community life and, like the blemish that invites anxious examination of an old master, made it the more interesting.

What was wrong with the funeral?

Well, for one thing, there were only three cars. Not that there really needed to be any at all. The tall, sombre-faced house, standing behind its looming hedges at the far end of the built-up portion of Heston Lane, was little more than fifty yards from the cemetery entrance. But that wasn’t the point. Even had the grave yawned in the middle of Mr Carobleat’s own front lawn, propriety would have demanded a cortege of Daimlers to go once round the drive before unloading at the point from which it had set out.

No, three cars meant that the austerity suggested in the Flaxborough Citizen announcement of “funeral private; friends meet at cemetery” had been deliberately put into effect. The town, conscious of its entitlement to make the best of the only genuine “engagement elsewhere” that had ever kept Mr Carobleat from serving its interests, felt snubbed. It resented such flagrant unostentation.