From the Fifteenth District (17 page)

On market days Molly often saw their old housemaid or the laundress. They asked for news of Alec, which made Molly feel cold and shy. She was dressed very like them now, in a cotton frock and roped-soled shoes from a market stall. “Style is all you need to bring it off,” Barbara had assured her, but she had none, at least not that kind. It was Molly who chose what the family would eat, who looked at prices and kept accounts and counted her change. Barbara was entirely busy with Alec at the hospital, and with Wilkinson at home. With love, she had lost her craving for nursery breakfasts. She sat at table smoking, watching Wilkinson telling stories. When Wilkinson was there, he did much of the cooking. Molly was grateful for that.

The new people at Lou Mas had everyone’s favor. If there had been times when the neighbors had wondered how Barbara and Alec could possibly have met, the Malayan planter and his jolly wife were an old novel known by heart. They told about jungle terrorists, and what the British ought to be doing, and they described the owner of Lou Mas – a Welshman who was planning to go into politics. Knowing Barbara to be Irish, no one could place the Welshman. The story started up that
Barbara’s family were bankrupt and had sold Lou Mas to a Welsh war profiteer.

Mrs. Massie presented the new people with
Flora’s Gardening Encyclopaedia
. “It is by way of being a classic,” she said. “Seventeen editions. I do all my typing myself.”

“Ah, well, poor Barbara,” everyone said now. What could you expect? Luckily for her, she had Wilkinson. Wilkinson’s star was rising. “Don’t underestimate Rommel” had been said to some effect – there was a mention in the
Sunday Telegraph
. “Wilkinson goes everywhere. He’s invited to everything at Monte Carlo. He must positively live on lobster salad.” “Good for old Wilkinson. Why shouldn’t he?” Wilkinson had had a bad war, had been a prisoner somewhere.

Who imagined that story, Mr. Cranefield wondered. Some were mixing up Wilkinson with the dying Alec, others seemed to think Alec was already dead. By August it had become established that Wilkinson had been tortured by the Japanese and had spent the years since trying to leave the memory behind. He never mentioned what he’d been through, which was to his credit. Barbara and three kids must have been the last thing he wanted, but that was how it was with Wilkinson – too kind for his own good, all too ready to lend a hand, to solve a problem. Perhaps, rising, he would pull the Webbs with him. Have you seen that girl hanging about in the market? You can’t tell her from the butcher’s child.

From Alec’s bedside Barbara wrote a long letter to her favorite brother, the pilot, Mike. She told about Alec, “sleeping so peacefully as I write,” and described the bunch of daisies Molly had put in a jug on the windowsill, and how well Will had done in his finals (“He will be the family intellectual, a second Alec”), and finally she came round to the matter of
Wilkinson: “You probably saw the rave notice in the
Telegraph
, but you had no way of knowing of course it was someone I knew. Well, here is the whole story. Please, Mike, do keep it to yourself for the moment, you know how Ron takes things sometimes.” Meeting Eric had confirmed her belief there was something in the universe more reasonable than God – at any rate more logical. Eric had taken a good look at the Lou Mas cottage and thought something might be done with it after all. “You will adore Eric,” she promised. “He is marvellous with the children and so kind to Alec,” which was true.

“Are you awake, love?” She moistened a piece of cotton with mineral water from a bottle that stood on the floor (Alec had no table) and wet his lips with it, then took his hand, so light it seemed hollow, and held it in her own, telling him quietly about the Lou Mas cottage, where he would occupy a pleasant room overlooking the sea. He flexed his fingers; she bent close: “Yes, dear; what is it, dear?” For the first time since she’d known him he said, “Mother.” She waited; but no, that was all. She saw herself on his balcony at Lou Mas in her white dressing gown, her hair in the sun, saw what the gardener would have been struck by if only he had looked up. She said to herself, “I gave Alec three beautiful children. That is what he is thanking me for now.”

Her favorite brother had been away from England when her letter came, so that it was late in September when he answered to call her a bitch, a trollop, a crook, and a fool. He was taking up the question of her gigolo boyfriend with the others. They had been supporting Alec’s family for three years. If she thought they intended to take on her lover (this written above a word scratched out); and here the letter ended. She went white, as her children did, easily. She said to
Wilkinson, “Come and talk in the car, where we can be quiet,” for they were seldom alone.

