Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand (12 page)

“Nothing like the workmanship in an English best gun,” said Ferguson. “At least, that’s what they say when they insist on taking a year or two to make you a pair.”

“Actually, I may be in the happy position of reuniting my pair.” The Major could not resist the opportunity to give this information directly to Lord Dagenham.

“Well, of course,” said Lord Dagenham. “You inherit the other one from your brother, don’t you? Congratulations, old man.”

“It’s not all quite settled yet,” said the Major. “My sister-in-law, you know…”

“Oh, quite right to take a few days. Lots of feelings after a funeral,” said Father Christopher. He hinged his long angular frame forward over the bar. “Can we get a round, Tom? And do you have a table for Lord Dagenham?”

“A matched pair of Churchills,” said the American, smiling at the Major with slightly increased interest.

“Yes, 1946 or thereabouts. Made for the Indian market,” said the Major, not allowing even a hint of pride to show through his modesty.

“I’d love to see them in action sometime,” Ferguson said.

“The Major often comes over and has a go with us,” said Dagenham. “Glass of cabernet please, Tom – and what’ll you have, Frank?”

“Then I’m sure I’ll be seeing you at Double D’s shoot on the eleventh.” Ferguson stuck out his hand and the Major was forced into a ridiculous display of pumping, as if they had just made a pact to sell a horse. Dagenham stuck his own hands in his jacket pockets and looked awkward. The Major held his breath. He was aware of a certain personal humiliation, but he was equally anxious about his lordship. Lord Dagenham was now in the terrible position of having to find a gracious way to explain to his American guest that the shooting party in question was strictly for business colleagues, mostly down from London for the day. It was appalling to see a good man so trapped by the ignorance of the bad-mannered. The Major considered jumping in to explain the situation himself, but did not want to suggest that his lordship was unable to extricate himself from situations of tangled etiquette.

“Of course you must come if you can, Pettigrew,” said Dagenham at last. “Not much of a challenge, though. We’ll only be taking the ducks off the hill pond.”

Dagenham’s gamekeeper raised three varieties of duck on a small pond tucked into a copse that crowned a low hill above the village. He incubated abandoned eggs, fed the ducklings by hand, and visited every day, often with delighted schoolchildren from the Hall in tow, until the ducks learned to waddle after him as he called to them. Once a year, Dagenham held a shoot at the pond. The gamekeeper, and some young helpers hired for the day, scared the ducks off the pond with yelling and thrashing about with rakes and cricket bats. The birds circled the copse once, squawking in protest, and then flew back directly into the path of the guns, urged home by the gamekeeper’s welcoming whistle. The Major’s disappointment at never being invited to this more elaborate shoot, with its early morning meeting on the steps of the Hall and huge breakfast party to follow, was slightly mitigated by his contempt for so-called sportsmen who needed wildfowl driven right onto the gun barrel. Nancy had often joked that Dagenham should buy the ducks frozen and have the gamekeeper toss a handful of shot in with the giblets. He had never quite been comfortable laughing with her at this, but had agreed that it was certainly not the sporting match of man and prey to which he would be proud to lend his gun.

“I’d be delighted to come,” said the Major.

“Ah, I think Tom has our table ready,” said Dagenham, ignoring the expressions of hope on the face of the Vicar and Whetstone. “Shall we?”

“See you on the eleventh, then,” said Ferguson, pumping the Major’s hand again. “I’ll be on you like a bear on honey, getting a good look at those guns of yours.”

“Thank you for the warning,” said the Major.

∗

“I thought you said there was some difficulty about the gun?” Alec asked in a quiet voice as they chewed their sandwiches and refused to steal glances at Lord Dagenham’s party. Whetstone was laughing more loudly than the American in order to make sure the entire room knew he was at the table. “What are you going to do if you can’t get it?” The Major now regretted mentioning Bertie’s will to Alec. It had slipped out somewhere on the back nine when he was overcome again by the injustice of the situation. It was never a good idea to confide in people. They always remembered, and when they came up to you in the street, years later, you could see the information was still firmly attached to your face and present in the way they said your name and the pressure of their hand clasping yours.

