deprived even of his identity. After all, he was a man, too, somebody may have loved him, he may have had children. Suddenly he seems to me the most injured of all. I’d like just to see what they gave him to last him till doomsday. You did say there was a stone?”
“Hewitt said so. I wondered who paid for it.”
“I wonder, too. Where do you suppose he’d be? It’s a burial only two and a half years old. I should think that would be in the new part.”
They passed by the vestry door, and the Vicar came out in his cassock, and joined them as naturally as one stream joins another. He had the hymn-board for the evening service in one hand, and a fistful of numbers in the other, and went on placidly slotting them into their places as he walked.
“Dan, you’re just the man we need,” said Simon. “We’re looking for a grave. The man you buried as Walter Ruiz, a couple of years or so ago.”
“You’re heading the wrong way, then,” said the Vicar tranquilly, neither missing nor acknowledging the doubt thus cast on the recorded identity, as though it did not matter one way or the other. “He was a seaman, we made room for him among the older graves, where all the mid-nineteenth-century sailors are. I thought he’d be more at home. This way!”
He led them, skirts fluttering round his Great-Dane strides, along a thread-like path swept darker in the high grass, to a remote corner in the angle of the stone wall, shaded with thorn trees.
“235,” read Simon aloud, deciphering the numbers on the hymn-board upside-down. “Abelard’s hymn. Maybe I should come to church to-night.”
“Maybe you should, but don’t expect me to tell you so.”
“You won’t believe this, but I used to sing in the choir. Alto. I could sing alto before my voice broke, and after. I still can, it’s a technique I was somehow born with. There’s a splendid alto to ‘
“ ‘Vere Jerusalem est ilia civitas,
Cuius pax iugis et summa iucunditas,
Ubi non praevenit rem desiderium,
Nec desiderio minus est premium.’
Wish and fulfilment can severed be ne’er, nor the thing prayed for come short of prayer! That always seemed to me the most perfect of all definitions of heaven. But then, look who wrote it, poor devil! He knew all about wish and non-fulfilment, and things falling short.”
“Simon,” said the Vicar, “I don’t know whether I really ought to admire you for it, but you must be the only fellow I ever met with the effrontery to think of Abelard as a poor devil. Here you are, here’s—” He had been about to say “Walter Ruiz”; instead he said, courteously but serenely: “—the man you’re looking for.”
A low, cropped grave, turfed over within a granite kerb, under the bough of a hawthorn tree. Grey old stones, seamed with fine viridian moss, leaning all round. A plain pillow stone at the head of the small enclosure, and inscribed on it:
WALTER RUIZ
Born May 8th, 1929,
Drowned, March, 1962.
“I will bring my people again
from the depths
of the sea.”
“He wasn’t Ruiz, you know,” said Simon, standing gazing down at it with a shadowed face. “Nobody’ll ever know now who he really was. I don’t know why, but I feel bad about that. Even if we could think of him by a name, and a face, and say: Poor old Smith, three years next month since he was washed up!—even that would be something, give him a place to exist in, a dimension in which he’d be real. But now he’s nobody.”
“He’s as surely somebody,” said the Vicar placidly, “as you are. And nothing could be much surer than that.”
“But who? Doesn’t that matter?”
“It matters who. It doesn’t matter that we should know who. He’s been identified,” said the Vicar, tucking his hymn-board under his arm, “a long time ago, in the only way that matters in the least now. And by a witness who doesn’t make mistakes.”
“Yes—I see your point.‘I will bring my people again from the depths of the sea.’ Yes, he might have done worse. Who provided the stone? You?”
“It’s always been the tradition that the dead from the sea, who had no families here to bury them, should be a charge on the church. Look round you, if you think a foreign name makes a man a stranger here.”
They looked. Half the sea-faring nations of the west lay there quietly enough together, with the scent of the salt shore for ever in the wind that stirred the pale grasses over them. Edvard Kekonnen, seaman. Hugh O’Neill, master-mariner. Alfonso Nunez, master-mariner. Vassilis Kondrakis, seaman. Two Spanish shipmates, unknown by name. Sean MacPeake, master-mariner. Jean Plouestion, fisherman. Walter Ruiz, or X, fisherman, seaman or master-mariner. “I will bring my people again from the depths of the sea.” It didn’t much matter if no one else knew what to call them, the voice they were listening for would have all their names right.
“Yes,” said Simon, a small, wry smile curling the corners of his mouth, “this is the point of departure for a good many heavens, seemingly, Valhalla, Tir-nan-Og, the lot. It’s the sea-going men who made the western islands heaven, I suppose.” He slipped into song again, very softly:
“
It sounds like Jan Treverra himself designing that paradise, doesn’t it?
“ ‘
“I was thinking much the same thing,” agreed George, smiling. “What was it Dom said about your two epitaphs, that first evening we were up at the Place with you? Something about making the after-life sound like a sunshine cruise to the Bahamas.”
