Alone in the house he felt the full weight of exhaustion settle on him like iron shackles. He considered stopping in the living room for a reviving brandy, but there was no fire in the grate and the house suddenly seemed chill and dark. He decided to go straight to bed. The small staircase, with its faded oriental runner, loomed as steep and impassable as Everest’s Hillary Steps. He braced his arm on the polished walnut banister and began to haul himself up the narrow treads. He considered himself to be generally in good health and made a point of doing a full set of stretching exercises every day, including several deep knee bends. Yet today—overcome by the strain, he supposed—he had to pause halfway up the stairs to catch his breath. It occurred to him to wonder what would happen if he passed out and fell. He saw himself lying splayed out across the bottom treads, head down and blue in the face. It might be days before he was found. He had never thought of this before. He shook his shoulders and straightened up his back. It was ridiculous to think of it now, he reprimanded himself. No good acting like a poor old man just because Bertie had died. He took the remaining stairs with as regular and fluid a step as he could manage and did not allow himself to puff and pant until he had gained his bedroom and sunk down on the soft wide bed in relief.

Chapter 3

Two days passed before it occurred to the Major that Mrs. Ali had not called in to check on him and that this had caused him a certain disappointment. The paper boy was quite well again, judging by the ferocity with which the Times was thrown at his front door. He had had his share of other visitors. Alice Pierce from next door had come round yesterday with a hand-painted condolence card and a casserole dish of what she said was her famous organic vegetarian lasagna and informed him that it was all over the village that he had lost his brother. There was enough of the pale brown and green mush to feed an army of organic vegetarian friends. Unfortunately, he did not have the same kind of Bohemian friends as Alice and so the dish was now fermenting in his refrigerator, spreading its unpleasant plankton smell into the milk and butter. Today, Daisy Green, the Vicar’s wife, dropped by unannounced with her usual entourage of Alma Shaw and Grace DeVere from the Flower Guild and insisted on making him a cup of tea in his own house. Usually it made the Major chuckle to see the trinity of ladies going about the business of controlling all social and civic life in the village. Daisy had seized the simple title of Flower Guild chairwoman and used it to endow herself with full noblesse oblige. The other ladies swam in her wake like frightened ducklings, as she flew about offering unsolicited advice and issuing petty directives which somehow people found it easier to follow than refuse. It amused him that Father Christopher, the Vicar, thought he chose his own sermons and that Alec Shaw, retired from the Bank of England, was made to join the Halloween Fun Committee and host junior pétanque on the village green despite being almost medically allergic to children. It amused him less when, treating their spinster friend as a project, Daisy and Alma would ask Grace to play her harp or greet people at the door at various charity events, while consigning certain other unattached ladies to cloakroom and tea serving duties. Even today, they had conspired to make a presentation of Grace. She was fully primped, her slightly elongated face made papery with pale powder and a girly pink lipstick, a coquettish scarf tied in a bow under her left ear as if she were off to a party.

Grace was actually quite a sharp and pleasant woman at times. She was very knowledgeable about roses and about local history. The Major remembered a conversation they had enjoyed in the church one day, when he had found her carefully examining seventeenth-century wedding records. She had worn white cotton gloves to protect the books from her fingers and had been unconcerned about her own clothes, which had been coated with soft dust. “Look,” she had whispered, a magnifying lens held close to the pale brown ink scribbles of an ancient vicar. “It says, ‘Mark Salisbury married this day to Daniela de Julien, late of La Rochelle.’ This is the first record of Huguenots settling in the village.” He had stayed with her a half hour or so, watching her page reverently through the subsequent years, looking for hints and clues to the tangle of old families in the area. He had offered to lend her a recent history of Sussex that might be of use, only to find that she had a copy already. She also owned several more 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.