“I’m sure there will be no problem when I explain the situation,” said the Major. “She’ll at least let me have it for the occasion.” Marjorie was always very impressed with titles, and she was not aware of Lord Dagenham being a reduced kind of gentry, with all but one wing of the Hall let to a small boarding school for children aged three to thirteen and most of the lands lying fallow, producing only EU subsidy payments. He was sure he could talk up his lordship to the heights of an earl and impress upon Marjorie the privilege accorded the entire family by the invitation. Once the gun was in his hands, he would be quite happy to draw out any discussion of ownership – perhaps indefinitely? He ate his sandwich more quickly. If he hurried, he might see Marjorie this afternoon and put the whole matter to rest.

“Ah, Major, I was hoping to catch you.” It was Grace, standing awkwardly by the bar, her large handbag clutched in crossed hands like a flotation cushion. “I managed to get Mrs. Ali on the telephone about the dance.”

“Very good,” said the Major in a voice as neutral as he could manage without being actively dismissive. “So you’re all set, then?” He hoped Dagenham’s table was not in earshot.

“She seemed rather stiff at first,” said Grace. “She said she didn’t really do catering. I was quite disappointed, because I thought she and I were on quite good terms.”

“Can we buy you a drink, Grace?” Alec said, waving half a sandwich at her from the Major’s other side. A speck of dark pickle landed dangerously close to the Major’s arm.

“No, thank you,” she said. The Major frowned at Alec. It was not kind of him to make such an offer. Grace was one of those rare women who maintained a feminine distaste for being at the bar. There was also the impossibility of a lady climbing onto the high stool in any dignified manner and she would feel keenly the absence of another woman to chaperone.

“Anyway, then the strangest thing happened. I mentioned your name – that you and I were working on this together – and she suddenly changed her tune. She was most helpful.”

“Well, I’m glad you got what you needed,” said the Major, anxious to end the matter before Grace inferred anything from her own observation.

“I didn’t know you knew Mrs. Ali…?” She was hesitant, but there was a definite question in her voice, and the Major tried not to squirm.

“I don’t really,” he said. “I mean, I buy a lot of tea from her. We discuss tea quite often, I suppose. I really don’t know her well.” Grace nodded and the Major felt a just a hint of guilt at denying Mrs. Ali in this way. However, he comforted himself, since Grace did not seem to find it the least strange that her own friendship would count for so much less than a casual commercial exchange over tea, he had best leave well alone.

“Anyway, she said she would call up some people she knows in the town and give me some ideas and prices. I told her mostly finger food, nothing too spicy.”

“Won’t do to end up with curried goat’s head and roasted eyeballs,” said Alec.

Grace ignored him. “She said she would call me next week. And perhaps set up a tasting. I told her you and I would be delighted to attend.”

“Me?” said the Major.

“I was afraid if I said just me she might go back to being stiff,” Grace explained. The Major had no answer for this.

“Looks like you’re the food committee, Pettigrew,” said Alec. “Try to slip in a plate of roast beef, will you? Something edible amongst all the vindaloo.”

“Look, I can’t possibly assist you,” said the Major. “I mean, with just losing my brother…I have so many things to see to…family and so on.”

“I understand,” said Grace. She looked at him and he read in her eyes a disappointment that he should have stooped to the dead-relative excuse. Yet he was as entitled as the next man to use it. People did it all the time; it was understood that there was a defined window of availability beginning a decent few days after a funeral and continuing for no more than a couple of months. Of course, some people took dreadful advantage and a year later were still hauling around their dead relatives on their backs, showing them off to explain late tax payments and missed dentist appointments: something he would never do.

“I will just have to do the best I can,” said Grace and her face drooped, as if defeat were inevitable. “I was afraid I might let Daisy down again, but of course that is no excuse for me to trespass on your very great grief. Please forgive me.” She put out her hand and touched him lightly on the forearm. He was suddenly aware of a slow burn of shame.

“Oh, look here, sometime next week would probably be fine,” he said, his voice gruff. He patted her hand. “I’ll have most things straightened out with the family by then.”

“Oh, thank you, Daisy will be so pleased.”

