obscure and wonderful old texts that he ended up borrowing from her. For a brief while, he had considered pursuing their friendship. However, Daisy and Alma had no sooner learned of the conversation than they had begun to interfere. There were coy comments in the street, a whispered word or two at the golf club bar. Finally they had sent Grace to a luncheon date with him, all made up and forced into a hideous silk dress. She looked as ruched and tied as a holiday pork roast. They must have filled her head with advice on men, too, so that she sat and made frozen conversation all through her green salad (no dressing) and plain fish, while he chewed a steak and kidney pie as if it were shoe leather and watched the hands of the pub clock creep unwillingly around the dial. He remembered that he had dropped her at her door with mingled relief and regret.
Today, Grace was left to keep him pinned in the living room with whispery conversation about the weather while Daisy and Alma clattered the cups and banged the tray and talked to him at the tops of their voices from the kitchen. He caught Grace shifting her eyes to the left and right around the room and knew all three of them were inspecting him and his house for signs of neglect and decline. He squirmed in his chair with impatience until the tea was brought in.
“There’s nothing like a good cup of tea from a real china pot, is there?” said Daisy, handing him his cup and saucer. “Biscuit?”
“Thank you,” he said. They had brought him a large tin of assorted “luxury” biscuits. The tin was printed with views of thatched cottages of England and the biscuits were appropriately tumescent; stuffed with fudge, dribbled with pastel icing, or wrapped in assorted foils. He suspected that Alma had picked it out. Unlike her husband, Alec, who was proud of his history as an East End boy, Alma tried hard to forget her origins in London; but she sometimes betrayed herself with a taste for showy luxuries and the sweet tooth of someone who grew up without quite enough to eat. The other ladies, he suspected, were hiding their mortification. He selected an undecorated shortbread and took a bite. The ladies settled themselves on chairs, smiling at him with compassion as if watching a starving cat lap from a saucer of milk. It was somewhat difficult to chew under the scrutiny and he took a large swallow of tea to help the sandy biscuit down. The tea was weak and tasted of paper. He was rendered speechless by the realization that they had brought their own teabags as well.
“Was your brother older than you?” asked Grace. She leaned toward him, her eyes wide with compassion.
“No—younger, actually, by two years.” There was a pause.
“He was ill for some time?” she asked hopefully.
“No, quite sudden, I’m afraid.”
“I’m so, so very sorry.” She fussed with her fingers at the large green stone brooch at her high-collared neck. She cast her eyes down at the carpet, as if looking for a thread of conversation in the geometric patterns of the faded Bokhara. The other ladies busied themselves with their teacups and there was a palpable desire in the room for the conversation to move on. Grace, however, could not find her way out.
“Was his family with him at the end?” she said, looking at him desperately. He was tempted to tell her that no, Bertie had died alone in an empty house and been discovered weeks later by the charlady from next door. It would be satisfying to puncture the vapid conversation with the nail of deliberate cruelty. However, he was aware of the other two women watching her struggle and doing nothing to help.
“His wife was with him when they took him to the hospital and his daughter was able to see him for a few minutes, I understand,” he said.
“Ah, that’s wonderful,” she said.
“Wonderful,” echoed Daisy, and smiled at him as if this wiped away any further obligation to be sad.
“It must be a great comfort to you to know he died surrounded by family,” added Alma. She took a large bite from a fat dark chocolate biscuit. A faint chemical odor of bitter orange reached the Major’s nostrils. He would have liked to reply that this was not so, that he was pierced with pain that no one had thought to call him until it was all over and that he had missed saying goodbye to his younger brother. He wanted to spit this at them, but his tongue felt thick and useless.
“And of course he was surrounded by the comfort of the Lord,” said Daisy. She spoke in an awkward rush as if she were bringing up something vaguely impolite.
“Amen,” whispered Alma, selecting a creme sandwich.
