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 1950s: “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.
“Ah, Mike,” she said. “That is so kind of you.” Using both hands she lifted the veil so that he could see her clear gray eyes.
The procession wound past the hospital and came to the church square. Mr. Cranefield had arranged a small after-funeral party, as a favor to Barbara, who had no real home. Some were coming and some were not; the latter now began to say good-bye. Geneviève, whose face was like a pink sponge because she had been crying so hard, flung herself at James, who let her embrace him. Over his governess’s dark shoulder he saw the faces of people who had given him secondhand clothes, thus (he believed) laying waste to his life. He smashed their faces to particles, left the particles dancing in the air like midges until they dissolved without a sound. Wait, he was thinking. Wait, wait.
Mr. Cranefield wondered if Molly was going to become her mother’s hostage, her moral bail — if Barbara would hang on to her to show that Alec’s progeny approved of her. He remembered Molly’s small, anxious face, and how worried she had been about St. George. “You will grow up, you know,” he said, which was an odd thing to say, since she was quite tall. They walked down the path Wilkinson had not been able to climb in his car. She stared at him. “I mean, when you grow up you will be free.” She shook her head. She knew better than that now, at fourteen: There was no freedom except to cease to love. She would love her brothers when they had stopped thinking much about her: women’s fidelity. This would not keep her from fighting them, inch by inch, over money, property, remnants of the past: women’s insecurity. She would hound them and pester them about Alec’s grave, and Barbara’s old age, and where they were all to be buried: women’s sense of order. They would by then be another James, an alien Will, a different Molly.
Mr. Cranefield’s attention slipped from Molly to Alec to the funeral, to the extinction of one sort of Englishman and the emergence of another. Most people looked on Wilkinson as a prewar survival, what with his “I say’s” and “By Jove’s,” but he was really an English mutation, a new man, wearing the old protective coloring. Alec would have understood his language, probably, but not the person behind it. A landscape containing two male figures came into high relief in Mr. Cranefield’s private image of the world, as if he had been lent trick spectacles. He allowed the vision to fade. Better to stick to the blond pair on his desk; so far they had never let him down. I am not impulsive, or arrogant, he explained to himself. No one would believe the truth about Wilkinson even if he were to describe it. I shall not insist, he decided, or try to have the last word. I am not that kind of fool. He breathed slowly, as one does when mortal danger has been averted.
The mourners attending Mr. Cranefield’s party reached the motor road and began to straggle across: It was a point of honor for members of the British colony to pay absolutely no attention to cars. The two widows had fallen back, either so that Barbara could make an entrance, or because the older woman believed it would not be dignified for her to exhibit haste. A strong west wind flattened the black dresses against their breasts and lifted their thick veils.
How will he hear me, Molly wondered. You could speak to someone in a normal grave, for earth is porous and seems to be life, of a kind. But how to speak across marble? Even if she were to place her hands flat on the marble slab, it would not absorb a fraction of human warmth. She had to tell him what she had done — how it was she, Molly, who had led the intruder home, let him in, causing Alec, always courteous, to remove himself first to the hospital, then farther on. Disaster, the usual daily development, had to have a beginning. She would go back to the cemetery, alone, and say it, whether or not he could hear. The disaster began with two sentences: “Mummy, this is Mr. Wilkinson. Mr. Wilkinson wants to tell you how he came to drive me home.”
Barbara descended the steps to Mr. Cranefield’s arm in arm with her new friend, who was for the first time about to see the inside of an English house. “Look at that,” said the older widow. One of the peacocks had taken shelter from the wind in Mr. Cranefield’s electric lift. A minute earlier Alec’s sister had noticed, too, and had thought something that seemed irrefutable: No power on earth would ever induce her to eat a peacock.
Who is to say I never loved Alec, said Barbara, who loved Wilkinson. He was high-handed, yes, laying down the law as long as he was able, but he was always polite. Of course I loved him. I still do. He will have to be buried properly, where we can plant something — white roses. The mayor told me that every once in a while they turn one of the Russians out, to make room. There must be a waiting list. We could put Alec’s name on it. Alec gave me three children. Eric gave me Lou Mas.
Entering Mr. Cranefield’s, she removed her dark veil and hat and revealed her lovely head, like the sun rising. Because the wind had started blowing leaves and sand, Mr. Cranefield’s party had to be moved indoors from the loggia. This change occasioned some confusion, in which Barbara did not take part; neither did Wilkinson, whose wrenched shoulder was making him feel ill. She noticed her children helping, carrying plates of small sandwiches and silver buckets of ice. She approved of this; they were obviously well brought up. The funeral had left Mr. Cranefield’s guests feeling hungry and thirsty and rather lonely, anxious to hold on to a glass and to talk to someone. Presently their voices rose, overlapped, and created something like a thick woven fabric of blurred design, which Alec’s sister (who was not used to large social gatherings) likened to a flying carpet. It was now, with Molly covertly watching her, that Barbara began in the most natural way in the world to live happily ever after. There was nothing willful about this: She was simply borne in a single direction, though she did keep seeing for a time her black glove on her widowed friend’s black sleeve.