A Rather English Marriage by Angela Lambert Page A

disturbed by some distant clamour in his mind that would not be harmonized into his dream. He opened his eyes, looked at the alarm clock beside the bed, and remembered that Grace was dead. ‘O Lord, look after my dear wife Grace, who is now with Thee in paradise,’ he prayed, as he had done each morning since her death. He remembered the little dead bird chucked into a rubbish bin up by the allotments, flies busy in its eye sockets, its scrawny bunch of feathers an empty rag, the innards eaten away; remembered above all how bad it had smelt, and squeezed his eyes tightly shut to banish the vision and all that it implied … maggots … change and decay … crawling and rotting … He had seen enough dead bodies to know what disgusting changes happened within days of breath ceasing.
    He’d spent the war with an assault unit of the Royal Engineers, petarding houses and road blocks, launching assault bridges, ferrying powered rafts and, after going through France and Belgium in the wake of Jerry, he knew all too well what death looked like, not only in its immediate aftermath but weeks later. Charred bodies were more bearable; their blackened flesh and bloodless corpses hardly seemed as though they could ever have been alive. It was the sight of flesh decomposing, caving in on itself, returning to compost and anonymous matter that was hardest to reconcile with his belief that the living were merely at one stage of their path towards eternity.
    He’d been such an eager lad before it all began. Joined the local Territorial Army after Munich, when he was just eighteen. Always wanted to be an engineer; he’d loved working things out, could imagine weights and stresses in his head. First he’d been a sapper, then in 1941 they made him a lancecorporal, and by the end of the war he’d been promoted to sergeant. How proud Grace had been when he came home with a third stripe to sew on to his khaki uniform. No matter how much he protested that it was automatic, she had disagreed. She knew better, she said, as she stitched it to his sleeve. She’d been right, too; he’d distinguished himself at the D-Day landing.
    Right, he thought, that’ll do for now. Cup of tea and then I can get in a quick two hours up at the allotment before anyone else arrives. He liked the silence of the dawn: the earth still damp and the scent of the flowers strong and clear, clearer than it ever was later on in the day, as though they withdrew from the competition of pipe tobacco and clothes saturated with smoke. The birds sang fearlessly first thing in the morning, and the usual robin would come and perch on his spade or watch him from a nearby bush, turning its head from side to side, its black eyes checking for worms.
    He liked doing housework because it made him feel like Grace. She had always taken a pride in her shining kitchen, put together item by item as they began to discard the bits and pieces they’d started out with when they got married. Nobody in their two families had money to spare, but people had given what they could; and what they hadn’t got and couldn’t afford, Roy had made.
    â€˜Royston Southgate, you’re a wonder, you are!’ Grace would say after he had showed her how he had sawed and planed and fitted joints together, working in the evenings up at his old school on the workbench where he had learned his carpentry. He’d built their table, and two benches with nice firm legs splayed to take the weight; he’d built a wardrobe for their bedroom and, while they waited for the first baby, an old-fashioned cradle which Grace had trimmed by cutting up her wedding dress.
    â€˜I’m not likely to need it again,’ she’d joked. ‘Might as well put it to good use.’
    Their child lay like a little prince in a bower of yellowing satin with lace ruffles encircling the sides. The pair of themhad leaned over him at night, straining to hear him breathe -