“There’s surely no need for that,” he said. “Can’t we keep it between ourselves?” Alec dug him in the ribs with an elbow and he was aware from Grace’s delicate mauve blush that his words were open to interpretation. He would have liked to clarify, but she was already retreating from the room, bumping a bony hip on the corner of a table as she hurried away. The Major groaned and looked at his sandwich which seemed as appetising now as two rubber mats filled with horsehair. He pushed the plate away and signaled Tom to bring another lager.

H
is car was already pulled up to Marjorie’s spindly fountain and a face at the double-glazed oriel window above the front door had registered his presence before the second thoughts overwhelmed him. He should have telephoned before arriving. The fiction that he was welcome to drop in at any time, because he was family, could only be maintained as long as he never took Marjorie at her word.

It had been obvious soon after Bertie’s marriage that Marjorie had no intention of playing the dutiful daughter-in-law and had sought to separate the two of them from the rest of the family. In the modern style, they had formed a nucleus of two and set about filling their tiny flat with ugly new furniture and friends from Bertie’s insurance office. They immediately began to defy the tradition of the family Sunday lunch at Rose Lodge and took to dropping by in the late afternoon instead, when they would decline a cup of tea in favour of a mixed cocktail. His mother would drink tea, stiff with Sunday disapproval, while Marjorie regaled them with news of her latest purchases. He would have a small sherry, a sticky and unpleasant attempt to bridge the gap. Nancy soon lost patience with them. She began to call Bertie and Marjorie the ‘Pettigrubbers’ and, to the Major’s horror, to encourage Marjorie to elaborate on exactly how much her latest purchases had cost.

The front door remained shut. Perhaps he had only imagined a face at the window, or perhaps they didn’t want to see him and were even now crouching behind the sofa hoping he would ring the bell a couple of times and then leave. He rang again. Once again the chimes played their few bars of ‘Joyful, Joyful,’ echoing away deep into the house. He rapped on the door knocker, a brass wreath of grapevine with a central wine bottle, and stared at the front door’s aggressive oak grain. Somewhere another door closed and at last heels clicked on tile and the door was unbolted. Jemima was dressed in gray sweatpants and a black sleeveless polo neck top, with her hair pulled back under a white sweatband. She appeared, thought the Major, to be dressed as some kind of athletic nun. She gave him a glare she might have given a door-to-door vacuum salesman or an evangelical proselytiser.

“Is Mother expecting you?” she asked. “Only I just got her to lie down for a few minutes.”

“I’m afraid I drove over on the off chance,” he said. “I can come back later.” He looked at her carefully. Her face was devoid of the usual make-up and her hair limp. She looked like the gangly, stooped girl of fifteen she had once been; sullen but with Bertie’s pale eyes and strong chin to redeem her.

“I was just doing my healing yoga,” she said. “But I suppose you’d better come in while I’m here. I don’t want people bothering Mother when I’m not around.” She turned and went in, leaving the door for him to close.

∗

“I suppose you’d like a cup of tea?” Jemima asked as they arrived in the kitchen. She put on the electric kettle and stood behind the U-shaped kitchen counter, where someone had begun to sort out a drawer full of junk. “Mother will get up in a bit anyway. She can’t seem to lie still these days.” She hung her head and picked about for bits of used pencils, which she added to a small heap in between a pile of batteries and a small arrangement of variously coloured string.

“No little Gregory today?” the Major asked, sitting himself on a wooden chair at the breakfast table in the window nook.

“One of my friends is picking him up from school,” she said. “They’ve all been very good about babysitting and bringing over salads and stuff. I haven’t had to cook dinner in a week.”

“Quite the welcome break, then?” said the Major. She gave him a withering look. The kettle began to boil; she produced two chunky malformed mugs in a strange olive hue and a flowery box of tea bags.

“Chamomile, Blackberry Zinger, or burdock?” she asked.

“I’ll have real tea if you have it,” he said. She reached high into a cupboard and pulled out a tin of plain tea bags. She dropped one in a cup and poured boiling water up to the brim. It immediately began to give off a smell like wet laundry.

“How is your mother doing?” he asked.

“It’s funny how people keep asking me that. “How’s your poor mother?” they say, as if I’m just some disinterested observer.”

“How are you both doing?” he offered, feeling his jaw twitch as he bit back a more resentful retort. Her broad hint of people’s insensitivity did not extend to asking how he was coping.