Out of This World Read Free

sheep. Even when I’d made a name for myself. He took Dad’s side. Naturally.
    ‘Besides, I’m getting too old for running around any more.’ (As if it were a sport.)
    ‘You’re the youngest sixty-four-year-old I know.’
    And how is the cottage? she asks. And I feel embarrassed again, because this would be the fifth or sixth year of Ray’s retirement. It’s fine, I say. It must be nice that, she says, a cottage in the country. And do I still go up in the planes? Yes, I still go up in the planes.
    ‘There you are, you see, at your age.’
    And never once, in nine visits, has she voiced any outrage, any fury, that Dad got the hero’s treatment, the front-page funeral, and Ray was just the poignant sub-plot. ‘The loyalty that inspired loyalty …’
    We sip our tea, gazing at the white grandstand. The car we sit in has been scrupulously scoured for any sign or scent of a feminine presence. Jenny’s comb, long hairs in its teeth, peeping from under the passenger seat. I wouldn’t dare andcouldn’t bear, on this of all days (though, God knows, she’ll have to know some time), to tell Marion that, actually, I am happy. That in spite of everything (and at my age!) I am actually –
    I swallow my tea carefully, like a guilty husband. You won’t blame me, Mrs Evans, laugh at me? Refuse to meet me again?
    On Epsom Downs people exercise dogs, and fly kites and model aeroplanes. And there are the horses. He liked horses. Picked the winners. Groomed my daughter’s horse. Chauffeur and stableman.
    Marion used to invite me to stay for dinner. But after the third or fourth time, because I always said no, she stopped asking. I drive her home. Marion is sixty-eight, but I always feel vastly her junior. Her semi-detached in Epsom is trim, immaculate, lovingly cared for. I’ve looked at many things that are difficult to look at, but when I leave and she stands at the front door, brushing hair from her forehead, upright, unsmiling, it breaks me up. My chest starts to heave.
    I go to Dad’s grave too. It’s on the way back, and I deliberately leave it till the evening, so I won’t stumble upon anyone. Upon Frank perhaps, piously making a personal visit. The Surrey churchyard, the lych-gate and yew trees always depress me. What did they put in that coffin? And I’m troubled by the litter of tributes that, even after ten years, festoons the grave itself. The biggest wreath, as always, from BMC. Another from his regiment (that was over sixty years ago). Others from the hospitals in Guildford and Chiswick (left them several grand apiece), from old colleagues and pals in the M.O.D. and the Royal Ordnance. One, with a fulsome message, from the Conservative Club. Flowers from the parish and local big-wigs. Even an offering from the primary school.
    The blast was big enough. The police concluded that Ray must have shut the passenger door, got back into the driver’sseat and shut his own door before the bomb, a crude device operated by simple pressure, was detonated by some shifting of Dad in his seat. Death instantaneous. The shut doors acted to contain but also to intensify the shock. The explosion not only totally destroyed a Daimler New Sovereign but gouged a crater in the gravel drive, shattered every window in the front of the house – in several cases damaging irreparably the Queen Anne window frames and lacerating the furniture inside – gashed the brickwork and stucco, blew in the front door, and deafened the other three occupants of the house on that Monday morning: namely Mrs Keane, Dad’s housekeeper, Sophie Beech, his grand-daughter, and Harry, his son.
    I stand for a few moments by the grave, hands in my pockets. I won’t be tricked. How do we make such decisions? How do we decide that one life matters and another doesn’t? How do we solemnize one death and ignore a thousand others?
    Usually, after leaving the churchyard, I take the minor road past Hyfield. Past the Six Bells pub, the cricket ground. I slow down