“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 crème 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 Cléry 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 façade 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 frown, which, he admitted, might be the simple result of unfortunately prominent eyebrows. It was a ridiculous and indefensible dislike, the Major had more than once admonished himself, but it caused his hand to once again tighten around the head of his cane as he marched over the grass and in at the door. The shop bell’s tinkle made the young man look up from his task. He nodded and the Major gave a slightly smaller nod in return and looked around for Mrs. Ali.

The store contained a single small counter and cash register up front, backed by a display of cigarettes and a lottery machine. Four narrow but clean aisles stretched back through the low-ceilinged rectangular room. They contained a well-stocked but plain selection of foods. There were beans and bread, teabags and dried pasta, frozen curries and bags of curly chips and chicken nuggets for children’s suppers. There was also a large array of chocolates and sweets, a card section, the newspapers. Only the canisters of loose tea and a dish of homemade samosas hinted at Mrs. Ali’s exotic heritage. There was an awkward extension in the back that contained a small area of bulk items like dry dog food, potting soil, some kind of chicken pellets, and plastic-wrapped multipacks of Heinz baked beans. The Major couldn’t imagine who purchased bulk items here. Everyone did their main shopping at the supermarket in Hazelbourne-on-Sea or drove to the new superstore and outlet center in Kent. It was also possible to hop over to France on a cheap ferry, and he often saw his neighbors staggering home with giant boxes of washing powder and strangely shaped bottles of cheap foreign beer from the Calais hypermarket. For most people, the village shop was strictly for when one had run out of something, especially late at night. The Major noticed that they never thanked Mrs. Ali for being open until eight on weeknights and also on Sunday mornings, but they loved to mumble about the prices being high and they speculated about Mrs. Ali’s income from being an authorized lottery dealer.