his formal, military stance – but that was acquired, taught: Albert buttoned. She thought perhaps Mr and Mrs Bowen had been most proud of that Albert: backbone straight, unnaturally so, chest out, gold buttons arranged in groups of five on his uniform tunic, and the three-feathered plume in his bearskin cap. That was the young man she remembered from the silver-framed photograph, not the Albert she remembered from life. That young soldier hadn’t been the only Albert. It still made her chest feel tight. So she wouldn’t think about it.
A seagull landed nearby, accompanying her a few steps before flying away. Flora watched it disappear into the distance, and began looking in the sand for shells that she could photograph. It had been six years now since the telegram with its three short sentences. Bang. Bang. Bang. Like bullets.
Then there had been Christopher, Albert’s friend in the winter of 1918, only four months later, sitting in his Welsh Guards’ uniform on Mr and Mrs Bowen’s settee, the teacup clattering in his shaking hands. She had listened mutely, intently, as had Mr and Mrs Bowen. Christopher said it had gone in his side. It had been very sudden. They were crouching, almost standing really and getting ready to go over the top of the trench. Albert was crouched lower. It had been unforeseen and very quick. Oh yes, Christopher was certain of that. It had been over in a moment, Mr and Mrs Bowen, Christopher could tell. There had been no suffering at all. None.
The room fell silent.
‘That is a comfort to Mrs Bowen,’ Mr Bowen said eventually.
‘Yes,’ Christopher replied. He stared into his teacup. He kept knocking the buttons of his uniform against the saucer with a clack. The Army doctor had said that the bullet had entered the liver and there could be ‘no hope’ – those were his words – ‘for a man with a bullet in his liver,’ Christopher said. Mr Bowen sat dumbly. Flora picked up the bone china teapot and offered Christopher more tea.
‘No, thank you kindly; I’ll be getting off now. Catching the train back to Swansea, you see. Got to get back before it’s too late.’
‘Oh yes, of course.’ They understood. It had been very kind, too kind to mention, Christopher coming all this way to tell them, so that they would know there had been no pain at the end.
‘A great reassurance,’ Mr Bowen had said.
Flora sat on a rock, shook her hair and looked out at the still sea. She tried not to think about Albert and the life they would have had together, kept on trying to shake the shock and the sadness out of herself. For years it seemed as if her very bones had been glazed with grief, though she was becoming aware of a new warmth growing within her and the need to embrace life again.
It was Thursday and Wilfred was spending the day in his workshop. What was it with his customers, he wondered. Mrs Howell-Thomas’s fingernails, poor bugger, hadn’t seen a nailbrush for a while. It was hard washing a corpse’s hand. Some cooperated but others lay there like a sack of potatoes with a look of consternation on their face, like a small child who didn’t like being washed. Wilfred went to the door of the workshop to get a couple of breaths of fresh air, feeling grateful for the business Mrs Howell-Thomas had provided.
‘Nails are in a bit of a state here, Mrs Howell-Thomas. Not like you, what with you keeping your house so spick and span.’
Mrs Howell-Thomas was certainly proving less compliant in death than she ever was in life. But it was like that. These elderly Welsh ladies who spent their life distributing hymn books at the door of the Bethesda Chapel and making lemon curd for the Harvest Festival – as soon as they popped their clogs, that was it, couldn’t get them to do anything you wanted. Christian values went out the window once they’d kicked the bucket.
And what was he going to do about that ring? It wouldn’t budge. The rigor mortis had faded and all the fluids had sunk to the bottom of the body, turning Mrs Howell-Thomas the usual waxy colour associated with the recently deceased. It was a pleasant shade of mushroomy-white and the colour that meant that, when the family saw the departed, they were under no illusion that their dearly departed had indeed departed. It was the colour that proclaimed ‘dead’.
‘Daughter coming this