She let him finish reading, then said, in a voice that he had never heard before but that did not seem to surprise him – “I grew up blacking my brothers’ boots. Alec was the first man who ever held a door open for me.”

He said, “Your brothers all did well,” without irony, meaning there was that much to admire.

“Oh,” she said, “If you are comparing their chances with Alec’s, if that’s what you mean – the start Alec had. Well, poor Alec. Yes, a better start. I often thought, Well, there it is with him, that’s the very trouble – a start too good.”

This exchange, this double row of cards faceup, seemed all they intended to reveal. They instantly sat differently, she straighter, he more relaxed.

Wilkinson said, “Which one of them actually owns Lou Mas?”

“Equal shares, I think. Though Desmond has power of attorney and makes all the decisions. Alec and I
own
Lou Mas, but only legally. They put it in our name because we were emigrating. It made it easier for them, with all the taxes. We had three years, and not a penny in rent.”

Wilkinson said, in a kind of anguish, “Oh, God bless my soul.”

It was Wilkinson’s English lawyer friend in Monte Carlo who drew up the papers with which Alec signed his share of Lou Mas over to Barbara and Alec and Barbara revoked her brother’s power of attorney. Alec, his obedient hand around a pen and the hand firmly held in Barbara’s, may have known what he was doing but not why. The documents were then put
in the lawyer’s safe to await Alec’s death, which occurred not long after.

T
he doctor, who had sat all night at the bedside, turning Alec’s head so that he would not strangle vomiting (for that was not the way he wished him to die), heard him breathing deeply and ever more deeply and then no longer. Alec’s eyes were closed, but the doctor pressed the lids with his fingers. Believing in his own and perhaps Alec’s damnation, he stood for a long time at the window while the roof and towers of the church became clear and flushed with rose; then the red rim of the sun emerged, and turned yellow, and it was as good as day.

There was only one nurse in the hospital, and a midwife on another floor. Summoning both, he told them to spread a rubber sheet under Alec, and wash him, and put clean linen on the bed.

At that time, in that part of France, scarcely anyone had a telephone. The doctor walked down the slope on the far side of Rivabella and presented himself unshaven to Barbara in her nightdress to say that Alec was dead. She dressed and came at once; there was no one yet in the streets to see her and to ask who she was. Eric followed, bringing the clothes in which Alec would be buried. All he could recall of his prayers, though he would not have said them around Barbara, were the first words of the Collect: “Almighty Cod, unto whom all hearts be open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid.”

Barbara had a new friend – her French widowed landlady. It was she who arranged to have part of Barbara’s wardrobe dyed black within twenty-four hours, who lent her a black hat and
gloves and a long crêpe veil. Barbara let the veil down over her face. Her friend, whose veil was tied round her hat and floated behind her, took Barbara by the arm, and they walked to the cemetery and stood side by side. The Webbs’ former servants were there, and the doctor, and the local British colony. Some of the British thought the other woman in black must be Barbara’s Irish mother: only the Irish poor or the Royal Family ever wore mourning of that kind.

The graveyard was so cramped and small, so crowded with dead from the time of Garibaldi and before, that no one else could be buried. The coffins of the recent dead were stored in cells in a thick concrete wall. The cells were then sealed, and a marble plaque affixed in lieu of a tombstone. Alec had to be lifted to shoulder level, which took the strength of several persons – the doctor, Mr. Cranefield, Barbara’s brothers, and Alec’s young sons. (Wilkinson would have helped, but he had already wrenched his shoulder quite badly carrying the coffin down the hospital steps.) Molly thrust her way into this crowd of male mourners. She said to her mother, “Not you – you never loved him.”

God knows who might have heard that, Barbara thought.

