Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand (24 page)

“Look, it’s really no trouble,” he said. “And if it helps you resolve this problem, I’m glad to be of service.”

“I will be entirely in your debt, Major.” She stood up from her stool, came close and laid her hand on his arm. “I cannot express my gratitude.” The Major felt warmth spreading up his arm. He kept still, as if a butterfly had alighted on his elbow. For a moment nothing existed but the feel of her breath and the sight of his own face on her dark eyes.

“Well, it’s quite all right.” He gave her hand a quick squeeze.

“You are a most astonishing man,” she said, and he realised he had inspired a sense of trust and indebtedness that would make it entirely impossible for an honourable man to attempt to kiss her anytime soon. He cursed himself for a fool.

∗

It was dark when Abdul Wahid knocked at the door of Rose Lodge. He was carrying a few belongings rolled tightly in a small prayer rug tied with a canvas strap. He looked as if he were used to rolling his life up in this simple bundle.

“Do come in,” said the Major.

“You are very kind,” said the young man, who wore the same frown as usual. He carefully removed his battered brown slip-on shoes and placed them under the hallstand. The Major knew this was a sign of respect for his home, but he felt embarrassed by the intimacy of a stranger’s feet in damp socks. He had a sudden vision of the village ladies leaving imprints of their stockings in coven circles on his polished boards. He was glad his own feet were encased in stout wool slippers.

Leading the way upstairs, he decided to show the nephew to the north-facing spare room after all. Roger’s room, with its old blue rug and the good desk with the writing lamp, seemed suddenly too luxurious and soft for this hard-faced young man.

“Will this do?” he asked, surreptitiously kicking the weak bed leg to make sure it was sturdy and no dust fell from the wormholes. The thin mattress, the pine chest of drawers, and the single print of flowers on one wall seemed suitably monastic.

“You are too kind.” Abdul Wahid deposited his few belongings gently on the bed.

“I’ll get you some sheets and let you settle in,” said the Major.

“Thank you,” said Abdul Wahid.

When the Major came back with the linens, and a thin wool blanket that he had selected instead of a silk eiderdown, Abdul Wahid had already settled in. On the chest were laid out a comb, a soap dish, and a copy of the Qur’an. A large cotton dishtowel, printed with calligraphy, had been hung over the picture. The prayer rug lay on the floor, looking small against the expanse of worn floorboard. Abdul Wahid sat on the edge of the bed, his hands on his knees, staring into thin air.

“I hope you’ll be warm enough,” the Major said, placing his bundle on the bed.

“She was always so beautiful,” whispered Abdul Wahid. “I could never think straight in her presence.”

“The window rattles a bit if the wind gets round this corner of the house,” the Major added, and went over to tighten the catch. He found himself slightly unnerved at having the intense young man in his home and, for fear of saying something wrong, he decided to play the jovial, disinterested host.

“They promised me I would forget her, and I did,” said the young man. “But now she is here and my brain has been spinning all day.”

“Maybe it’s a low-pressure system.” The Major peered out through the glass for signs of storm clouds. “My wife always got headaches when the barometer dropped.”

“It is a great relief to be in your home, Major,” said Abdul Wahid. The Major turned in surprise. The young man had stood up and now made him a short bow. “To be once again in a sanctuary far from the voices of women is balm to the anguished soul.”

“I can’t promise it will last,” said the Major. “My neighbour Alice Pierce is rather fond of singing folk music to her garden plants. Thinks it makes them grow or something.” The Major had often wondered how a wailing rendition of ‘Greensleeves’ would encourage greater raspberry production but Alice insisted that it worked far better than chemical fertilisers, and she did produce several kinds of fruit in pie-worthy quantities. “No sense of pitch, but plenty of enthusiasm,” he added.

“Then I will add a prayer for rain to my devotions,” said Abdul Wahid. The Major could not determine whether this was intended as a humorous remark.

“I’ll see you in the morning,” he said. “I usually put on a pot of tea around six.” As he left his guest and proceeded down to the kitchen, he felt in his bones the exhaustion of such a strange turn of events.

