Amagansett

murmurings.

They started spending more time together, playing chess with a set the Professor had recovered from the rubble of a bombed-out farmhouse. Each time the regiment advanced they split the chess pieces between them so that only half the set would have to be replaced should either man step on a mine or take a direct hit from a mortar or a shell.

For the first few weeks their games were conducted in near silence, each man alone with his thoughts, his strategy. But with time their friendship found a precarious footing, the only kind possible under the circumstances. Experience dictated that to know a man too well was only to store up unnecessary grief for the future. As the fighting increased in ferocity Conrad came to appreciate the true value of their chess games. They permitted him to keep functioning at a certain level of aggression, the right combative pitch. He feared what might happen if he ever allowed himself to come down in between the fire-fights, to think about what he was doing, what he had done. Chess, it seemed, was his way of dealing with things, of keeping going. Others had theirs.

Some talked big and brave and carved notches into their rifle butts. Others retreated into themselves, drawing on resources they never knew they had. Others sought refuge in humor, black as the night at a new moon. You did what you did to get through, that was all. The Professor was no different, turning to science for his crutch, laying his theory on Conrad late one night while they sheltered in a church.

Men died, said the Professor, and when they died the microscopic creatures that inhabited their bodies suddenly turned on them and consumed them. Everyone knew that they came first—the micro-organisms, the protozoa, the bacteria. That’s what all life had once been about. But maybe it still was, maybe the evolution of life was a load of bunk. Life, the life that mattered, was the same as it had always been: microscopic. Only its external appearance had changed, the husk it had molded around itself, the tendrils it had sent out—legs to carry it to better feeding grounds or away from danger, hands to kill on its behalf and nourish it. We were like servants, he went on, laboring under illusions of selfimportance, convinced that they’re the true masters of the house. In truth, we nourish the bugs, and then we die, and then they devour us, their vehicle, before moving on.

Conrad could remember thinking at the time that what the poor fellow needed was a spell of leave, a few days’ furlough in Naples—take in a show or two, flirt with some Red Cross girls. But now he found himself reaching for what the Professor had said that night, trying to see sense in it, draw some kind of solace for what had happened to Lillian, for what was happening to her in that coffin.

It didn’t work.

And he knew then that he would break the pledge he had made to himself, the vow muttered through clenched teeth in the garden of the English hospital, beneath the dying heat of a September sun, the long grass in the orchard littered with fallen fruit.

In that moment, he saw with absolute certainty that he would take another human life.

‘Hello.’

Conrad spun, startled. An elderly woman was standing behind him, frail and stooped, her thinning silver hair as light as goose down.

‘Did you know her?’ she asked.

‘No.’

He saw his lie reflected back at him in her rheumy eyes. How long had he been standing at the grave, adrift on his thoughts? Five minutes? Twenty? More? Hardly the actions of someone with no association.

‘She drowned,’ he said. ‘I found her.’

‘Oh, you’re the fisherman.’

‘One of them. I just came by to pay my respects.’

She seemed satisfied with his response, and turned towards the grave. ‘A tragedy. She was a right beauty.’

The East Hampton Star had run a small piece, along with a picture of Lillian taken at some charity event at the Guild Hall, smiling as always.

‘Kind with it. Always found time to speak to an old lady.’

Conrad cast an eye over the washed-out colors of her dress, the cheap handbag, the swollen feet squeezed into scuffed shoes, and he tried to imagine her moving in Lillian’s circle.

As if reading his thoughts, the old lady turned to him. ‘I used to see her here.’

‘Here?’

‘I come every day, sometimes twice. Hubert likes me to come, you see, even if it’s for a few minutes, just to say hello. Oh, I know it sounds silly, and maybe it is, but I live close, on Osborne Lane, just along from the crossing, so it’s no great hardship, though sometimes my joints protest when the wind’s off the ocean.’

Out of politeness, Conrad allowed her to finish.

‘She used to come here?’ he asked. ‘To the cemetery?’

‘Who?’

He nodded at the grave. ‘Lillian Wallace.’

‘Oh yes, almost every week. To visit someone over there.’

She pointed towards the northeast corner of the cemetery.

‘Almost every week,’ she repeated. ‘Always with flowers.’

‘What kind of flowers?’

‘Just…flowers. I don’t know.’

The directness of the question had unsettled her. Why should he care what variety of flowers Lillian Wallace had brought with her?