Beloved father and husband—it’s so sad, not bland at all,” Bertie said. It was 1999, nearly sixty years by then since his father had died. Teddy’s own life already felt like history. Bertie had asked him what he would like to do for his eighty-fifth birthday and he said he would like to have a little expedition around “old haunts,” so she hired a car and they took off from Fanning Court on what Bertie called a “road trip” and what Teddy called a “farewell tour.” He did not expect to survive much beyond the millennium and thought this would be a good way to round off a life and a century. He would have been surprised to know that he still had another decade and more ahead of him. It had been a strange and lovely trip, full of feeling (“We ran the gamut,” Bertie said afterwards) and genuine sentiment rather than just nostalgia, always a bit of a cheap emotion in Teddy’s opinion.
By then, Hugh’s headstone had been softened by lichen and the inscription was growing quietly less legible. Sylvie was buried elsewhere in the same churchyard, as were Nancy and her parents. Teddy had no idea where Winnie and Gertie were but Millie was here, home to roost at last after a lifetime of never settling long in one place. All these people, he thought, tied to Bertie by a thin red thread, yet she would never know them.
Pamela and Ursula, like Bea, had opted for cremation. Teddy had waited for the bluebells in the wood to flower before scattering Ursula’s ashes amongst them. The dead were legion.
“Best to avoid morbid thoughts,” he said to Bertie.
“What would you like on your headstone?” she asked, despite this admonishment. Teddy thought of the endless white acres of the war cemeteries. Name, rank, number. He thought of Keats, “Here lies one whose name was writ in water,” an epitaph that Ursula had always found so tragic. Or Hugh himself, who had once said, “Oh, you can just put me out with the dustbin, I won’t mind.” And written in stone on the war memorial at Runnymede, the names of the dead who had no grave at all.
Something had changed. What? Of course—the big unruly horse chestnuts that used to shade the dead on one side of the churchyard were all gone now and small flowering cherries had been planted tamely in their stead. The old stone wall that had previously been obscured by the horse chestnuts was visible now, cleaned and newly repointed.
“A woodland burial,” he said. “No name, nothing, just a tree. An oak if you can, but anything will do. Don’t let your mother be in charge.”
Death was the end. Sometimes it took a whole lifetime to understand that. He thought of Sunny, journeying restlessly in search of the thing he had left behind. “Promise me you’ll make the most of your life,” he said to Bertie.
“I promise,” Bertie said, already at twenty-four knowing it was unlikely she would be able to do so.
Love Divine, All Loves Excelling” announced that the Sunday service was reaching its end. Teddy wandered amongst the graves. Most of the people in them had died long before his time. Ursula was picking up conkers from the stand of magnificent horse chestnuts at the far end of the churchyard. They were enormous trees and Teddy wondered if their roots had intertwined with the bones of the dead, imagined them curling a path through ribcages and braceleting ankles and fettering wrists.
When he walked over to Ursula he found her examining a conker. The spiky green shell had split, revealing the gleaming, polished nut inside. “Fruit of the tree,” she said, handing it to him. “Media vita in morte sumus. In the midst of life we are in death. Or is it the other way round? There’s something magical, isn’t there, about seeing something brand new, something just entering the world, like a calf being born or a bud opening?” They had seen calves being born at the Home Farm when they were children. Teddy remembered feeling queasy at the sight of the slippery membrane, the cauled calf looking like something that had already been parcelled up by a butcher.
The morning-service congregation began to spill out of the church into the sunshine. Ursula said, “You used to love playing conkers. There’s something quite medieval about little boys and their conkers. Flails—is that what those spiky weapons on sticks were called? Or is it morning stars? What a nice name for something horrible.” She rambled on. Teddy could tell she was in a mood for diversion, as a remedy against the awfulness of the war, he supposed. Ursula, he thought, knew what happened on the ground during a bombing raid. Teddy could only imagine and imagination was going to have no place in his world from now on.