Major Pettigrew's Last Stand: A Novel Read online

  “That’s extremely thoughtful of you,” he said trying to dampen the eagerness that brightened his voice. “Actually I was meaning to talk to you about that at some appropriate time.”

  “Well, of course,” she said. “You must have some small token, some memento. Bertie would have insisted. There are some quite new shirts he never wore … Anyway, I’ll have a think.”

  When he hung up the phone it was with a feeling of despair. She truly was a horrible woman. He sighed for poor Bertie and wondered whether he had ever regretted his choice. Perhaps he had not given the matter much attention. No one really contemplates death when making these life decisions, thought the Major. If they did, what different choices might they make?

  It was only a twenty-minute drive from Edgecombe St. Mary to the nearby seaside town of Hazelbourne-on-Sea where Bertie and Marjorie lived. The town was a commercial hub for half the county and always busy with shoppers and tourists, so the Major had made careful calculations as to traffic on the bypass, possible parking difficulties in the narrow streets by the church, time required to accept condolences. He had determined to be on the road no later than one thirty. Yet here he was sitting in the car, in front of his house, unmoving. He could feel the blood flowing, slow as lava, through his body. It seemed as if his insides might be melting; his fingers were already boneless. He could exert no pressure on the steering wheel. He worked to quell his panic with a series of deep breaths and sharp exhales. It was not possible that he should miss his own brother’s funeral and yet it was equally impossible to turn the ignition key. He wondered briefly whether he was dying. Pity, really, that it hadn’t happened yesterday. They could have buried him with Bertie and saved everyone the trouble of coming out twice.

  There was a knock on the car window and he turned his head as if in a dream to see Mrs. Ali looking anxious. He took a deep breath and managed to land his fingers on the power window button. He had been a reluctant convert to the mania for power everything. Now he was glad there was no handle to crank.

  “Are you all right, Major?” she asked.

  “I think so,” he said. “I was just catching my breath. Off to the funeral, you know.”

  “Yes, I know,” she said, “but you’re very pale. Are you all right to drive?”

  “Hardly a choice, my dear lady,” he said. “Brother of the deceased.”

  “Perhaps you’d better step out and get some fresh air for a minute,” she suggested. “I have some cold ginger ale here that might do you good.” She was carrying a small basket in which he could see the bright sheen of a green apple, a slightly oily paper bag that suggested cakes, and a tall green bottle.

  “Yes, perhaps for a minute,” he agreed, and stepped from the car. The basket, it turned out, was a small care package she had meant to leave on his doorstep for his return.

  “I didn’t know if you’d remember to eat,” she said as he drank the ginger ale. “I myself did not consume anything for four days after my husband’s funeral. I ended up in the hospital with dehydration.”

  “It’s very kind of you,” he said. He felt better for the cold drink but his body still ran with small tremors. He was too worried to feel any humiliation. He had to make it to Bertie’s funeral somehow. The bus service ran only every two hours with reduced service on Tuesdays and last bus back at five P.M. “I think I’d better see if there’s a taxi available. I’m not sure I’m fit to drive.”

  “That is not necessary,” she said, “I’ll drive you myself. I was on my way to Hazelbourne anyway.”

  “Oh I couldn’t possibly …” he began. He didn’t like being driven by a woman. He hated their cautious creeping about at intersections, their heavy-handed indifference to the nuances of gear changing, and their complete ignorance of the rearview mirror. Many an afternoon he had crept along the winding lanes behind some slow female driver who blithely bobbed her head to a pop radio station, her stuffed animals nodding their own heads in time on the rear shelf. “I couldn’t possibly,” he repeated.

  “You must do me the honor of letting me be of service,” she said. “My car is parked in the lane.”

  She drove like a man, aggressively changing gear into the turns, accelerating away, swinging the tiny Honda over the hills with relish. She had opened her window slightly and the rush of air blew ripples in her rose silk headscarf and tossed stray black locks of hair across her face. She brushed them away impatiently while gunning the car into a flying leap over a small humpbacked bridge.

