Major Pettigrew's Last Stand

Chapter 5

To tell Mortimer that he had never begrudged Bertie the gun had been a damn lie. Sitting on the seafront, his back pressed against the wooden slats of a park bench, the Major turned his face up to the sun. The sweater absorbed heat as efficiently as a black plastic bin liner, and it was pleasant to sit tucked away in the lee of the fishermen’s black-tarred net-drying sheds, listening to the waves breaking themselves to pieces on the shingle.

There was a generous spirit about nature, he thought. The sun gave its heat and light for free. His spirit by contrast was mean, like a slug shriveling on the bricks at midday. Here he was, alive and enjoying the autumn sunshine, while Bertie was dead. And yet even now he couldn’t give up the niggling annoyance he had felt all these years that Bertie had been given that gun. Nor could he shake the unworthy thought that Bertie knew and was now paying him back for his resentment.

It had been a midsummer day when his mother called him and Bertie into the dining room, where their father lay wasting away from emphysema in his rented hospital bed. The roses were very lush that year, and perfume from the nodding heads of an old pink damask came in at the open French doors. The carved sideboard still displayed his grandmother’s silver soup tureen and candlesticks, but an oxygen pump took up half the surface. He was still angry at his mother for letting the doctor dictate that his father was too frail to sit up in his wheelchair anymore. Surely there could be only good in wheeling him out to the sunny, sheltered corner of wall on the small terrace overlooking the garden? What did it matter anyway, if his father caught a chill or got tired? Though they cheerfully congratulated his father every day on how well he was doing, outside the sickroom no one pretended that these were anything other than the last days.

The Major was a second lieutenant by then, one year out of officer training, and he had been granted ten days’ special leave from his base. The time had seemed to flow slowly, a quiet eternity of whispers in the dining room and thick sandwiches in the kitchen. As his father, who had sometimes failed to convey warmth but had taught him duty and honor, wheezed through the end of his life, the Major tried not to give in to the emotion that sometimes threatened him. His mother and Bertie often crept away to their rooms to wet pillows with their tears, but he preferred to read aloud at his father’s bedside or help the private nurse in turning his emaciated body. His father, who was not as addled by his disease as everyone assumed, recognized the end. He sent for his two sons and his prized pair of Churchills.

“I want you to have these,” he said. He opened the brass lock and pushed back the well-oiled lid. The guns gleamed in their red velvet beds; the finely chased engraving on the silver action bore no tarnish, no smudge.

“You don’t have to do this now, Father,” he said. But he had been eager; perhaps he had even stepped forward, half-obscuring his younger brother.

“I wish them to go on down through the family,” said his father, looking with anxious eyes. “Yet how could I possibly choose between my two boys and say one of you should have them?” He looked to their mother, who took his hand and patted it gently.

“These guns mean so much to your father,” she said at last. “We want you to each have one, to keep his memory.”

“Given to me by the Maharajah from his own hand,” whispered their father. It was an old story so rubbed with retelling that the edges were blurry. A moment of bravery; an Indian prince honorable enough to reward a British officer’s courageous service in the hours when all around were howling for Britain’s eviction. It was his father’s brush with greatness. The old tray of medals and the uniforms might desiccate in the attic, but the guns were always kept oiled and ready.

“But to break up a pair, Father?” He could not help blurting out the question, though he read its shallowness in his mother’s blanched face.

“You can leave them to each other, to be passed along as a pair to the next generation—keep it in the Pettigrew name, of course.” It was the only act of cowardice he had ever seen from his father.

The guns were not listed as part of the estate, which was passed to his mother for her lifetime use and then to him, as the eldest son. Bertie was provided for out of small family trusts. By the time their mother died some twenty years later, the trusts had eroded to an embarrassing low. However, the house was decrepit too. There was rot in some of the seventeenth-century beams, its traditional Sussex brick-and-tile-hung exterior needed extensive repairs, and their mother owed the local council money. The house still looked substantial and genteel among the smaller thatched cottages in the lane, but it was more of a liability than a grand inheritance, as he had told Bertie. He had offered his brother most of their mother’s jewelry as a gesture. He had also tried to buy his brother out of the gun, both then and several other times over the years when Bertie had seemed hard up. His younger brother had always declined his generous offers.

A gull’s guttural scream jolted the Major. It was waddling along the concrete path, wings spread wide, trying to bully a pigeon away from a hunk of bread roll. The pigeon tried to pick up the bread and flap aside, but the roll was too large. The Major stamped his foot. The gull looked at him with disdain and flapped backward a few feet, while the pigeon, without so much as a glance of gratitude, scooted its bread down the path like a tiddlywink.

