'That's something I'll never forget,' the secretary said. 'I mean, all those Americans there, Rangers and Green Berets, and that unit pennant on old GG's coffin, and that big sergeant singing the "Battle Hymn" over the grave. Don't mind admitting it, I was crying fit to bust.'
The empty stool was beside them.
'Sort of humbling,' the treasurer said. 'How wrong can you get? Thought he was just a sad old beggar who lived with his fantasies, and it was all real and we took the piss. You just never know a man, do you? God, we'll miss Gorgeous George…'
They raised their glasses and toasted the vacant stool.
Longer afterwards, the tangles were tidied and the ends knotted.
From behind a desk, Mary Reakes worked with driven energy for the cathedral's International Centre for Reconciliation.
Other ladies with whom she shared office space in the building beside the new cathedral had considered, lightly, opening a sweepstake — with a prize of a tin of chocolates — to be won by the first who saw the incomer smile. They did not know where she had come from, or why — each day her face was set with an undisguised chill — and her cubicle had no decoration except old and new postcards from the Iraqi capital, Baghdad. She did not share.
The head teacher of a secondary school said to her deputy, 'I think Julian's settled in well. Don't understand him. Can't imagine why a man with his qualifications wants to make his life here, the back end of Adelaide — must have been something of an earthquake that dropped him down on us.'
'And you don't get anything of explanation from him, or from his partner.'
'She's nice. Vicky's a bit scatterbrain, but the heart's there — she's doing good things in year five's craft class. I hope they stay.'
'I think they will. Most of the new migrants who've had — what did you call it, an earthquake? — some damn great upheaval, they don't have anywhere further to run. Mr Wright and his lady are here to stay.'
Faria looked after her invalid mother and never went further from home than the Khans' corner shop.
Khalid drove a mini-cab in west London, Syed worked in the family's fast-food take-away, and Jamal had started the second year of his business-studies course.
None of them would again be sleepers, or willing to be woken.
Two elderly men, one a retired power-company engineer, the other a retired quantity surveyor studied the stands on which the Horticultural Society's show entries were displayed, and eyed where the judges had laid the prize-winning rosettes.
The engineer said, 'That man, Anne's husband, he's never been seen here before — never put anything in before — and first time up he's taken the gold with his tomatoes.
'I've the impression that he's lived with them since they were two-inch plants, cosseted them and fussed over them, probably slept with them each night. It takes an utter obsession to produce tomatoes of that quality totally life-consuming.'
'What did he do before taking his pension?'
'She's never said, Anne hasn't. Some dreary job in Whitehall, I suppose — and exchanged it for a greenhouse. He's so damned aloof…has the manner of someone who used to think himself important, but it was probably only pushing paper…Maybe I'm wrong, maybe it was life-and-death stuff, but the knife came down and it's exchanged for tomatoes.'
'And that's your Englishman?'
'That's him.'
'Your stranger?'
'Less of a stranger now. He came to us in the spring, now it's the autumn.'
It was only once a year that the bishop visited the village and its priest. It was near the end of the day and a cool wind came from the north, chilled by the high points of the Pyrenees. Leaves fluttered down around them. After the heat of summer, a cruel winter was usual at this lonely, unlovely cluster of homes and its church, which lay between the larger communities of Calacete and Maella.
'And he spends his days here?'
'And his evenings writing letters — which is why you are visiting and can see him for yourself.'
The bishop's body threw a long shadow and the chill wind blustered the cloak he wore. He stared across a slight ravine over bare, fallen rocks and past a long cattle barn that was now broken into disrepair. Beyond it there was a flat space of dull sun-scorched earth where weeds grew high. There the man sat, his back to them. If their voices carried to him he showed no sign of caring that they intruded on the privacy of his space.
'The hospital was in that barn?'
'It was.'
'And the dead were buried where the weeds grow?'
'They were…but it is difficult to be exact about where the graves lie. There are no witnesses in the village. Everyone had been evacuated before the battle for the Ebro began. They were forcibly removed or fled. The village was a shell. When people came back, they had too many bitter memories and they did not believe it correct to relive those dark days…They had chosen the wrong side, they had supported the losers. It is natural that the dead of the defeated should not be honoured.'
'They were difficult times.'
The bishop saw a man, lit by the last of the day's sun, sitting motionless on the hard ground. The man, he thought, was well built in an athletic way and had none of the flab of middle age. His hair was tousled in the wind. Too young a man to be so captured by the dead: a man of an age at which life still stretched ahead and where ambition for the future should not be denied. In the files at his office, the bishop had seven translated letters from this man, all signed 'Respectfully, David Banks', and all written in a clear, strong hand.
'And he has been to other battlefields before coming and staying in your village?'
'He went to the old barracks at Albacete, then to Madrid. He has walked in the Jarama valley and at Brunete, and he has been down to the Ebro river…He did all of that before he came to us and took a lodging in the village. He has lived here very simply. He does not take alcohol and he is polite in all his dealings with us. Each day he leaves the village and walks up — past where we are now — to the barn where the wounded were treated, and where some died, and then he goes to the place where it is said the graves were dug. He has been there when the sun was fierce on him, without shade, and when the rain has tipped on him, without shelter…and he has written those letters to you.'
'And I, alone, have the power to free him?'
'I believe so.'
'Then it has to be done…'
The bishop grimaced, then hitched up the hem of his robe and strode away. The priest hurried after him. Helping each other, they scrambled down the loose stones and the dried dirt of the ravine. In its pit were old and rusted tins that might have held rations issued to combatants. There were three aged shell cases with lichen surviving on them. On their hands and knees they scaled the far edge of the ravine. They came to the barn where the walls of stone — still bore the pockmarks of bullets. The bishop paused there, at a doorway that had no door, gazed inside, and his eyes peeled away the interior's darkness. He imagined he looked into the hell of an abattoir, and he murmured a prayer for those who had died there close to seven decades before. He seemed to hear the moaning of the wounded and the cries of those who were past saving. On the flat ground, the priest hung back, but the bishop tramped on, crushing weeds under his feet. He came to the man, walked round him, then lowered himself, placed his weight on a rock and was in front of him.
'You are David Banks?'
'I am.' He was answered in halting Spanish.
'You have written many letters to me.'