And yet he could not help but register a certain sense of exhilaration at having thrust himself into the heart of Mrs. Ali’s life in such an extraordinary manner. He had acted spontaneously. He had asserted his own wishes. He was tempted to celebrate his own boldness with a large glass of Scotch, but as he reached the kitchen he decided that a large glass of sodium bicarbonate would be more prudent.

S
aturday morning was sunny and the Major was in the back garden, forking a pile of leaves into a wheelbarrow, when his son’s raised voice from the house snapped him to attention and caused him to drop the entire load with a half-formed oath. Having no idea that Roger would follow through on his threat to visit, the Major had not told him that there would be a guest in the house. From the continued shouts inside, accompanied by what sounded like a chair being overturned, the Major surmised that he might need to run if he were to save both Roger and his houseguest from a skirmish.

As he hurried toward the door, he cursed Roger for never bothering to phone but always turning up unannounced whenever he felt like it. The Major would have liked to institute some rational system of pre-visit notification, but he never seemed to find the right words to tell Roger that his childhood home was no longer available to him at all hours. He was unaware of any established etiquette as to when a child should be stripped of family privilege, but he knew the time had long since passed in this case.

Now he would be stuck with Roger pouting as if he owned the place and the Major and his guest were the interlopers. As he reached the back door, Roger came panting through, his face red and furious and his fingers poised over his mobile phone. “There’s a man in the house claims he’s staying here,” said Roger. “Sandy’s keeping him talking but I’ve got the police on speed dial.”

“Oh, good heavens, don’t call the police,” said the Major. “That’s just Abdul Wahid.”

“Abdul what?” said Roger. “Who the hell is he? I almost hit him with a dining chair.”

“Are you quite mad?” asked the Major. “Why would you assume my guest is some kind of intruder?”

“Is that any more absurd than assuming my father has suddenly become friendly with half the population of Pakistan?”

“And you left Sandy alone with my ‘intruder’?” asked the Major.

“Yes, she’s keeping him occupied, talking to him about handmade clothing,” said Roger. “Spotted that his scarf was some vintage tribal piece and quite calmed him down. I ducked out just to check he was on the up and up.”

“So much for chivalry,” said the Major.

“Well, you said yourself, he isn’t dangerous,” said Roger. “Who the hell is he and what’s he doing here?”

“I don’t see that it is any of your concern,” said the Major. “I am simply helping out a friend by putting up her nephew for a couple of days, a couple of weeks at most. She wanted to invite the fiancée to move in and – It’s a bit complicated.”

He felt himself on shaky ground. It was hard to defend his invitation when he himself did not fully understand what Mrs. Ali was trying to accomplish in immediately moving Amina and George into the flat above the shop. She had stared hungrily at little George, and the Major had not recognised the look until later. It was the same look Nancy had sometimes given Roger, when she thought no one was looking. She had looked that way on the day of his birth and she had looked at him just the same as she lay wasting away in the hospital. In that bleach-scented room with its flickering fluorescent light and its ridiculous new wallpaper border bursting with purple hollyhocks, Roger had chattered on about his own concerns as usual, as if a cheery recitation of his promotion prospects would wipe out the reality of her dying, and she had gazed at him as if to burn his face into her fading mind.

“It sounds quite ridiculous,” said Roger, speaking in such an imperious tone that the Major wondered how he would react to a swift butt on the shins with a rake handle. “Anyway, Sandy and I are here now, so you can use us as an excuse to get rid of him.”

“It would be entirely rude to ‘get rid’ of him,” said the Major. “He has accepted my invitation – an invitation I might not have made had I known you were coming down this weekend.”

“I did say we’d be down to visit soon,” said Roger. “I told you at the cottage.”

“Alas, if I planned my weekends around the hope that you would carry through on a promise to visit, I would be a lonely old man sitting amid a growing tower of clean bed linen and uneaten cake,” said the Major. “At least Abdul Wahid showed up when invited.”

“Look, I’m sure he’s a perfectly nice chap, but you can’t be too careful at your age,” said Roger. He stopped and looked around as if to detect eavesdroppers. “There have been many cases of elderly people taken in by scam artists.”

“What do you mean, ‘elderly people’?”

“You have to be especially careful about foreigners.”