The Major sighed. He was a man who always tried to do his duty without regard for gratitude or even acknowledgment. Surely he could not have inspired resentment from Bertie all these years?

At no time had the Major allowed himself to feel guilty about being the eldest son. Of course the order in which one was born was random, but so was the fact that he had not been born into a family with a title and vast estates. He had never felt animosity toward those who were born into great social position. Nancy had argued with him about it when they first met. It was the sixties, and she was young and thought love meant living on baked beans and the moral directives of folk music. He had explained to her, very patiently, that keeping one’s name and estate going was an act of love.

“If we just keep dividing things up, each generation more people demanding their share of the goodies, it just all vanishes as if it never mattered.”

“It’s about redistributing the wealth,” she had argued.

“No, it’s about the Pettigrew name dying out; about forgetting my father and his father before him. It’s about the selfishness of the current generation destroying the remembrance of the past. No one understands stewardship anymore.”

“You are so adorable when you’re being so damn conservative and uptight!” She laughed. She made him laugh too. She made him sneak off his base to see her. She made him wear improbable shirts and bright socks off duty. Once she called him from a police station after a student protest and he had to show up at the night sergeant’s desk in his full dress uniform. They let her go with just a lecture.

After they were married, there were some years of heartache as children refused to gestate, but then Roger happened at the very last gasp of fertility, and at least, with only one child, there were no arguments over assets. In memory of Nancy’s ideas on generosity, he had dutifully added to his own will a nice little sum of cash for his niece, Jemima. He had also specified that Jemima should receive the second-best china service from his maternal grandmother. Bertie had often hinted that he liked those plates, but the Major had been doubtful of placing vintage Minton, however faded and crazed, in the care of Marjorie. She broke dishes so often that every dinner party at Bertie’s house was served on a different china pattern.

Having an updated will and precise instructions was always a priority for the Major. As a military officer (in harm’s way—as he liked to put it), he had found it a great comfort to open his small iron strongbox, spread out the thick pages of his will, and read over the list of assets and distributions. It read like a list of achievements.

He would just have to be very clear with Marjorie. She was not thinking straight right now. He would have to explain again the exact nature of his own father’s intention. He would have to make things clear to Roger as well. He had no intention of battling to reunite the pair of guns, only to have Roger sell them after his death.

“Ah, there you are, Major,” said a voice. He sat upright and blinked in the strong light. It was Mrs. Ali, holding her large tote bag and a new library book. “I didn’t see you at the car park.”

“Oh, is that the time?” said the Major, looking in horror at his watch. “I completely lost track. My dear lady, I am so horribly embarrassed to have kept you waiting.” Now that he had unconsciously achieved what he would never have dared to deliberately contrive, he was completely at a loss.

“It is not a problem,” she said. “I knew you’d be along eventually and, as the day has turned out so unexpectedly nice, I thought I’d take a brief walk and maybe start my book.”

“I will, of course, pay for the car park.”

“It’s really not necessary.”

“Then will you permit me to at least buy you a cup of tea?” he asked, so quickly that the words pushed and elbowed each other to get out of his mouth. She hesitated so he added: “Unless you’re in a rush to get home, which I quite understand.”

“No, there is no rush,” she said. She looked left and right along the promenade. “Perhaps, if you think the weather will continue to hold, we could walk as far as the kiosk in the gardens?” she said. “If you feel up to it, of course.”

“That would be lovely,” he said, though he had a suspicion that the kiosk served its tea in polystyrene cups with some kind of preserved creamer in those little tubs that were impossible to open.

The promenade, when traversed from east to west as they were doing, formed a scrolling three-dimensional timeline of Hazelbourne-on-Sea’s history. The net-drying sheds and the fishing boats drawn up on the shingle, where the Major had been sitting, were part of the old town, which huddled around small cobbled alleys. Lopsided Tudor shops, their oak beams worn to fossil, contained dusty heaps of cheap merchandise.

As one walked, the town grew more prosperous. In the middle, the Victorian pier’s copper roofs, white wooden walls, and curlicued wrought-iron structure sat out over the Channel like a big iced cake. Beyond the pier, the mansions and hotels became imposing. Their stone porticos and dark awnings hooded over long windows implied a certain disapproval of the transient activities going on within lushly carpeted interiors. Between hotels that each occupied a full block were open squares of villas or wide streets of sweeping townhouse façades. The Major thought it such a shame that the elegance was hopelessly marred these days by the serried ranks of cars, angle-parked this way and that, like dried herring in a crate.

