The Afterlife Read Free

the river or the drive to the sea. Then she decided the two should be combined, and a supply of boots and overshoes was tossed into the car. Carter got in the back of the littleAustin—red, though it had looked black at the station last night—and let the two women sit up front together. Jane occupied what in America would have been the driver’s seat, so that Carter felt startled and imperilled when she turned her head aside or gestured with both hands. Lucy seemed quite accustomed to the wrong side of the road, and drove with a heedless dash. “Here is the village, these few houses,” she said. “And the church just beyond—you can’t see it very well because of that huge old chestnut. Incredibly old, they say the tree is. The church isn’t so old.”
    On the other side of the road, there were sheep, dusted all over with spots of color and mingled with gamboling lambs. The river was not far off, and Lucy parked by an iron bridge where water poured in steady cold pleats down the slant face of a concrete weir. Embankments had been built by stacking bags of cement and letting natural processes dampen and harden them. Lucy led the way along a muddy path between the riverbank and a field that had been recently plowed; the pale soil, littered to the horizon with bonelike bits of flint, was visibly lifting into the silvery, tumbling sky. The wind was scouring dark trails of soil upward, across the plowed miles.
    “It’s been almost a drought,” Lucy said, her voice uplifted, her kerchief flattened against her freckled cheek. Her eyes, squinting, were a pale color between blue and green, and this beryl, beneath this wild sky, had an uncanny brilliance. “Oh, look!” she cried, pointing. “A little marsh tit, doing his acrobatics! Last week, closer to the woods, I saw a pair of waxwings. They generally go back to the continent by this time of year. Am I boring you both? Really, the wind is frightful, but I want you to see my gray heron. His nest
must
be in the woods somewhere, but Frank and I have never been able to spot it. We asked Sedgewick—that’s the duke’s gamekeeper—whereto look for it, and he said if we got downwind we would
smell
it. They eat meat, you know—rodents and snakes.”
    “Oh dear,” Jane said, for something to say. Carter couldn’t take his eyes from the distant dark lines of lifting earth, the Texas-like dust storm. As the three made their way along the river, the little black-capped tit capered in the air above them, and as they approached the woods, out flocked starlings, speckled and black and raucous.
    “Look—the kingfisher!” Lucy cried. This bird was brilliant, ruddy-breasted and green-headed, with a steel-blue tail. It flicked the tail back and forth, then whirred along the river’s glittering surface. But the gray heron was not showing himself, though they trod the margin of the woods for what seemed half a mile. They could hear tree trunks groaning as the wind twisted their layered crowns; the tallest and leafiest trees seemed not merely to heave but to harbor several small explosions at once, which whitened their tossing branches in patches. Carter’s eyes watered, and Jane held her hands in their fat, borrowed gloves in front of her face.
    At last, their hostess halted. She announced, “We better get on with it—what a disappointment,” and led them back to the car.
    As they drew close to the glittering, pleated, roaring weir, Carter had the sudden distinct feeling that he should look behind him. And there was the heron, sailing out of the woods toward them, against the wind, held, indeed, motionless within the wind, standing in midair with his six-foot wingspread—an angel.
    The wind got worse as they drove toward the sea. On the map, it looked a long way off, but Lucy assured them she had often done it and returned by teatime. As she whipped alongthe narrow roads, Carter in the back seat could not distinguish between her tugs on the steering wheel and the tugs of