Major Pettigrew's Last Stand

by Helen Simonson

  “Anyway, she said she would call up some people she knows in the town and give me some ideas and prices. I told her mostly finger food, nothing too spicy.”

  “Won’t do to end up with curried goat’s head and roasted eyeballs,” said Alec.

  Grace ignored him. “She said she would call me next week. And perhaps set up a tasting. I told her you and I would be delighted to attend.”

  “Me?” said the Major.

  “I was afraid if I said just me she might go back to being stiff,” Grace explained. The Major had no answer for this.

  “Looks like you’re the food committee, Pettigrew,” said Alec. “Try to slip in a plate of roast beef, will you? Something edible amongst all the vindaloo.”

  “Look, I can’t possibly assist you,” said the Major. “I mean, with just losing my brother … I have so many things to see to … family and so on.”

  “I understand,” said Grace. She looked at him and he read in her eyes a disappointment that he should have stooped to the dead-relative excuse. Yet he was as entitled as the next man to use it. People did it all the time; it was understood that there was a defined window of availability beginning a decent few days after a funeral and continuing for no more than a couple of months. Of course, some people took dreadful advantage and a year later were still hauling around their dead relatives on their backs, showing them off to explain late tax payments and missed dentist appointments: something he would never do.

  “I will just have to do the best I can,” said Grace and her face drooped, as if defeat were inevitable. “I was afraid I might let Daisy down again, but of course that is no excuse for me to trespass on your very great grief. Please forgive me.” She put out her hand and touched him lightly on the forearm. He was suddenly aware of a slow burn of shame.

  “Oh, look here, sometime next week would probably be fine,” he said, his voice gruff. He patted her hand. “I’ll have most things straightened out with the family by then.”

  “Oh, thank you, Daisy will be so pleased.”

  “There’s surely no need for that,” he said. “Can’t we keep it between ourselves?” Alec dug him in the ribs with an elbow and he was aware from Grace’s delicate mauve blush that his words were open to interpretation. He would have liked to clarify, but she was already retreating from the room, bumping a bony hip on the corner of a table as she hurried away. The Major groaned and looked at his sandwich which seemed as appetizing now as two rubber mats filled with horsehair. He pushed the plate away and signaled Tom to bring another lager.

  Chapter 7

  His car was already pulled up to Marjorie’s spindly fountain and a face at the double-glazed oriel window above the front door had registered his presence before the second thoughts overwhelmed him. He should have telephoned before arriving. The fiction that he was welcome to drop in at any time, because he was family, could only be maintained as long as he never took Marjorie at her word.

  It had been obvious soon after Bertie’s marriage that Marjorie had no intention of playing the dutiful daughter-in-law and had sought to separate the two of them from the rest of the family. In the modern style, they had formed a nucleus of two and set about filling their tiny flat with ugly new furniture and friends from Bertie’s insurance office. They immediately began to defy the tradition of the family Sunday lunch at Rose Lodge and took to dropping by in the late afternoon instead, when they would decline a cup of tea in favor of a mixed cocktail. His mother would drink tea, stiff with Sunday disapproval, while Marjorie regaled them with news of her latest purchases. He would have a small sherry, a sticky and unpleasant attempt to bridge the gap. Nancy soon lost patience with them. She began to call Bertie and Marjorie the “Pettigrubbers” and, to the Major’s horror, to encourage Marjorie to elaborate on exactly how much her latest purchases had cost.

  The front door remained shut. Perhaps he had only imagined a face at the window, or perhaps they didn’t want to see him and were even now crouching behind the sofa hoping he would ring the bell a couple of times and then leave. He rang again. Once again the chimes played their few bars of “Joyful, Joyful,” echoing away deep into the house. He rapped on the door knocker, a brass wreath of grapevine with a central wine bottle, and stared at the front door’s aggressive oak grain. Somewhere another door closed and at last heels clicked on tile and the door was unbolted. Jemima was dressed in gray sweatpants and a black sleeveless polo neck top, with her hair pulled back under a white sweatband. She appeared, thought the Major, to be dressed as some kind of athletic nun. She gave him a glare she might have given a door-to-door vacuum salesman or an evangelical proselytizer.

  “Is Mother expecting you?” she asked. “Only I just got her to lie down for a few minutes.”

  “I’m afraid I drove over on the off chance,” he said. “I can come back later.” He looked at her carefully. Her face was devoid of the usual makeup and her hair limp. She looked like the gangly, stooped girl of fifteen she had once been; sullen but with Bertie’s pale eyes and strong chin to redeem her.