Beyond the appropriately named Grand Hotel, the town’s march through history was abruptly interrupted by the sudden swell of the chalk cliffs into a vast headland. The Major, who often walked the entire promenade, never failed to ponder how this might represent something about the hubris of human progress and the refusal of nature to knuckle under.

Recently he had begun to worry that the walk and the hypothesis had become so inextricably linked that they looped through his mind like madness. He was quite unable to walk and think about the racing results, for example, or about repainting his living room. He tried to put it down to the fact that he had no one with whom he could discuss the idea. Perhaps, if they were at a loss for conversation over tea, he might bring it up with Mrs. Ali.

Mrs. Ali walked with a comfortable stride. The Major shuffled his feet trying to fall in with her rhythm. He had forgotten how to let a woman dictate the pace.

“Do you like to walk?” he asked.

“Yes, I try to get out early three or four times a week,” she said. “I’m the crazy lady wandering the lanes in the dawn chorus.”

“We all ought to join you,” he said. “Those birds perform a miracle every morning and the world ought to get up and listen.” He was often up at night, toward the later hours, pinned to his mattress by an insomnia that seemed equal parts wakefulness and death. He could feel his blood running in his veins, yet he could not seem to move a finger or toe. He would lie awake, eyes scratchy, watching the dim outline of the window for any sign of light. Before any hint of paleness, the birds would begin. First a few common chirpings (sparrows and such); then the warbles and peepings would become a waterfall of music, a choir sounding from the bushes and trees. The sound released his limbs to turn and stretch and expelled all sense of panic. He would look to the window, now pale with singing, and roll over into sleep.

“All the same,” she said, “I probably should get a dog. No one thinks dog owners are crazy, even if they walk out in their pajamas.”

“What book did you pick today?” he asked.

“Kipling,” she replied. “It’s a children’s book, as the librarian took pains to inform me, but the stories are set in this area.” She showed him a copy of Puck of Pook’s Hill, which the Major had read many times. “I only knew his Indian books, like Kim.”

“I used to consider myself a bit of a Kipling enthusiast,” said the Major. “I’m afraid he’s rather an unfashionable choice these days, isn’t he?”

“You mean not popular among us, the angry former natives?” she asked with an arch of one eyebrow.

“No, of course not …” said the Major, not feeling equipped to respond to such a direct remark. His brain churned. For a moment he thought he saw Kipling, in a brown suit and bushy mustache, turning inland at the end of the promenade. He squinted ahead and prayed the conversation might wither from inattention.

“I did give him up for many decades,” she said. “He seemed such a part of those who refuse to reconsider what the Empire meant. But as I get older, I find myself insisting on my right to be philosophically sloppy. It’s so hard to maintain that rigor of youth, isn’t it?”

“I applaud your logic,” said the Major, swallowing any urge to defend the Empire his father had proudly served. “Personally, I have no patience with all this analyzing of writers’ politics. The man wrote some thirty-five books—let them analyze the prose.”

“Besides, it will drive my nephew crazy just to have him in the house,” Mrs. Ali said with a slight smile.

The Major was not sure whether to ask more about the nephew. He was extremely curious, but it did not seem his place to enquire directly. His knowledge about the families and lives of his village friends was acquired in bits and pieces. The information was strung like beads out of casual remarks, and he often lost the earlier information as more was added, so that he never acquired a complete picture. He knew, for example, that Alma and Alec Shaw had a daughter in South Africa, but he could never remember whether the husband was a plastic surgeon in Johannesburg or a plastics importer in Cape Town. He knew that the daughter had not been home since before Nancy’s death, but this information came with no explanation; it only resonated with an unspoken hurt.

“Do you have other nephews and nieces?” he said. He worried that even this vague politeness seemed to echo with questions about why she had no children, and to suggest rudely that she must of course come from a large family.

“There is only the one nephew. His parents, my husband’s brother and his wife, have three daughters and six granddaughters.”

“Ah, so your nephew must be their golden boy?” said the Major.

“He was my golden boy, too, when he was little. I’m afraid that Ahmed and I spoiled him terribly.” She hugged her book a little tighter to her chest and sighed. “We were not blessed with children of our own, and Abdul Wahid was the very image of my husband when he was small. He was a very smart boy, too, and sensitive. I thought he would be a poet one day.”

