My brother wore a bright red suit to our father's funeral. I was furious until the family solicitor saw him and stopped walking.
PART 1 — THE LINING
Not burgundy. Not a dark wine colour. Red.
Every other man in that chapel was in black or charcoal, and my brother came up the side aisle past our father's coffin looking like he was going to a party.
I got him at the door with the jacket over his arm, before he put it on.
"What are you doing?"
"Not now, Daisy."
"Give me that, put my coat on. Dad would have hated this. Don't do it in front of everyone."
About forty people were already sitting down and at least eleven of them were watching us.
And Dermot said, quietly, "No, he wouldn't."
Then he put the jacket on and went and sat in the front row in it.
Our father was Alasdair Cordell and he was seventy-nine and he had worn grey to everything for fifty years.
After the service we went up to the cemetery, and Hollis Bray came over. He has done this family's legal work since 1996 and he is seventy-two and he had been crying, properly, at the back of the chapel.
He saw Dermot and he stopped walking.
His eyes went down to that jacket and stayed there.
"Where did you get that suit?"
"It was in Dad's cupboard."
That is not a thing that is true. I cleared out most of my father's clothes myself in the March, and there was no red suit in that house.
"Which cupboard?"
"The one downstairs."
There is no cupboard in my father's study. There is a wall of bookshelves.
Dermot had been in there in the April looking for Dad's service papers, and he had found a narrow door behind the end section of the shelving, and inside it were three suits in garment bags.
Two black. One red.
And a note pinned to the red one with Dermot's name on it, in our father's handwriting.
Hollis Bray went the colour of the gravel.
"Did you check the pockets?"
Dermot said no.
And that man took us both about thirty feet away from everybody else, behind the yew, and said, "Take the jacket off."
Dermot took it off and Hollis went through the inside pockets and found nothing.
Then he ran his fingers down the lining at the chest, and stopped, and pressed.
Something crackled under the fabric.
He turned that jacket inside out. There was a section of lining about six inches long that had been sewn by hand, badly, with a different thread.
"Your father told me I'd know when it was time," he said.
He got a little pair of scissors out of his briefcase and cut it open.
Inside was a folded letter and an envelope stiff with documents.
He put both into my brother's hands.
"He spent the last year of his life on this. He made me promise it only reached you if you found the red one and chose to put it on."
And then he quoted our father, and I have not stopped hearing it since.
"He said: if Dermot wears the red one, he's understood, and he's ready. If he wears black like everybody else, he hasn't, and it waits another generation."
Dermot got the letter open with both hands going.
The first line says:
Son — if you're reading this, you wore the red one. I knew you would. And it means I can finally say the thing I was never brave enough to say out loud.
PART 2 — 1970
Our father played bass in a band called the Wrenfold Men from 1967 to 1971.
Neither of us knew. Not one thing. No photograph, no record, no mention in fifty-five years.
He wore a red suit on stage. That suit. He had it made in Marchvale in 1969 for eleven pounds and it has been in a bag behind a bookcase since about 1974.
In the November of 1971, when he was twenty-four, his own father sat him down and told him to stop wasting himself and take the job at the firm.
And he did it. He stopped that month. He never played again, not at a party, not at Christmas, not once in our hearing.
The letter is four pages and about a page and a half of it is that.
And it is not what I expected from that man at all, because he is not angry in it. He does not blame his father.
What he says is that he understood at the time exactly why it was being asked and that he thinks his father was right about the money and wrong about the rest, and that he made the decision himself and it was his to make.
And then he says the sentence he could not say out loud.
I have never once stopped being sorry.
PART 3 — 2009
In the spring of 2009 my brother was twenty-five and two years into a music degree at Ardleigh and doing well at it.
And he left it and came into the family firm.
Everybody in this family has a version of why. His version is that Dad wanted him to.
Dad never said it. Not once. I have got that from Hollis Bray and it is in the letter and I believe both of them.
What happened is that I said it.
I was twenty-eight. I was three years into the firm. There was a recession on and I had watched my father do sums at that kitchen table for eight months.
And I sat opposite my brother and made the sensible case for about forty minutes, and I was good at it, and he took the job in the September.
My father heard about it after it was decided. Hollis says he went very quiet about it for about a fortnight and then never mentioned it again.
He watched his own thing happen to his son from four feet away, and he said nothing, because he had decided at twenty-four that a man gets to choose and he was not going to take the choice off Dermot the way it had been taken off him.
He was so careful not to be his father that he forgot somebody else would do it instead.
And it was me.
PART 4 — THE ENVELOPE
There were three things in that envelope.
The first is a deed. In 2012 my father bought the old rehearsal rooms on Kell Lane in Marchvale, which is where that band practised in 1968, and which had been a carpet warehouse since 1989.
He has owned it for thirteen years and let it to the carpet people and never mentioned it to anybody except Hollis Bray.
The second is a statement for an account none of us knew about.
The Wrenfold Men recorded four songs in 1970. One of them was licensed for something in 2004 and has been earning ever since, about eight hundred pounds a month, and he never touched a penny of it.
Two hundred and eleven thousand pounds.
The third is a page in his handwriting with eleven lines on it, which is a list of what the building needs, with prices, most of them from 2012, most of them now wrong.
It is a costing for turning it back into rehearsal rooms.
He did it in a notebook thirteen years ago and never said one word to either of his children about it.
PART 5 — THE RED ONE
Dermot opened it in the March. Four rooms, hourly rates, a teaching space at the back.
It is not a going concern yet and it may not be. He has kept the day job and he does three evenings and Saturdays, and I do the books because that is what I am for.
The red suit is on a stand in the front room there.
Everybody who comes in assumes it is a prop.
Give me that, put my coat on. Dad would have hated this.
I said that at the chapel door, with my hand on my brother's jacket, in front of about eleven people who were watching.
I was completely wrong and I have been wrong about the same thing for sixteen years in a row, and both times it came out of my mouth as common sense.
What I have not got past, and what I do not think I am going to, is the arithmetic.
My father sewed that letter into a lining and gave it to a solicitor and set a test with two possible answers, because he could not say four words to his own son in a room.
And the test he chose was whether Dermot would be willing to be looked at.
He was. He walked the length of a chapel in that thing in front of forty people with his sister telling him to take it off.
He passed.
May you like
And the man who set it had failed the same test every day for fifty-five years, in grey, and knew it, and put the whole of it in an envelope instead.
THE END
