suitable) they had sent a very large wreath to the funeral home.
“I am sorry I did not have an opportunity to meet your lovely wife,” said Mrs. Ali, handing him a cup.
“Yes, she’s been gone some six years now,” he said. “Funny really, it seems like both an eternity and the blink of an eye all at the same time.”
“It is very dislocating,” she said. Her crisp enunciation, so lacking among many of his village neighbors, struck him with the purity of a well-tuned bell. “Sometimes my husband feels as close to me as you are now, and sometimes I am quite alone in the universe,” she added.
“You have family, of course.”
“Yes, quite an extended family.” He detected a dryness in her tone. “But it is not the same as the infinite bond between a husband and wife.”
“You express it perfectly,” he said. They drank their tea and he felt a sense of wonder that Mrs. Ali, out of the context of her shop and in the strange setting of his own living room, should be revealed as a woman of such great understanding. “About the housecoat,” he said.
“Housecoat?”
“The thing I was wearing.” He nodded to where it now lay in a basket of
“I have an old tweed jacket that my husband used to wear,” she said softly. “Sometimes I put it on and take a walk around my garden. And sometimes I put his pipe in my mouth to taste the bitterness of his tobacco.” She flushed a warmer shade and lowered her deep brown eyes to the floor, as if she had said too much. The Major noticed the smoothness of her skin and the strong lines of her face.
“I still have some of my wife’s clothes, too,” said the Major. “After six years, I don’t know if they still smell of her perfume or whether I just imagine it.” He wanted to tell her how he sometimes opened the closet door to thrust his face against the nubby suits and the smooth chiffon blouses. Mrs. Ali looked up at him and behind her heavy- lidded eyes he thought she too might be thinking of such absurd things.
“Are you ready for more tea?” she asked and held out her hand for his cup.
When Mrs. Ali had left, she making her excuses for having invited herself into his home and he making his apologies for inconveniencing her with his dizzy spell, the Major donned his housecoat once more and went back to the small scullery beyond the kitchen to finish cleaning his gun. He was conscious of tightness around his head and a slight burn in the throat. This was the dull ache of grief in the real world; more dyspepsia than passion.
He had left a small china cup of mineral oil warming on its candle stand. He dipped his fingers in the hot oil and began to rub it slowly into the burled walnut root of the gun stock. The wood became silk under his fingertips. He relaxed into his task and felt his grief ease, making room for the tiniest flowering of a new curiosity.
Mrs. Ali was, he half suspected, an educated woman, a person of culture. Nancy had been such a rare person, too, fond of her books and of little chamber concerts in village churches. But she had left him alone to endure the blunt tweedy concerns of the other women of their acquaintance. Women who talked horses and raffles at the hunt ball and who delighted in clucking over which unreliable young mother from the council cottages had messed up arrangements for this week’s play group at the Village Hall. Mrs. Ali was more like Nancy. She was a butterfly to their scuffle of pigeons. He acknowledged a notion that he might wish to see Mrs. Ali again outside of the shop, and wondered whether this might be proof that he was not as ossified as his sixty-eight years, and the limited opportunities of village life, might suggest.
Bolstered by the thought, he felt that he was up to the task of phoning his son, Roger, in London. He wiped his fingertips on a soft yellow rag and peered with concentration at the innumerable chrome buttons and LED displays of the cordless phone, a present from Roger. Its speed dial and voice activation capabilities were, Roger said, useful for the elderly. Major Pettigrew disagreed on both its ease of use and the designation of himself as old. It was frustratingly common that children were no sooner gone from the nest and established in their own homes, in Roger’s case a gleaming black-and-brass-decorated penthouse in a high-rise that blighted the Thames near Putney, than they began to infantilize their own parents and wish them dead, or at least in assisted living. It was all very Greek, the Major thought. With an oily finger, he managed to depress the button marked “1—Roger Pettigrew, VP, Chelsea Equity Partners,” which Roger had filled in with large, childlike print. Roger’s private equity firm occupied two floors in a tall glass office tower in London’s Docklands; as the phone rang with a metallic ticking sound, the Major imagined Roger in his unpleasantly sterile cubicle with the battery of computer monitors and the heap of files for which some very expensive architect had not bothered to provide drawers.
Roger had already heard.
“Jemima has taken on the call-making. The girl’s hysterical, but there she is, calling everyone and his dog.”
“It helps to keep busy,” suggested the Major.
“More like wallowing in the whole bereaved-daughter role, if you ask me,” said Roger. “It’s a bit off, but then they’ve always been that way, haven’t they?” His voice was muffled and the Major assumed this meant he was once again eating at his desk.
“That’s unnecessary, Roger,” he said firmly. Really, his son was becoming as unedited as Marjorie’s family. The city was full of blunt, arrogant young men these days and Roger, approaching thirty, showed few signs of evolving past their influence.
“Sorry, Dad. I’m very sorry about Uncle Bertie.” There was a pause. “I’ll always remember when I had chicken pox and he came over with that model plane kit. He stayed all day helping me glue all those tiny bits of balsa together.”
“As I recall you broke it against the window the next day, after you’d been warned against flying it indoors.”
“Yeah, and you used it as kindling for the kitchen stove.”
“It was broken to pieces. No sense in wasting it.” The memory was quite familiar to them both. The same story came up over and over at family parties. Sometimes it was told as a joke and they all laughed. Sometimes it was a cautionary lecture to Jemima’s willful son. Today the hint of reproach was showing along the seams.
“Will you come down the night before?” asked the Major.
“No, I’ll take the train. But listen, Dad, don’t wait for me. It’s possible I might get stuck.”
“Stuck?”
“I’m swamped. There’s a big flap on. Two billion dollars, tricky buyout of the corporate bonds—and the client’s nervous. I mean, let me know when it’s finalized, and it’ll go in my calendar as a ‘must,’ but you never know.” The Major wondered how he was usually featured in his son’s calendar. He imagined himself flagged with a small yellow sticky note—important but not time sensitive, perhaps.
The funeral was set for Tuesday.
“It seemed good for most people,” Marjorie said on her second call. “Jemima has her evening class on Mondays and Wednesdays and I have a bridge tournament on Thursday night.”
“Bertie would want you to carry on,” the Major replied, feeling a slight acid tone creep into his voice. He was sure the funeral had also been scheduled around available beauty appointments. She would want to make sure her stiff wave of yellow hair was freshly sculpted and her skin toned or waxed—or whatever she did to achieve a face like stretched leather. “I suppose Friday is out?” he added.
He had just made a doctor’s appointment for Tuesday. The receptionist at the surgery had been very understanding given the circumstances and had immediately insisted on moving a perennially asthmatic child to Friday in order to squeeze in his EKG. He didn’t like the idea of canceling.
“The Vicar has Youth-in-Crisis.”
“I assume the youth are in crisis every week,” said the Major sharply. “It’s a funeral, for God’s sake. Let them put the needs of others ahead of their own for once. It might teach them something.”
“The funeral director felt that Fridays were inappropriately festive for a funeral.”
“Oh…” He was rendered speechless and defeated by the absurdity. “Well, I’ll see you Tuesday, then, about four o’clock?”
“Yes. Is Roger going to drive you?”
“No, he’ll come straight from London by train and take a taxi. I’ll drive.”
“Are you sure you’ll be all right?” asked Marjorie. She sounded quite genuinely concerned and the Major felt a
