All the while I am listening to the church service I am also studying the ants, whose furious activity takes on a different meaning when set to Christianity. I see the inequity of life, the immorality of nature. I consider a larval god controlling the fate of ant and tree, seen by the ants but unseen too, unrecognized for His actions. I hear part of an address about a deaf music teacher, I see the slavery of ants, the isolation of the teacher, the ignorance of an ant, the total domination of a larval god, the acceptance of workers, a tyrannical grub, the solitary teacher, unquestioning ant, a gluttonous writhing larva, a hymn…. It’s one of my favorites:
After the hymn I hear the rector bidding us to pray. Abstractedly I think of Vivien leaning forward so that her head is right next to St. Bartholomew. Perhaps it’s only now she’ll notice her name on his foot. Is it making her smile, I wonder, or is she embarrassed by it? Does it fill her with happy memories, as it does me, or sad ones? Last week I would have sworn I knew the answers, but now I am a lot less certain.
I’m not particularly attentive to the service. It’s become a background for my reflections on the saint’s effigy and my musings on the ants’ subjugation, but I register wafts of sentences that drift towards me, like hearing the comforting drone of a party downstairs while you’re dozing in bed.
“We pray for the poor throughout the world…in our own parish, the elderly, lonely, sick…in particular we ask you to remember…Win Readon, Alfie Tutt, Fred Matravers…Virginia Stone. We pray that you grant them the grace…”
Virginia Stone…? I’ve been watching the industry of a single ant cutting a neat circle round itself on a leaf, and marveling that such a preprogrammed creature has the wit to move out of the circle before it’s detached from the rest of the plant, when I hear myself prayed for—or think I do. I can’t be sure. As I say, I wasn’t really concentrating, but I quickly recall the voice again in my mind and it seems clear, unmistakable: Virginia Stone. I’m astounded. Why on earth are they praying for me? I’m not sick or lonely. I can only think that Vivien has made an excuse for my absence in church.
Let me tell you—because there can’t be many people who’ve experienced it—it really is the most unusual feeling to hear your name prayed for in church, the rector asking for help from a God you don’t believe exists. If only they knew that I’m right here, listening from behind the laurel just beyond the graveyard. I briefly imagine that this is my funeral, that Win Readon, Alfie Tutt and Fred Matravers have somehow got better but I have died, and I’m watching them pay their last respects, Win, Alfie and Fred, who have never met me but had, apparently, been ill with me.
When the service is over the door opens and five dour elderly people file out after the rector. I was expecting the whole village to flood through in a harangue of noise, but there is no throng of shouting children, no Sunday bests, no hats. Vivien emerges deep in conversation with another elderly woman, and they walk along the path to the road. I’m about to leave my hiding spot, anxious to get back to the house before her, when I notice that she’s stopped. She says something quietly to her companion and turns back, walking purposefully and directly towards me, looking straight at me through the stiff, waxy leaves. How on earth did she know I was here? What do I say? She passes three rows of graves and I’m sure our eyes meet. I look down at the ants’ nest again, and at the Maculinea larva, hoping to look studious when she reaches me. But the seconds grow longer and she doesn’t arrive, and when I look up again I see she’s turned right and gone through the gap in the hedge to the graveyard extension, that bit of rectory garden expropriated by the surplus of dead, the bit where our own family is buried. I don’t visit the graves, so it hadn’t occurred to me before that that’s where Vivien is headed, and now it dawns on me that she’s probably not seen me after all. She doesn’t know I’m here squatting on my haunches.
Vivien’s just out of my view, but if she’s at the family graves, she must be standing very close to me, just the other side of the hedge to be precise—but a little behind and to the left. I shuffle back on the dry earth as quietly as possible and stop. I think I can hear her breathing. I rotate a fraction, still crouched, and find that as I peer through a small gap in the leaves, I’m looking at her back, less than five feet away.
Her tweed jacket, a loose weave of sludgy colors, is pulled taut over her shoulders as she hunches down at Maud’s grave. The small slit in the back of her mid-length skirt has opened and ridden up, showing me, through the sheer nylons, the raised purple veins, just like mine, on the backs of her knees. She stays like that for a while, displaying her veins to the laurel and me. I can’t see if she’s fingering the grass or if she’s reading the words on the headstone she designed—just Maud’s name and dates, no more, no other small clue about her for future generations. Death snatches so much substance. All of a sudden Maud became a label on a stone, the nuances of the individual no longer important—her thoughts and desires, her grievances and her passions, the wisdom, knowledge and understanding slowly assimilated throughout her life, all gone.
Vivien rises shakily to her feet and I glimpse a crumpled white handkerchief in her right hand as she steadies herself, leaning on her mother’s stone, almost embracing it. She moves to the next grave, Clive’s, and stands at his feet, reading the headstone she never saw placed, the one that the nuns at his retirement home chose for me. It’s half the size of Maud’s, made of imported, highly polished black granite, which they’d insisted was smarter and cheaper than the local stone. It reads RIP at the top, then simply CLIVE STONE underneath. They’d forgotten the two honorary doctorates, his fellowship of the Royal Society and all the other accolades he’d meticulously collected for his memorial throughout his life. Vivien stays at Clive’s feet long enough to read the three letters and two words, then leaves.
I am now expecting her to stop at the third family grave, the tiny one on Maud’s other side, a small rectangular plot bound by the spiky pieces of flint I’d watched Arthur put round it to mark the edges. Within the flint boundary you can still see, even now, a sharp swelling in the earth, the poignant little hump of a small body shape, as if he’d not even been given a box, as if he’d just been laid on the ground and covered with earth, which was patted down over him, the way children bury themselves on a beach. It looks as if the grave digger, quite understandably, reasoned that as such a small space was needed, it wasn’t worth taking away any of the soil. What soil came out would all go back in and eventually compress over time. As if nothing had ever gone into it at all. But this little knoll was rebelling: it had refused to pack down, to give back the soil its place, and it refused to look as if nothing had gone into the ground at all.