“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.