Coffin Scarcely Used

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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.

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