that wasn’t right. The poem had a line he liked, Every hair is, hair of the head, numbered. He remembered it again.
I walked into a cottage and the woman I am so drawn to was waiting for me and she has lain down with me, Wilfred thought. He could feel the swift beat of Flora’s heart against his chest. This beautiful, raw woman still in her mourning clothes, had called him. He lay there stroking her hair, which was smooth and fine. Perhaps it is me, he thought, who has died, and gone to heaven.
Flora lay in Wilfred’s arms and breathed in the male smell of his black woollen waistcoat and the spiciness of his hair oil. His arms were solid around her. She hadn’t intended to lie on her back, or even lie down at all, but when he pulled her down she went down with him; lay with him, close to him. Flora noticed how Wilfred breathed regularly: inhaling, then exhaling confidently. This man was not Albert, but this man was alive. This is Wilfred, Flora thought. Beyond that, she knew very little about him, the barest facts – that he was the undertaker from Narberth. Flora had a sense of him and that was enough: his mind was alive, questioning, forging, deciding, and she knew instinctively that she was safe with him.
Lying there with Wilfred there were so many possibilities, so many ways they could go. Flora rested serenely, safely, waiting to see what would happen.
When they had left the cottage at the end of the afternoon, Wilfred stood to the side of the doorway and let Flora go out first. Then he had pulled the door to, using some force so as to close it completely and Flora, serenely, shyly, without speaking, had got on her bicycle and cycled away quickly, down the muddy lane, past the hazelnut trees and bluebells and back on to the empty road. Behind her she heard the sound of the engine spluttering and the car driving away along the deserted road in the other direction. She wondered if Wilfred would come to the cove again.
When she reached the road she stopped, pushed her hair from her face and was struck by a thought: why did she like this man? Why Wilfred and not another? Flora didn’t know. There were many men: the two men she had loved, her father and Albert, both now dead. There were other men, the boys in Stepaside with whom she’d gone to school, the farmers’ sons who had brought their horses to her father for shoeing, young men at church. And all the men who had been killed not so long ago, whose names were chiselled on the new war memorial, each letter precise and neat, every name representing a young man and a whole world that had come and gone. All those men. So why Wilfred? And why now, in this dislocation between her father being dead and Flora feeling peaceful about his death?
She began to cycle past Wisemans Bridge, steadily at first then harder and faster, almost as hard as when she had raced to the post office when her father had collapsed, only this time she felt alive, not panicked. It had been years since she had felt this exhilarated. She held the handlebars tightly, feeling her strength. It was windy and the air was carouselling around her.
My father is dead, Albert is dead, but I am alive, she told herself. She forced her hands around the rubber handlebars and dug her thumbnails into the skin of her first fingers, stood up on the pedals, pushing down furiously with all her might. The wind was surging into her. Her face flushed and she kept shaking her head to fling strands of hair out of her eyes. Her lips tasted tangy from the sea air. She could feel her pulse beating in her wrists. She wanted to throw back her head and scream it all out, all the suppressed passions and frustrations of those quiet, deathly years without Albert. She wanted to scream away the dull, dusty deathliness that had befuddled her mind and coddled her body when, all along, she had been surrounded by the sea, endless plashy waves, the great sky, the sharp rocks and the smooth pebbles – though she had seen or felt none of it. She glanced around but there was no one to be seen so she threw back her head, lunged down on the pedals, looked