“Would that apply equally to Americans?” asked the Major. “Because I spot one of them now.” Sandy was standing in the doorway. She appeared to be examining the long curtains and the Major wished that the pattern of poppies had not faded to rust all along the edges.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Roger. “Americans are just like us.”

As his son greeted Sandy with a kiss on the lips and an arm around the waist, the Major was left to gape at such a peremptory dismissal of any distinction of national character between Great Britain and the giant striving nation across the Atlantic. The Major found much to admire in America but also felt that the nation was still in its infancy, its birth predating Queen Victoria’s reign by a mere sixty years or so. Generous to a fault – he still remembered the tins of chocolate powder and waxy crayons handed out in his school even several years after the war – America wielded her huge power in the world with a brash confidence that reminded him of a toddler who has got hold of a hammer.

He was prepared to admit that he might be prejudiced, but what was one supposed to think of a country where history was either preserved in theme parks by employees wearing mob caps and long skirts over their sneakers, or was torn down – taken apart for the wide-plank lumber?

“Are you all right, darling?” asked Roger. “Turns out Abdul is here at my father’s invitation.”

“Of course he is,” said Sandy. She turned to the Major. “Ernest, you have a lovely home.” She held out her long hand and the Major took it, noting that her nails were now pink with broad white tips. It took him a moment to realise that they had been painted to look like fingernails, and he sighed over the extraordinary range of female vanities. His wife, Nancy, had had lovely oval nails, like filbert nuts, and had never done anything more than buff them with a small manicure tool. She had kept them short, the better to thrust them into the garden soil or to play the piano.

“Thank you,” said the Major.

“You can almost smell the centuries,” said Sandy, who was perfectly dressed for a literary version of the countryside, or perhaps an afternoon in Tunbridge Wells. She wore high-heeled brown shoes, pale, well-pressed slacks, a shirt with autumn leaves printed on it, and a cashmere sweater tied around her shoulders. She did not look ready to climb over a stile and walk through soggy sheep fields to the pub for lunch. A happy maliciousness prompted the Major to suggest just that immediately.

“Let’s celebrate the lovely surprise of your visit, shall we?” he said. “I thought we’d walk down for lunch at the Royal Oak.”

“Actually we brought lunch with us,” said Roger. “Picked up supplies at this great new place in Putney. Everything is flown in from France by overnight mail.”

“I hope you like truffle dust.” Sandy laughed. “Roger had them powder everything but the madeleines.”

“Perhaps you’d like to invite that Abdul chap to join us, by way of apology,” added Roger, as if it were the Major who had created an offence.

“It’s not polite to call him Abdul. It means servant,” said the Major. “Formally, you should use the entire Abdul Wahid. It means Servant of God.”

“Touchy about it, is he?” said Roger. “And his aunt would be Mrs. What’s-Her-Name from the village shop? The one you brought to the cottage to freak out Mrs. Augerspier?”

“Your Mrs. Augerspier is an objectionable woman – ”

“That goes without saying, Dad.”

“Just because it goes without saying doesn’t mean one shouldn’t speak up, you know. Or at least refuse to do business with such a person.”

“There’s no point in being confrontational and losing out on something lucrative, is there?” asked Roger. “I mean, it is much more satisfying to beat them by getting the better end of the bargain.”

“On what philosophical basis does that idea rest?” asked the Major. Roger gave a vague wave of the hand and the Major saw him roll his eyes for Sandy’s benefit.

“Oh, it’s simple pragmatism, Dad. It’s called the real world. If we refused to do business with the morally questionable, the deal volume would drop in half and the good guys like us would end up poor. Then where would we all be?”

“On a nice dry spit of land known as the moral high ground?” suggested the Major.

∗

Roger and Sandy went to fetch their hamper and as the Major tried not to think of truffles, which he had always avoided because they stank like sweaty groins, Abdul Wahid came out of the house. As usual he was carrying a couple of dusty religious texts tucked tightly under his armpit and was wearing the dour frown which the Major now understood was the result of excessive thinking rather than mere unpleasantness. The Major wished young men wouldn’t think so much. It always seemed to result in absurd revolutionary movements or, as in the case of several of his former pupils, the production of very bad poetry.