  “How are you feeling?” she asked, and the Major wasn’t sure how to answer. Her driving was making him slightly sick, but in the excited, pleasant manner that small boys on roller coasters felt sick.

  “I’m not feeling as washed out as before,” he said. “You drive very well.”

  “I like to drive,” she said, smiling at him. “Just me and the engine. No one to tell me what I should be doing. No accounts, no inventory—just the possibilities of the open road and many unseen destinations.”

  “Quite,” he said. “Have you made many road trips?”

  “Oh, no,” she replied. “Generally I drive into the town every other week to pick up supplies. They have quite a selection of Indian specialty shops on Myrtle Street. Other than that, we use the car mainly for deliveries.”

  “You should drive to Scotland or somewhere,” he said. “Or there are always the autobahns of Germany. Very pleasant driving, I hear.”

  “Have you driven much in Europe?” she asked.

  “No, Nancy and I talked about it. Driving through France and perhaps up into Switzerland. We never got around to it.”

  “You should go,” she said. “While you have the chance.”

  “And you,” he asked. “Where would you like to go?”

  “So many places,” she said. “But there is the shop.”

  “Perhaps your nephew will soon be able to run the shop by himself?” he asked. She laughed a not altogether happy laugh.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “One day very soon he will be quite able to run the shop and I shall be superfluous.”

  The nephew was a recent and not very pleasant addition to the village shop. He was a young man of twenty-five or so. He carried himself stiffly, a hint of insolence on his gaze, as if he were always prepared to meet some new insult. He had none of Mrs. Ali’s quiet, graceful acquiescence and none of the late Mr. Ali’s patience. While the Major recognized on some level that this was perhaps his right, it was awkward to ask the price of the frozen peas from a man waiting to be insulted in this very manner. There was also a hint of restrained severity in the nephew toward the aunt, and of this the Major did not approve.

  “Will you retire?” he asked.

  “It has been suggested,” she said. “My husband’s family lives up north and hopes I will consent to live in their home and take my rightful place in the family.”

  “No doubt a loving family will compensate for having to live in the north of England,” said Major Pettigrew, doubting his own words. “I’m sure you will enjoy being the revered grandmother and matriarch?”

  “I have produced no children of my own and my husband is dead,” she replied, an acid tone in her voice. “Thus I am more to be pitied than revered. I am expected to give up the shop to my nephew, who will then be able to afford to bring a very good wife from Pakistan. In exchange, I will be given houseroom and, no doubt, the honor of taking care of several small children of other family members.”

  The Major was silent. He was at once appalled and also reluctant to hear any more. This was why people usually talked about the weather. “They surely can’t force you …” he began.

  “Not legally,” she said. “My wonderful Ahmed broke with family tradition to make sure the shop came to me. However, there are certain debts to be paid. And then again, what is the rule of law against the weight of family opinion?” She made a left turn, squeezing into a small gap in the hurtling traffic of the coast road. “Is it worth the struggle, one must ask, if the result is the loss of
family and the breaking of tradition?”

  “It’s downright immoral,” said the outraged Major, his knuckles white on the armrest. That was the trouble with these immigrants, he mused. They pretended to be English. Some of them were even born here. But under the surface were all these barbaric notions and allegiances to foreign customs.

  “You are lucky,” said Mrs. Ali. “You Anglo-Saxons have largely broken away from such dependence on family. Each generation feels perfectly free to act alone and you are not afraid.”

  “Quite,” said the Major, accepting the compliment automatically but not feeling at all sure that she was right.

  She dropped him on the corner a few yards from the church, and he scribbled down his sister-in-law’s address on a piece of paper.

  “I’m sure I could get a bus back or something,” he said, but they both knew this was not the case so he didn’t press his demurral. “I expect we’ll be done by six o’clock, if that’s convenient?” he added.

  “Certainly.” She took his hand a moment in hers. “I wish you a strong heart and the love of family this afternoon.” The Major felt a warmth of emotion that he hoped he could keep alight as he faced the awful starkness of Bertie in a walnut box.