“A poet?” said the Major. He tried to picture the angry young man writing verse.

“My brother-in-law put a stop to such nonsense once Abdul Wahid was old enough to help in one of their shops. I suppose I was naïve. I wanted so much to share with him the world of books and of ideas and to pass on to him what I was given.”

“A noble impulse,” said the Major. “But I taught English at a boarding school after the army and I can tell you it’s pretty much a lost cause, getting boys over ten to read. Most of them don’t own a single book, you know.”

“I cannot imagine,” she said. “I was raised in a library of a thousand books.”

“Really?” He did not mean to sound so doubtful, but he had never heard of grocers owning large libraries.

“My father was an academic,” she said. “He came after Partition to teach applied mathematics. My mother always said she was allowed to bring two cooking pots and a picture of her parents. All the other trunks contained books. It was very important to my father that he try to read everything.”

“Everything?”

“Yes, literature, philosophy, science—a romantic quest, of course, but he did manage to read an astonishing amount.”

“I try to manage a book a week or thereabouts,” said the Major. He was quite proud of his small collection, mostly leather editions picked up on his trips to London from the one or two good book dealers who were still in business around Charing Cross Road. “But I must confess that these days I spend most of my time rereading old favorites—Kipling, Johnson; there’s nothing to compare with the greats.”

“I can’t believe you admire Samuel Johnson, Major,” she said, laughing. “He seems to have been sorely lacking in the personal grooming department and he was always so rude to that poor Boswell.”

“Unfortunately, there is often an inverse correlation between genius and personal hygiene,” said the Major. “We would be sorely lacking if we threw out the greats with the bathwater of social niceties.”

“If only they would take a bath once in a while,” she said. “You are right, of course, but I tell myself that it does not matter what one reads—favorite authors, particular themes—as long as we read something. It is not even important to own the books.” She stroked the library book’s yellowing plastic sleeve with a look that seemed sad.

“But your father’s library?” he asked.

“Gone. When he died, my uncles came from Pakistan to settle the estate. One day I came home from school and my mother and an aunt were washing all the empty shelves. My uncles had sold them by the foot. There was an odor of smoke in the air and when I ran to the window …” She paused and took a slow breath.

Memories were like tomb paintings, thought the Major, the colors still vivid no matter how many layers of mud and sand time deposited. Scrape at them and they come up all red and blazing. She looked at him, her chin raised. “I can’t tell you the paralyzing feeling, the shame of watching my uncles burning paperbacks in the garden incinerator. I cried out to my mother to stop them, but she just bent her head and went on pouring soapy water onto the wood.” Mrs. Ali stopped and turned to look out over the sea. The waves flopped dirty foam onto the expanse of quilted brown sand that signaled low tide. The Major breathed in the sharp tang of stranded seaweed and wondered whether he should pat her on the back.

“I’m so sorry,” he said.

“Oh, I can’t believe I told you this,” she said, turning back, her hand rubbing a corner of her eye. “I apologize. I’m getting to be such a silly old woman these days.”

“My dear Mrs. Ali, I would hardly refer to you as old,” he said. “You are in what I would call the very prime flowering of mature womanhood.” It was a little grandiose but he hoped to surprise a blush. Instead she laughed out loud at him.

“I have never heard anyone try to trowel such a thick layer of flattery on the wrinkles and fat deposits of advanced middle age, Major,” she said. “I am fifty-eight years old and I think I have slipped beyond flowering. I can only hope now to dry out into one of those everlasting bouquets.”

“Well, I have ten years on you,” he said. “I suppose that makes me a real fossil.”

She laughed again, and the Major felt that there was no more important and fulfilling work than to make Mrs. Ali laugh. His own troubles seemed to recede as their steps took them beyond the ice cream stalls and ticket booths of the pier. Here they navigated a newly installed series of curves in the promenade. The Major withheld his usual diatribe against the stupidity of young architects who feel oppressed by the straight line. Today he felt like waltzing.