Actually, no one had, except for Mrs. Massie. Believing it to be true, she dismissed it from memory. She was composing her own obituary: “Two generations of gardeners owed their …” “Two generations of readers owed their gardens …”

“Our Father,” Alec’s sister said, hoping no one would notice and mistake her for a fraud. Nor did she wish to have a scrap of consideration removed from Barbara, whose hour this was. Her own loss was beyond remedy, and so not worth a mention. There was no service – nothing but whispering and silence. To his sister, it was as if Alec had been left, stranded
and alone, in a train stalled between stations. She had not seen him since the day he left England, and had refused to look at him dead. Barbara was aware of Diana, the mouse, praying like a sewing machine somewhere behind her. She clutched the arm of the older widow and thought, I know, I know, but she can get a job, can’t she? I was working when I met Alec, wasn’t I? But what Diana Webb meant by “work” was the fine stitching her own mother had done to fill time, not for a living. In Diana’s hotel room was a box containing the most exquisite and impractical child’s bonnet and coat made from some of the white silk Alec had sent her from India, before the war. Perhaps a luxury shop in Monte Carlo or one of Barbara’s wealthy neighbors would be interested. Perhaps there was an Anglican clergyman with a prosperous parish. She opened her eyes and saw that absolutely no one in the cemetery looked like Alec – not even his sons.

The two boys seemed strange, even to each other, in their dark, new suits. The word “father” had slipped out of their grasp just now. A marble plaque on which their father’s name was misspelled stood propped against the wall. The boys looked at it helplessly.

Is that all? people began wondering. What happens now?

Barbara turned away from the wall and, still holding the arm of her friend, led the mourners out past the gates.

It was I who knew what he wanted, the doctor believed. He had told me long before. Asked me to promise, though I refused. I heard his last words. The doctor kept telling himself this. “I heard his last words” – though Alec had not said anything, had merely breathed, then stopped.

“Her father was a late Victorian poet of some distinction,” Mrs. Massie’s obituary went on.

Will, who was fifteen, was no longer a child, did not look like Alec, spoke up in that high-pitched English of his: “Death is empty without God.” Now where did that come from? Had he heard it? Read it? Was he performing? No one knew. Later, he would swear that at that moment a vocation had come to light, though it must have been born with him – bud within the bud, mind within the mind. I will buy back your death, he would become convinced he had said to Alec. Shall enrich it; shall refuse the southern glare, the southern void. I shall pay for your solitude, your humiliation. Shall demand for myself a stronger life, a firmer death. He thought, later, that he had said all this, but he had said and thought only five words.

As they shuffled out, all made very uncomfortable by Will, Mrs. Massie leaned half on her stick and half on James, observing, “You were such a little boy when I saw you for the first time at Lou Mas.” Because his response was silence, she supposed he was waiting to hear more. “You three must stick together now. The Three Musketeers.” But they were already apart.

Major Lamprey found himself walking beside the youngest of the Laceys. He told Mike what he told everyone now – why he had not moved to Malta. It was because he did not trust the Maltese. “Not that one can trust anyone here,” he said. “Even the mayor belongs to an anarchist movement, I’ve been told. Whatever happens, I intend to die fighting on my own doorstep.”

The party was filing down a steep incline. “You will want to be with your family,” Mrs. Massie said, releasing James and leaning half her weight on Mr. Cranefield instead. They picked up with no trouble a conversation dropped the day before. It was about how Mr. Cranefield – rather, his other self, E. C. Arden – was likely to fare in the second half of the
nineteen-fifties: “It is a question of your not being too modern and yet not slipping back,” Mrs. Massie said. “I never have to worry. Gardens don’t change.”

“I am not worried about new ideas,” he said. “Because there are none. But words, now. ‘Permissive.’ ”

“What’s that?”

“It was in the
Observer
last Sunday. I suppose it means something. Still. One mustn’t. One can’t. There are limits.”

Barbara met the mayor coming the other way, too late, carrying a wreath with a purple ribbon on which was written, in gold, “From the Municipality – Sincere Respects.” Waiting for delivery of the wreath had made him tardy. “For a man who never went out, Alec made quite an impression,” Mrs. Massie remarked.

“His funeral was an attraction,” said Mr. Cranefield.

“Can one call that a funeral?” She was still thinking about her own.

Mike Lacey caught up to his sister. They had once been very close. As soon as she saw him she stood motionless, bringing the line behind her to a halt. He said he knew this was not the time or place, but he had to let her know she was not to worry. She would always have a roof over her head. They felt responsible for Alec’s children. There were vague plans for fixing up the cottage. They would talk about it later on.