The Afterlife Read Free Page A

the wind as it buffeted the Austin. A measured, prissy voice on the radio spoke of a gale from the Irish Sea and of conditions that were “near-cyclonic,” and Jane and Carter laughed. Lucy merely smiled and said that they often used that expression. In a village especially dear to her, especially historical and picturesque, a group of people were standing on the sidewalk at the crest of a hill, near the wall of a churchyard. The church was Norman, with ornamental arcs and borders of red pebbles worked into the masonry. Lucy drove the car rather slowly past, to see if there had been an accident.
    “I think,” Carter offered, “they’re watching the tree.” A tall tree that leaned out from within the churchyard was swaying in the wind.
    “Bother,” Lucy said. “I’ve driven too far—what I wanted to show you was back in the middle of the village.” She turned around, and as they drove by again several of the little crowd, recognizing the car, seemed amused. A policeman, wearing a rain cape, was pedalling his bicycle up the hill, very energetically, head down.
    What Lucy wanted the Billingses to see in the village was a side street of sixteenth-century houses, all of them half-timbered and no two skewed from plumb at the same angle.
    “Who lives in them?” Carter wanted to know.
    “Oh, people—though I daresay more and more it’s trendy younger people who open up shops on the ground floor.” Lucy backed around again and this time, coming up the hill, they met a police barricade, and the tall tree fallen flat across the road. Just half of the tree, actually; its crotch had been low to the earth, and the other half, with a splintery white wound in its side, still stood.
    The three Americans, sealed into their car, shrieked in excitement, understanding now why the villagers had been amused to see them drive past under the tree again. “You’d think somebody,” Jane said, “might have shouted something, to warn us.”
    “Well, I suppose they thought,” said Lucy, “we had eyes to see as well as they. That’s how they are. They don’t give anything away; you have to go to them.” And she described, as they bounced between thorny hedgerows and dry-stone walls, her church work, her charity work in the area. It was astonishing, how much incest there was, and drunkenness, and hopelessness. “These people just can’t envision any better future for themselves. They would never
dream
, for example, of going to London, even for a day. They’re just totally locked into their little world.”
    Jane asked, “What about television?”
    “Oh, they watch it, but don’t see that it has anything to do with them. They’re taken care of, you see, and compared with their fathers and grandfathers aren’t so badly off. The
cru
elty of the old system of hired agricultural labor is almost beyond imagining; they worked people absolutely to death. Picking flint, for instance. Every spring they’d all get out there and pick the flint off the fields.”
    That didn’t seem, to Carter, so very cruel. He had picked up bits of flint on his own, spontaneously. They were porous, pale, intricate, everlasting. His mind wandered as Lucy went on about the Norfolk villagers and Jane chimed in with her own concerns—her wish, now that the children were out of the house, to get out herself and to be of some service, not exactly jump into the ghetto with wild-eyed good intentions but do something
use
ful, something with
peo
ple.…
    Carter had been nodding off, and the emphasized wordspierced his doze. He felt he had been useful enough, in his life, and had seen enough people. At the office now—he was a lawyer—he was conscious of a curious lag, like the lag built into radio talk shows so that obscenities wouldn’t get on the air. Just two or three seconds, between challenge and response, between achievement and gratification, but enough to tell him that something was out of sync. He was going through the motions, and all the