  The service was largely the same mix of comedy and misery he remembered from Nancy’s funeral. The church was large and dismal. It was mid-century Presbyterian, its concrete starkness unrelieved by the incense, candles, and stained glass of Nancy’s beloved St. Mary’s C of E. No ancient bell tower or mossy cemetery here, with compensating beauty and the peace of seeing the same names carved on stone down through the ages. The only comfort was the small satisfaction of seeing the service well attended, to the point where two rows of folding chairs were occupied in the back. Bertie’s coffin lay above a shallow depression in the floor, rather like a drainage trough, and at some point in the service the Major was startled by a mechanical hum and Bertie’s sudden descent. He didn’t sink more than four inches, but the Major stifled a sudden cry and involuntarily reached out a hand. He hadn’t been prepared.

  Jemima and Marjorie both spoke. He expected to be derisive of their speeches, especially when Jemima, in a wide-brimmed hat of black straw more suitable for a chic wedding, announced a poem composed in her father’s honor. But though the poem was indeed atrocious (he remembered only a surfeit of teddy bears and angels quite at odds with the severity of Presbyterian teachings), her genuine grief transformed it into something moving. She wept mascara all over her thin face and had to be half carried from the lectern by her husband.

  The Major had not been asked in advance to speak. He considered this a grave oversight and had prepared extensive remarks over and over during the lonely insomnia of the intervening nights. But when Marjorie, returning to her seat after her own short and tearful goodbye to her husband, leaned in and asked him if he wanted to say anything, he declined. To his own surprise, he was feeling weak again and his voice and vision were both blurry with emotion. He simply grasped both her hands for a long moment and tried not to allow any tears to escape.

  After the service, shaking hands with people in the smoked-glass lobby, he had been touched by the appearance of several of his and Bertie’s old friends, some who he had not seen in many years. Martin James, who had grown up with them both in Edgecombe, had driven over from Kent. Bertie’s old neighbor Alan Peters, who had a great golf handicap but had taken up bird-watching instead, had driven over from the other side of the county. Most surprisingly, Jones the Welshman, an old army friend of the Major’s dating all the way back to officer training, who had met Bertie a handful of times one summer and had continued to send them both cards every Christmas, had come down from Halifax. The Major gripped his hand and shook his head in wordless thanks. The moment was spoiled only by Jonesy’s second wife, a woman neither he nor Bertie had had a chance to meet, who kept weeping brokenheartedly into her large handkerchief.

  “Give it over, Lizzy,” said Jones. “Sorry, she can’t help it.”

  “I’m so sorry,” wailed Lizzy, blowing her nose. “I get this way at weddings, too.” The Major didn’t mind. At least she had come. Roger had not appeared.

  Chapter 2

  Bertie’s house—he supposed he should have to start thinking of it as Marjorie’s house now—was a boxy split-level that she had managed to torque into some semblance of a Spanish villa. The lumpy brick pergola and wrought-iron railings of a rooftop patio crowned the attached double garage. An attic extension with a brick-arched picture window presented a sort of flamenco wink at the seaside town that sprawled below. The front garden was given over mostly to a gravel driveway as big as a car park and the cars were lined up two abreast around a spindly copper fountain in the shape of a very thin, naked young girl. The late afternoon was growing chilly, the clouds swelling in from the sea, but upstairs on the second floor, Marjorie still had the doors from the tiled living room open to the rooftop patio. The Major stayed as deep into the room as possible, trying to suck some warmth from lukewarm tea in a small polystyrene cup. Marjorie’s idea of “nothing elaborate” was a huge banquet of spoon-dripping food—egg salad, lasagna, a wine-soaked chicken stew—served entirely on paper plates. All around the room people cradled sagging plates in their palms, plastic glasses and cups of tea set down haphazardly on window ledges and the top of a large television.

  Across the room he caught an undulation in the crowd and followed the stir to see Marjorie embracing Roger. Major Pettigrew’s heart jumped to see his tall brown-haired son. So he had come after all.

