Read Online Notwithstanding by Louis De Bernières - Free Book Online Page B

jested Joan, aware that her pleasantry would probably be lost on the Macs. She drove through the arches of oak trees that spanned the lane. In summer they gave drivers the sensation of entering a tunnel in Arcadia, but now only a few tenacious brown leaves rustled on those great boughs that seemed to be upheld in beseechment to a white, implacable sky. Finally Joan turned right, up the very steep hill to St Peter’s Church. Since the church was Anglican, this road customarily had no nuns upon it, and so Joan speeded up a little in order to gain some momentum for the ascent, sounding her horn at the two most dangerous corners. ‘Nearly there,’ said Mrs Mac to her husband, and Mrs Mac’s sister echoed, ‘Yes, nearly there.’
    St Peter’s Church was truly very small, having been founded in Saxon times, and rebuilt several times without ever having been expanded. A rough path in Bargate sandstone led to its door, and two enormous yew trees overshadowed much of its graveyard, whose level had risen greatly over the thousand years in which its soil had been turned up for the new dead. The oldest headstones dated only to the seventeenth century, but the oldest bones were already browned and crumbled when Geoffrey de Mandeville took these lands in fief from the Conqueror, and divided them up in turn among his captains.
    Joan stopped the car outside, and pushed the gear lever into first, just in case the handbrake was as unreliable as she suspected. She clambered out, opened the rear doors for the Macs, and then went to open the boot in order to fetch out her cuttings and her secateurs. Mrs Mac’s sister emerged first, and then Mrs Mac, who turned to assist her husband, holding out an arm for him, even though she herself was so bent that she could scarcely see a dog’s length in front of her.
    ‘I’m going into the church,’ said Mrs Mac’s sister, who was a woman of simple pleasures, and liked nothing more than to sit in a pew, gazing around at the stained glass and the tablets on the walls, soaking up the atmosphere of the timelessness and perversity of God. She also thought, as always, but falsely, that it might be warmer inside than out.
    Joan fetched the substantial old key from its usual hiding place in a crevice in the brickwork of Piers de Mandeville’s tomb, and unlocked the black oak door of the church. Until recently it had never been locked at all, but lately there had been a rash of theft from rural churches as the larcenous classes had finally lost their sense of sacrilege. ‘I’m going to do the arrangements,’ she told the others, somewhat superfluously. ‘Shouldn’t be more than half an hour.’
    ‘Mac and I will do the graves, then,’ said Mrs Mac, and the old couple moved slowly away, bearing each other’s weight, to visit the graves of those they had loved, as well as those for whom they had felt particular sorrow. Mac’s mother and father were in there, and two of his sisters; there were three members of their defunct group of spiritualists; there was poor Mrs Rendall, who had been so blonde and pretty and vivacious, carried away by cancer before she was forty; there was Pamela Diss, who had committed suicide inexplicably at the age of twenty-three, when she had a family that adored her, and her whole life to look forward to. Mac and Mrs Mac paused before each headstone, reading the inscriptions and epitaphs that they already knew so well, and Mrs Mac, as always, could not help the tears of sentiment that inevitably welled up in the corners of her eyes. ‘All gone before, all gone before,’ she said to Mac, wiping her eyes with a tiny crumpled handkerchief, and then blowing her nose. ‘Last one,’ she said, and they moved slowly towards the grave under the western wall that was habitually the final one on their rounds.
    Mrs Mac was always mildly dismayed by the state of it, frustrated by the manner in which time confounded her efforts. Sometimes she brought a scrubbing brush with her to