They entered the public gardens, which began as a single bed crawling with yellow chrysanthemums, and then spread along two ever widening paths to create a long thin triangular space containing several different areas and levels. A sunken rectangle contained a bandstand, set in the middle of a lawn. Empty deck chairs flapped their canvas in the breeze. The council had just planted into concrete boxes the third or fourth set of doomed palm trees. There was an unshakable belief among the council’s executive committee that the introduction of palm trees would transform the town into a Mediterranean-style paradise and attract an altogether better class of visitor. The trees died fast. The day-trippers continued to bus in, wearing their cheap T-shirts and testing their raucous voices against the gulls. At the far end of the gardens, on a small circular lawn that lay open to the sea on one side, a thin, dark-skinned boy of four or five was nudging a small red ball with his feet. He played as if doing so were a hardship. When he gave the ball a sharp tap it bounced against a low bronze sign that said “No Ball Playing” in raised, polished letters and then rolled toward the Major. Feeling jovial, the Major attempted to chip the ball back, but it bounced sideways off his foot, struck an ornamental boulder, and rolled swiftly under a hedge of massed hydrangeas.

“Oi, there’s no football allowed ‘ere,” shouted a voice from a small green kiosk with a curly copper roof and shutters, which offered tea and an assortment of cakes.

“Sorry, sorry,” said the Major, waving his hands to encompass both the gray-faced, plump lady behind the kiosk counter and the small boy, who stood looking at the bushes as if they were as impenetrable as a black hole. The Major hurried over to the hedge and peered under, looking for some flash of red.

“What kind of park is it if a six-year-old can’t kick a football?” said a sharp voice. The Major glanced up to see a young woman who, though obviously of Indian origin, wore the universal uniform of the young and disenchanted. She was dressed in a rumpled parka the color of an oil spill, and long striped leggings tucked into motorcycle boots. Her short hair stuck out in a halo of stiff tufts as if she had just crawled out of bed, and her face, which might have been pretty, was twisted by a belligerent look as she faced the kiosk worker.

“There won’t be no flowers left if all the kids trample about with balls all day,” said the kiosk lady. “I don’t know what it’s like where you come from, but we try to keep things nice and genteel around here.”

“What d’you mean by that?” The young woman scowled. The Major recognized the abrasive northern tone he associated with Marjorie. “What are you saying?”

“I’m not saying nothing,” replied the lady. “Don’t get all shirty with me—I don’t make the rules.” The Major scooped up the somewhat muddy ball and handed it to the boy.

“Thank you,” said the boy. “I’m George, and I don’t really like football.”

“I don’t really like it, either,” said the Major. “Cricket is the only sport I really follow.”

“Tiddlywinks is a sport, too,” said George with a serious expression. “But Mum thought I might lose the bits if I brought them to the park.”

“Now that you bring it up,” said the Major, “I’ve never seen a sign saying ‘No Tiddlywinking’ in any park, so it might not be such a bad idea.” As he straightened up, the young woman hurried over.

“George, George, I’ve told you a thousand times about talking to strange men,” she said in a tone that identified her as the child’s mother rather than an older sister, as the Major had first thought.

“I do apologize,” he said. “It was entirely my fault, of course. Bit of a long time since I played any football.”

“Silly old cow ought to mind her own business,” said the young woman. “Thinks she’s in a uniform instead of an apron.” This was said loud enough to carry back to the kiosk.

“Very unfortunate,” said the Major in as noncommittal a voice as possible. He wondered whether he and Mrs. Ali would have to find an alternative source for tea. The kiosk lady was glaring at them.

“The world is full of small ignorances,” said a quiet voice. Mrs. Ali appeared at his elbow and gave the young woman a stern look. “We must all do our best to ignore them and thereby keep them small, don’t you think?” The Major braced himself for an abusive reply but to his surprise, the young woman gave a small smile instead.

“My mum always said things like that,” she said in a low voice.

“But of course we do not like to listen to our mothers,” said Mrs. Ali, smiling. “At least, not until long after we are mothers ourselves.”

“We have to go now, George. We’ll be late for tea,” said the young woman. “Say goodbye to the nice people.”

“I’m George, goodbye,” said the boy to Mrs. Ali.

“I’m Mrs. Ali, how do you do?” she replied. The young woman gave a start and peered at Mrs. Ali more closely. For a moment she seemed to hesitate, as if she wanted to speak, but then she appeared to decide against volunteering any further introductions. Instead, she took George by the hand and set off at a fast pace toward the town.

“What an abrupt young woman,” said the Major.

Mrs. Ali sighed. “I rather admire such refusal to bow before authority, but I fear it makes for a very uncomfortable daily existence.”

At the kiosk, the lady was still glaring and muttering something under her breath about people who thought they owned the place now. The Major tightened his upright stance and spoke in his most imposing voice, the one he had once reserved for quieting a room full of small boys.