  Roger made copious apologies for his lateness and a solemn promise to help Marjorie and Jemima select a headstone for Uncle Bertie. He was charming and smooth in an expensive, dark suit, unsuitable gaudy tie, and narrow, highly polished shoes too dapper to be anything but Italian. London had polished him to an almost continental urbanity. The Major tried not to disapprove.

  “Listen, Dad, Jemima had a word with me about Uncle Bertie’s shotgun,” said Roger when they had a moment to sit down on a hard leather sofa to talk. He twitched at his lapel and adjusted the knees of his trousers.

  “Yes, I was meaning to talk to Marjorie about it. But it’s not really the time, is it?” He had not forgotten about the question of the gun, but it didn’t seem important today.

  “They understand perfectly about the value of it. Jemima is quite up on the subject.”

  “It’s not a question of the money, of course,” said the Major sternly. “Our father was quite clear in his intentions that the pair be reunited. Family heirlooms, family patrimony.”

  “Yes, Jemima feels that the pair should be reunited,” said Roger. “A little restoration may be needed, of course.”

  “Mine is in perfect condition,” said the Major. “I don’t believe Bertie quite took the time with his that I did. Not much of a shooting man.”

  “Well, anyway,” said Roger, “Jemima says the market is red hot right now. There aren’t Churchills of this quality to be had for love or money. The Americans are signing up for waiting lists.” The Major felt a slow tightening in the muscles of his cheeks. His small smile became quite rigid as he inferred the blow that was to come. “So, Jemima and I think the most sensible course of action would be to sell them as a pair right now. Of course, it would be your money, Dad, but since you are planning to pass it on to me eventually, I assume, I could really use it now.”

  The Major said nothing. He concentrated on breathing. He had never really noticed how much mechanical effort was involved in maintaining the slow in-and-out of the lungs, the smooth passage of oxygen through the nose. Roger had the decency to squirm in his chair. He knew, thought the Major, exactly what he was asking.

  “Excuse me, Ernest, there’s a strange woman outside who says she’s waiting for you?” said Marjorie, appearing suddenly and putting her hand on his shoulder. He looked up, coughing to hide his wet eyes. “Are you expecting a dark woman in a small Honda?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said, “that’s Mrs. Ali come to pick me
up.”

  “A woman taxi driver?” said Roger. “You hate women drivers.”

  “She’s not a taxi service,” snapped the Major. “She’s a friend of mine. She owns the village shop.”

  “In that case, you’d better have her come in and have some tea,” said Marjorie, her lips tight with disapproval. She looked vaguely at the buffet. “I’m sure she’d like a piece of Madeira cake—everyone likes Madeira cake, don’t they?”

  “I’ll do that, thank you,” said the Major, rising to his feet.

  “Actually, Dad, I was hoping I could drive you home,” said Roger. The Major was confused.

  “But you came by train,” he said.

  “Yes, that was the plan,” said Roger, “but things changed. Sandy and I decided to drive down together. She’s out looking at weekend cottages right now.”

  “Weekend cottages?” It was too much to take in.

  “Yes, Sandy thought since I had to come down anyway … I’ve been on at her about getting a place down here. We could be nearer to you.”

  “A weekend cottage,” repeated the Major, still struggling with the implications of this person named Sandy.

  “I’m dying for you to meet her. She should be here any minute.” Roger scanned the room in case she had suddenly come in. “She’s American, from New York. She has a rather important job in the fashion business.”

  “Mrs. Ali is waiting for me,” said the Major. “It would be rude—”

  “Oh, I’m sure she’ll understand,” interrupted Roger.

  • • •

  Outside the air was chill. The view of the town and the sea beyond was smudged around the edges with darkness. Mrs. Ali had parked her Honda just inside the curly iron gates with their depictions of flying dolphins. She waved and stepped from the car to greet him. She was holding a paperback and half a cheeseburger wrapped in its garish, oily paper. The Major was venomously opposed to the awful fast-food places that were gradually taking over the ugly stretch of road between the hospital and the seafront, but he was prepared to find her indulgence charmingly out of character.