Alec pulled himself physically upright in his seat. It was almost frightening, the way the mind could so easily follow its well-worn tracks, even at times of unique stress. Habit again: nature’s protection. He turned cold at the thought that today might pass him by altogether, that he might in some way miss experiencing it or beginning to understand it. The most abject and revealing loss of composure would be better than that. He started doing what he could never have predicted: trying to feel. ‘A human being,’ the clergyman was saying, ‘is the sum of many qualities, and it is from what we see of these that we form our ideas of what everything in life is, of what life itself is.’ No help there. Alec glanced over to the front pew across the aisle, where Jim and Bob sat together. With the Giobertis, this was all the family there was. Jim’s brother, who had emigrated to Canada getting on for thirty years ago, had not received Jim’s cable, or had not answered it, and it was now nearly twenty years — yes, twenty next April — since young Charlie, Annette’s brother, had been killed in a motor-cycle accident in Alexandria, three weeks after getting his commission in the Royal Armoured Corps. Well, he had been spared all this.
Jim’s face, half-turned towards the clergyman, looked quite relaxed, and he had seemed so in the brief moment at the church door when Alec had just had time to grasp his hand and murmur a few words, though his movements and reactions had been a little slower than usual. It had been the same, Alec remembered, the night the telegram about Charlie arrived. He had got there in the small hours — he had left his digs within a minute of getting Jim’s phone call but the train had been held up by an air alert — to find Betty in a state of collapse, naturally, and Jim simply being Jim, only more so: calm, solid, desperately hurt but not defeated, saying little as always, showing a degree of strength that even Alec, who admired him more than any other man he had ever met, had not expected. Thank God that Jim, at least, was still here. Now that he was alone, Jim might well consider throwing in his lot with him, sharing some sort of household, even perhaps (Alec put this part of his thought aside for future reference) coming into the small glass-merchandising firm of Keith Mackenzie and Company in which Alec, upon his retirement next year, was planning to join his brother Iain. If that appealed to Jim, it would be a kind of continuation of the Trio — the name Alec used in his own mind for the unit the Duerdens and he had comprised for over thirty years. And it would be a fine memorial to Betty.
‘And so to have lived in vain,’ Alec heard the clergyman say, ‘is inconceivable.’ Even the thickest and most preternaturally apathetic voices have a directional component, and Alec became half-aware that this one was being beamed towards him. When a pause followed, he looked up and saw that the clergyman was indeed staring angrily into his face. After another second or two of ocular reprimand, the man spoke again. He was plainly drawing to a close, and now the hint of a new tone was heard, the detached disgust of a schoolmaster reading out to his class some shameful confidential document he has snatched from the hot hand of one of their number.
‘Whence do we derive our ideas of what is most precious and admirable and lovable in human nature? Not from any inborn knowledge, but from what we see in those around us. To know somebody, and even more to know them with love, is constantly to be made aware of what human nature is and can be. To have known somebody with love is to be permanently illuminated with the human capacity for tenderness, for generosity, for gaiety, for disregard of self, for courage, for forgiveness, for intelligence, for compassion, for loyalty, for humility — and nobody has ever lived who has been unable to offer his fellow-creatures some one or other of these. And is this illumination an aspect of life, a side of life, a part of life? No, it is life itself, this learning what we are. And can death diminish that? No, death can do nothing with it, death even throws it into prominence, death is cheated. As death will always be cheated. Let us pray. Will you kneel, please.’
Alec knelt and tried to pray, but could not decide what to pray to. The principle for good he sometimes thought of as existing above and beyond everything, and which he had expected (wrongly) to become more real to him as he grew older, seemed to involve a way of looking at things that included a belief in Betty’s having a future, and he could not see how she could have any. So he made some wishes about the past instead, that Betty had had a happy life and had not suffered when she was dying. He felt his mind slowing down and becoming a blank, and would have begun to forget where he was if it had not been for the diminishing footfalls that told him he was about to be left alone. He got quickly to his feet and hurried outside.
Jim was shaking hands with the last group of local people under the eye of the clergyman, whose manner now implied that he had been forced into his vestments as part of a practical joke and could see, for the moment, no dignified way of extricating himself. He looked bigger, too.
Alec felt impelled to speak to him: ‘Thank you for your address, Vicar, I thought it was most—’
‘Rector,’ the other said, moving off.
‘Right, let’s get on, Mac,’ Jim said. ‘Who are you going up with?’
There were only two cars to be seen, one with Bob in it, the other full of Giobertis. ‘Oh, don’t worry about me,’ Alec said rather wildly. ‘I can walk. How do I get to the—?’
‘Nonsense, hop in with me and Bob.’
‘No, that’s for the… I wouldn’t want to—’
‘Well then, go with Annette and Frank and the kids. These buses take five easily.’
‘In here, Uncle Mac,’ Annette called, and began making a place for him between herself and her husband. The two Gioberti girls occupied the folding seats: Sonia, a bespectacled blonde child of seven or eight with, so far as could be made out, a perfectly spherical head, and Elizabeth, a somewhat darker fourteen-year-old with a figure which, Alec supposed, many grown women would envy. As they moved off, she asked: ‘Where did you leave the car, Pop?’
Frank answered in his strong cockney accent: ‘Outside that hotel where we’re going to have lunch, the King’s Head or whatever it’s called. Tumbledown-looking joint.’
‘Why couldn’t we have gone up to the cemetery in our car?’
‘Because we’re going up in this one.’
‘Why? Ours is much more comfortable.’
‘I dare say it is, but we’re going up in this one and that’s an end of it, see?’
‘What are we going up to the cemetery for?’ Sonia asked.
‘To see Gran being buried.’
‘It won’t hurt her,’ Sonia stated.
‘Of course it won’t hurt her, she’s dead.’
‘What are we going up to see her being buried for?’
‘Because that’s what we do.’
‘Sonia, take your shoes off there,’ Annette said.
‘And shut up,’ Frank added.
‘How’s Christopher?’ Alec asked. ‘Let’s see, he must be nearly—’
‘He was four in June.’
‘Really? It seems only the other—’
‘Auntie Gina’s looking after him today,’ Elizabeth said with a hint of triumph. ‘Over at Camberwell.’
To forestall another invitation to silence from Frank, Alec looked out of the window. His eyes immediately fell on the little coffee shop with green check curtains where, whenever he came down for the weekend, he and Betty would spend an hour or so on the Saturday morning before strolling along to the King’s Head to meet Jim after his morning of local activities — work for the Ratepayers’ Association or the Golf Club committee — and relaxing over a couple of pink gins in the saloon bar, followed by lunch under the low beamed ceiling of the dining-room. It was at times like that that the Trio had really come into its own again, and for days and weeks afterwards there would be a lifting of the shadow that had fallen over Alec’s life since 1945. With the war over, the Duerdens had decided to stay on in this part of Buckinghamshire, where they had come in 1941 as a temporary measure to avoid the bombing, and not return after all to their house in Clapham. Since he could not reciprocate their hospitality, Alec had had to confine himself to staying with them only half a dozen times a year at the outside, and had seen them hardly more often for a meal or a theatre in London. He supposed he ought to be thankful that the Trio had survived as well as it had, that it had ever been able to recapture the spirit of its heyday, those twelve happiest years of his life between 1929 and 1941 when the Duerdens and he had occupied houses facing the Common, not four hundred yards apart.