Another World (20 page)

Restless, searching for some discharge of feeling, and not finding it, he goes into the church. He walks up to the altar steps, footsteps echoing across the marble floor, smelling dust, old hassocks, the odour of piety, but unable to feel anything except a kind of nostalgia for the certainties of faith, and even that’s false, for he never came any closer to faith than forced attendance at school assemblies, and those marred by an arrogant childish contempt for his father’s hypocrisy.

He goes to find the Fanshawe memorial.

In loving memory of Robert Fanshawe

Born October 11th 1893

Killed in action, July 1st 1916

Also of James Fanshawe

Born August 15th 1902

Died November 4th 1904

If any question why we died
,

Tell them, because our fathers lied

A bitter epitaph, though there’s nothing surprising about that. Fanshawe had lost two sons, why wouldn’t he be bitter? What’s strange is the determined linking of the two deaths, the conviction of guilt for both. Unless, of course, he’s reading too much into it, and Fanshawe merely intended to endorse Rudyard Kipling’s call for more and better arms.

Six weeks since they’d uncovered the picture. Six weeks since Miranda stepped back and said, in that soft murmur that had raised the hairs on the nape of his neck, ‘It’s us.’ Not true, he thinks, even as the covered-up figures rise once again to the surface of his mind. He doesn’t regret not telling the family about the Fanshawe murder, because even now he doesn’t see how the knowledge would have helped them. It’s easy to let oneself be dazzled by false analogies – the past never threatens anything as simple, or as avoidable, as repetition.

On his way out, by the west door, he finds the Fanshawe graves, and pauses to decipher the eroded names. William, Isobel, Muriel, James. He finds himself searching for Robert, but then remembers that Robert, like Harry, isn’t here.

He wanders off down the path that leads round the outer perimeter of the churchyard, taking the long route back to Geordie. Some of the graves, here under the trees, are so old the names are hidden by moss. They’re forgotten, and the people who stood beside their graves and mourned for them are dead and forgotten in their turn. He remembers the trip to France with Geordie, the rows upon rows upon rows of white headstones, ageless graves for those who were never permitted to grow old. He’d walked round them with Geordie, marvelling at the carefully tended grass, the devotion that kept the graves young. But now, looking round this churchyard, at the gently decaying stones that line the path, he sees that there’s wisdom too in this: to let the innocent and the guilty, the murderers and the victims, lie together beneath their half-erased names, side by side, under the obliterating grass.