Life: An Exploded Diagram Read Online Free Page B

scared, because, daft as he was, he knew that death is the soldier’s trade. He would have practiced bayoneting, stabbing sandbags hung from gallows. The peak of the cap shadows his eyes. Like Win, he is expressionless. The pair of them stare into the muzzle of Signor Delmonico’s camera, like people trying to maintain good manners in the face of some obscene species of horror.
    I’m reading all this into the picture, obviously. Maybe they didn’t feel anything like that at all. There’s sentimentality for you.
    On the other hand, there’s the fact that Percy is part of me. He’s woven into my DNA. We share cellular structure. He might be responsible for the shape of my nose, my dislike of cats, the color of my hair. He might have some genetic say in the kind of people I’m attracted to and the people who were attracted to me. And therefore he might be to blame for my failed marriage. Likewise, I might owe him my success, such as it is.
    Win, too, of course. Her thorny string of cells is just as much a part of me. But I knew her; I never knew Percy. And, like Win, I am angry with him for marching off into oblivion. I deal with my anger by making up stories about him. By imagining him. By bringing him up a lost country lane between two vast peaceable horses, his hands between their bridles and their hot flat cheeks, to where my young grandmother leans on a gate.
    I stole the photograph from my parents’ house in 1978, after Win’s funeral. It took them three months to notice it was gone.

W IN BROUGHT HER daughter up closely. In Bratton Morley, this was not difficult. The place consisted of nine cottages, nine families knitted together by intermarriage and employment by the Mortimers. Threads of connection reached out to the other clusters of dwellings on the estate; nevertheless, at the time of her marriage, Win could have written on a single sheet of paper the names of everyone she had ever met.
    Edmund Mortimer was a kindly employer. He did not stop a man’s pay when he was off sick. When his pigs were slaughtered, the lesser cuts — trotters, half-heads for sausage, thin end of belly for streaky bacon — were distributed among his people. His windfall apples were there for the taking. At potato-lifting times, women walked home from the fields with bulging aprons.
    Mortimer’s instinctive kindness toward his employees had been intensified by a deep sadness. The Great War had shocked and depressed him. He had listened to the patriotic bombast with intense unease, had read the triumphalist reports in the Times with utter dismay. Of the twenty-three of his men who had gone off to fight for the king — the kaiser’s cousin — only ten had returned, some of them maimed. He had walked to greet them home and shake their hands, if they still had them. He wrote notes to bereft mothers and young widows on black-edged paper.
    After the war, it took him eight years to get his farm back to full strength, eight years during which many of his fields lay fallow and women and awkward boys did the work of experienced men who had died. The landscape itself seemed to grieve. In the untilled fields, poppies proliferated like a million droplets of blood. Doggedly, he’d got things back to something like normal. He had not paid much attention to the Sparlings. He’d fixed the rent on their cottage at a guinea — twenty-one shillings — a year, payable on Lady Day, March 25. Win or her mother had queued to pay it, in hoarded coin, to Mr. Hedge, Mortimer’s moonfaced young steward. Hedge marked it down in a ledger using a pen dipped in black ink, counting the money into a metal cash box with an ironical flourish, because most of the money had come from Mortimer in the first place.
    Win and her mother were glad of Edmund Mortimer’s casual generosity, or neglect. Without a man’s wage coming in, they were poor. (Shortsighted and slow-moving Stanley had moved into a room above the baker’s. Walking to Borstead from Bratton at