grandfather would have said. “I don’t want a handkerchief from you. As for you
being long in the mouth, I don’t think you have it in you. Your mouth is too
busy laughing.”
“Thank you.”
“I hadn’t really meant that as a compliment, it simply came out that way, by
accident.”
“I know.”
“I am merely going about my business, not whining or begging for sympathy, or
quivering my lips, and you just turn up like?
“Please don’t make me a bad penny.”
“Very well. You just turn up like mad Uncle Albert, whom we keep locked in the
third-floor attic, but who periodically bribes the tweeney and escapes.”
He laughed. He had a wonderful laugh, full and rich and heady. I hadn’t heard a
laugh like that in far too long, truth be told. Not since the first time I saw
him in the park. Had I inadvertently been funny? I hadn’t meant to be. Truly,
there wasn’t any more humor in my life. When I had thrown the first clods of
earth on Grandfather’s grave, I decided that twenty-one years of smiles and
laughter were enough to grant any human being?more than enough. Grandfather had
been in my life since I was ten, when my mother had died, my father had left the
country, and Peter was at Eton. And Grandfather had loved to laugh. To my utter
embarrassment, tears leaked out of my eyes and slid down my face.
They stuck to the wretched net veil. I pulled the veil back and wiped the back
of my hand over my eyes. The tears kept coming. It was humiliating.
“I’m sorry,” the man said. “Very sorry. Whom did you lose?”
“My grandfather.”
“I lost mine five years ago. It was difficult. Actually, though, to be honest
about it, it is my grandmother I miss the most of all of them. She loved me more
than the sunsets in Ireland, she’d tell me. She was from Galway, you know, where
she said the sunsets were the most beautiful in the world. Then, she said, she
loved my grandfather so much, she willingly said good-bye to the sunsets,
married him, and came to England. I never heard of her speak of the sunsets in
Yorkshire.”
For a moment I thought he was going to cry. I didn’t want him to be nice,
perhaps even to have an inkling about what I was feeling. I wanted him to be a
man, and act like a man. That way I would know what he was without having to
bother with his name. My tears dried up.
Then he offered me his left hand, since his right hand was still holding the
umbrella over both of us. It was raining so hard it was as if we were enclosed
in a small gray world, completely alone. I didn’t like that, but I did like the
umbrella. I wasn’t even damp.
“No,” I said, looking at his hand, which didn’t even have a glove on it. Like
his face, that hand was tanned. I wasn’t about to touch that hand. It was large,
the fingers blunt and strong. “No,” I said again. “I don’t want to meet you. I
live with my companion, Miss Crislock, and we have no visitors, since we’re in
mourning.”
“How long do you anticipate this blacking out of life?”
“Blacking out of life? I’m doing no such thing. I loved my grandfather. I miss
him. I am respecting his memory. Also, truth be told, I am rather angry at him
for dying and leaving me here alone, to go on without him, to have no one
anymore for me. He shouldn’t have died and left me. He was old, but he wasn’t
ill. Everything was fine until he went riding and his horse slipped in a patch
of mud. He shot off his horse’s back, hit his head against an oak tree, and fell
unconscious. He never woke up. I protected him from the doctor, who wanted to
bleed him every day, the idiot. I pleaded with Grandfather, I promised to let
him eat all of Cook’s apple tarts he wanted, I begged him not to leave me, to
open his eyes and smile at me?even curse at me, something he enjoyed as much as