Read Online Notwithstanding by Louis De Bernières - Free Book Online

Mrs Mac’s sister were spiritualists, and had been ever since Mrs Mac discovered her abilities in 1922. She awoke one morning in the summer, on the same day that Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson was assassinated by Irish terrorists, and asked Mac, ‘Who’s Robert?’
    ‘Robert?’ repeated Mac.
    ‘Robert,’ said Mrs Mac, ‘with sandy hair, blue eyes and one of those sheepskin flying jackets. He says he wants you to know that he’s all right. Then he said “Toodle-oo” and disappeared.’
    Mac sat up in bed and looked at her, his mouth hanging open, and a cold shiver travelling the length of his spine. ‘I knew a Robert,’ he said, ‘and he always used to say “Toodle-oo”. Got burned in a Bristol Fighter.’
    ‘He’s dead, then, is he?’ asked Mrs Mac, realising all at once the significance of her dream, and Mac nodded. He was recalling the best friend of his youth, who had managed to become an officer, and campaigned so vigorously to be seconded from his regiment into the Royal Flying Corps, only to be killed accidentally, three weeks after winning his wings, on the second-to-last day of the war.
    In the aftermath of that war these islands were in tears, and never before had there come about such a rending of the veil between this world and the next. Mediums sprung up like cuckoo pint in the spring, among them the fraudulent, the genuinely gifted, the innocent but deluded, the disingenuous, and those who could be both spectacularly right and wrong within the space of a single sentence.
    Mrs Mac sought neither money nor notoriety, but gathered around her a small group of people from all walks of life, who crammed themselves into the tiny room, sat holding hands around the wooden table, and received messages from those they had loved, as well as some from complete strangers, as if the dead were as promiscuous as the living in their need to speak across the abyss, and as desperate for reassurance.
    Mrs Mac began her meetings with a short prayer, calling upon the Lord to bless their undertaking, and to protect those gathered together from the mischief of the uncouth spirits that inhabited the lower ether, and then the lights were quenched, with the exception of a single candle in the middle of the table, upon whose flame Mrs Mac would focus until her vision blurred and the dead would appear before her inner eyes, queuing up behind each other as it well behoved the British dead.
    As the decades passed, Mrs Mac’s circle of spiritualists passed on, one by one, until those who had once sat expectantly in the chairs became the very visitors who stepped out of the candle’s yellow flame to bring their cryptic messages and declarations from the other side. Increasingly, Mrs Mac dwelt not in this corporeal sphere, but in the next, until the two elided and coincided, and any distinction between them became redundant. It was as if Mrs Mac had died while remaining alive, or as if she had taken to living among the dead. She subsisted without terror, fearing only the pain and inconvenience of transferring from one condition to another when her own moment of death arrived, and looking forward to the better state of health whose enjoyment she envisaged on the far shore. Many in the village considered her mad, or at least half-baked, but she was sweet-natured, kindly and fascinating, and therefore those who did not believe in her phantoms simply humoured her. ‘She’s harmless,’ people would say, shrugging their shoulders, ‘and, you never know, there might be something in it.’
    One day Joan called in on Mrs Mac, saying, ‘I’m just going up to the church to do the flowers, and I wondered if you’d like to come.’ Joan took village responsibilities seriously and ran a kind of localised social services organisation that was entirely of her own devising. She was a devout conservative, perceiving that if all the world were made up of communities such as this one, and if every such community had people like herself and