“Do my eyes deceive me or are those real mugs you’re using for tea?” he said, pointing the head of his cane toward a row of thick earthenware mugs alongside the large brown teapot.

“I don’t hold with them polystyrene things,” said the woman, softening her expression just a bit. “Makes the tea taste like furniture polish.”

“How right you are,” said the Major. “Could we have two teas, please?”

“The lemon cake is fresh today,” she added as she slopped dark orange tea into two mugs. She was already cutting two huge slices as the Major nodded his head.

They drank their tea at a small iron table partly sheltered by an overgrown hydrangea rusty with the drying blooms of autumn. They were quiet and Mrs. Ali ate her slice of cake without any trace of the self-conscious nibbling of other ladies. The Major looked at the sea and felt a small sense of contentment quite unfamiliar in his recent life. A gin-and-tonic at the golf club bar with Alec and the others did not inspire in him any of the quietude, the happiness like a closely banked fire, which now possessed him. He was struck by the thought that he was often lonely, even in the midst of many friends. He exhaled and it must have come out as a sigh, for Mrs. Ali looked up from sipping her tea.

“I’m sorry, I haven’t asked you how you are doing,” she said. “It must have been difficult today, dealing with the solicitor?”

“These things have to be taken care of,” he said. “It’s always a bit of a mess, though, isn’t it? People don’t always take the time to leave clear instructions and then the executors have to sort it all out.”

“Ah, executors.” The dry hissing sound of the word conjured the scuttling of gray men, in ransacked rooms, looking for matches.

“Fortunately I am the executor for my brother,” he said. “Only there are one or two things he left rather vague. I’m afraid it will require delicate negotiation on my part to make things come out right.”

“He is lucky to have an executor of your integrity,” she said.

“Nice of you to say so,” he said trying not to squirm on his seat with a sudden twinge of guilt. “I will do my best to be absolutely fair, of course.”

“But you need to act fast,” she continued. “Before you can take inventory, the silver is gone, the linens appear on someone else’s table, and the little brass unicorn from his desk—worth next to nothing, except to you—poof! It’s slipped into a pocket and no one can even remember it when you ask.”

“Oh, I don’t think my sister-in-law would stoop …” He was seized with a sudden anxiety. “I mean when it is a question of an item of considerable value. I don’t think she’d rush to sell it or anything.”

“And everyone knows exactly what happened but no one will ever speak of it again, and the family goes on with its secrets invisible but irritating, like sand in a shoe.”

“There must be a law against it,” he said. Mrs. Ali blinked at him, emerging from her own thoughts.

“Of course there is the law of the land,” she said. “But we have talked before of the pressures of the family. One may be the most ancient of charters, Major, but the other is immutable.” The Major nodded, though he had no idea what she was talking about. Mrs. Ali fiddled with her empty tea mug, tapping it almost noiselessly against the table. He thought her face had clouded over, but perhaps it was just the day. The clouds did seem to be moving back in.

“Looks like we’ve had the best of the weather,” he said, brushing crumbs from his lap. “Perhaps it’s time we were heading back?”

The walk back was silent and somewhat uncomfortable, as if they had trespassed too far into personal areas. The Major would have liked to ask Mrs. Ali’s opinion of his situation, since he felt sure she would agree with him, but her faster stride suggested that she was still lost in her own memories. He was not about to inquire further into her life. Already there was an awkward intimacy, as if he had stumbled against her body in a crowd. This was one of the reasons he had avoided women since Nancy’s death. Without the protective shield of a wife, the most casual conversations with females had a way of suddenly veering off into a mire of coy remarks and miscommunicated intentions. The Major preferred to avoid looking ridiculous.

Today, however, his usual determination to retreat was being compromised by a stubborn recklessness. As he walked his head churned with the repeating phrase “I was wondering if you were planning to come to town next week?,” but he could not bring himself to express it aloud. They reached the small blue car and a sharp sadness threatened him as Mrs. Ali bent to unlock the door. He admired again her smooth brow and the brightness of her hair disappearing into its scarf. She looked up under his gaze and straightened up. He noticed her chin was hidden by the curve of the roof line. She was not a tall woman.

“Major,” she asked, “I was wondering if it would be possible to consult you more about Mr. Kipling when I’ve finished my book?” The sky began to spit fat drops of rain and a cold gust of wind whipped dust and litter against his legs. The sadness vanished and he thought how glorious the day was.

“My dear lady, I would be absolutely delighted,” he said. “I am completely at your disposal.”