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.
The 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 God, 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 around 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.