“Oh, go to hell,” whispered the Major into the translucent bottom of his teacup and covered his muttering with a cough.
“Thank you so much for coming,” he said, waving from the doorstep and feeling more generous now that they were leaving.
“We’ll come again soon,” promised Daisy.
“Lovely to see the Vierge de Clery still blooming,” added Grace, touching her fingertips to a nodding stem of white cabbage rose as she slipped through the gate behind them. He wished she had spoken about the roses earlier. The afternoon might have passed more pleasantly. Of course it wasn’t their fault, he reminded himself. They were following the accepted rituals. They were saying what they could at a time when even the finest poetry must fail to comfort. They were probably genuinely concerned for him. Perhaps he had been too churlish.
It surprised him that his grief was sharper than in the past few days. He had forgotten that grief does not decline in a straight line or along a slow curve like a graph in a child’s math book. Instead, it was almost as if his body contained a big pile of garden rubbish full both of heavy lumps of dirt and of sharp thorny brush that would stab him when he least expected it. If Mrs. Ali had dropped in—and he felt again the slight pique that she had not —she would have understood. Mrs. Ali, he was sure, would have let him talk about Bertie. Not the deceased body already liquefying in the ground, but Bertie as he was.
The Major stepped out into the now empty garden to feel the sun on his face, shutting his eyes and breathing slowly to lessen the impact of an image of Bertie in the ground, cold green flesh softening into jelly. He folded his arms over his chest and tried not to sob aloud for Bertie and for himself, that this should be all the fate left to them.
The warmth of the sun held him up and a small brown chaffinch, worrying the leaves of the yew, seemed to chide him for being lugubrious. He opened his eyes to the bright afternoon and decided that he might benefit from a short walk through the village. He might stop in at the village shop to purchase some tea. It would, he thought, be generous of him to make a visit and give the busy Mrs. Ali a chance to make her excuses for not coming to see him.
He had been many decades, as man and boy, in the village of Edgecombe St. Mary, and yet the walk down the hill to the village never ceased to give him pleasure. The lane was steeply cambered to either side, as if the narrow tarmac were the curving roof of some buried chamber. The dense hedges of privet, hawthorn, and beech swelled together as fat and complacent as medieval burghers. The air was scented with their spicy dry fragrance overlaid with the tang of animals in the fields behind the cottages. Garden gates and driveways gave glimpses of well-stocked gardens and thick lawns studded with clover clumps and dandelions. He liked the clover, evidence of the country always pressing in close, quietly sabotaging anyone who tried to manicure nature into suburban submission. As he rounded a curve, the hedges gave way to the plain wire fence of a sheep field and allowed a view of twenty miles of Sussex countryside spreading beyond the roofs of the village below. Behind him, above his own house, the hills swelled upward into the rabbit-cropped grass of the chalk downs. Below him, the Weald of Sussex cradled fields full of late rye and the acid yellow of mustard. He liked to pause at the stile, one foot up on the step, and drink in the landscape. Something—perhaps it was the quality of the light, or the infinite variety of greens in the trees and hedges—never failed to fill his heart with a love of country that he would have been embarrassed to express aloud. Today, he leaned on the stile and tried to let the colors of the landscape soak in and calm him. The business at hand, of visiting the shop, had somehow quickened his heart and overlaid the dullness of grief with an urgent and not unpleasant flutter. The shop lay only a few hundred yards downhill of his position, and the wonders of gravity helped him as he thrust away from the stile and continued to stride down the hill. He made the turn past the Royal Oak at the bottom, its timbered facade almost entirely obscured by hanging baskets of improbably colored petunias, and the shop came into view across the gently rising roundel of the village green.
The orange plastic sign, “Supersaver SuperMart,” winked in the low September sun. Mrs. Ali’s nephew was pasting to the plate glass window a large poster advertising a sale on canned peas; the Major hesitated in mid- stride. He would rather have waited until the nephew was not around. He did not like the young man’s perpetual