  “I was just doing my healing yoga,” she said. “But I suppose you’d better come in while I’m here. I don’t want people bothering Mother when I’m not around.” She turned and went in, leaving the door for him to close.

  “I suppose you’d like a cup of tea?” Jemima asked as they arrived in the kitchen. She put on the electric kettle and stood behind the U-shaped kitchen counter, where someone had begun to sort out a drawer full of junk. “Mother will get up in a bit anyway. She can’t seem to lie still these days.” She hung her head and picked about for bits of used pencils, which she added to a small heap in between a pile of batteries and a small arrangement of variously colored string.

  “No little Gregory today?” the Major asked, sitting himself on a wooden chair at the breakfast table in the window nook.

  “One of my friends is picking him up from school,” she said. “They’ve all been very good about babysitting and bringing over salads and stuff. I haven’t had to cook dinner in a week.”

  “Quite the welcome break, then?” said the Major. She gave him a withering look. The kettle began to boil; she produced two chunky malformed mugs in a strange olive hue and a flowery box of tea bags.

  “Chamomile, Blackberry Zinger, or burdock?” she asked.

  “I’ll have real tea if you have it,” he said. She reached high into a cupboard and pulled out a tin of plain tea bags. She dropped one in a cup and poured boiling water up to the brim. It immediately began to give off a smell like wet laundry.

  “How is your mother doing?” he asked.

  “It’s funny how people keep asking me that. ‘How’s your poor mother?’ they say, as if I’m just some disinterested observer.”

  “How are you both doing?” he offered, feeling his jaw twitch as he bit back a more resentful retort. Her broad hint of people’s insensitivity did not extend to asking how he was coping.

  “She’s been very agitated,” Jemima confided. “You see, there might be an award coming—from the Royal Institute of Insurance and Actuarial Sciences. They called three days ago, but apparently they can’t confirm yet. It’s between Dad and some professor who created a new way of hedging life insurance premiums of Eastern European immigrants.”

  “When will you know?” he said, wondering why the world always seemed to wait until death to give anyone their due.

  “Well, the other man suffered a stroke and he’s on a breathing machine.”

  “I’m so sorry to hear that.”

  “If he’s still alive on the twenty-third of the month, the end of their fiscal year, then Dad’s a sure thing to get the award. Posthumous is preferred, it seems.”

  “What an appalling thing.”

  “Yes, horrible,” she agreed. She sipped her tea, pulling the tea bag aside by its string. “I even called the hospital in London, but they refused to give me any information on his condition. I told them they were being very inconsiderate, given my poor mother’s suffering.”


  The Major jiggled his own string in the cup. The swollen belly of the bag rolled in the brown water. He found himself at a loss for words.

  “Ernest, how lovely to see you. You should have called and let us know you were coming.” Marjorie came in wearing a voluminous black wool skirt and a ruffled blouse of black and purple that looked as if it had been whipped up out of funeral bunting. He stood, wondering whether the circumstances required him to hug her, but she slipped behind the counter with Jemima and the two of them looked at him as if he had come to buy stamps at the post office. He decided to adopt a brisk tone of business.

  “I’m sorry to just barge in like this, Marjorie,” he said. “But Mortimer Teale and I have begun the estate work and I did want to just clarify one or two little matters with you.”

  “You know, Ernest, that I have no head for these things. I’m sure you can leave most of it to Mortimer. He’s such a clever man.” She picked at the tangle of string amid the junk pile but let it drop again.

  “That may be, but he is not a member of the family and therefore may not be able to interpret some of the niceties—or to allow for some of the intentions, so to speak.”

  “I think my father’s will is very straightforward,” said Jemima, her eye beady as a gull eyeing a bag of garbage. “We don’t need anyone upsetting Mother by raising questions for the sake of it.”

  “Exactly,” said the Major. He breathed slowly. “Much better to sort it all out within the family. Keep it all away from any unpleasantness.”

  “It’s all unpleasant anyway,” said Marjorie, wiping her eyes on a paper towel. “I can’t believe Bertie would do this to me.” She erupted in hoarse, unpleasant sobbing.

  “Mother, I can’t bear it when you cry,” said Jemima. She held her mother by the shoulders, simultaneously patting her while keeping her at arm’s length. Jemima’s face was screwed up into an expression of distress or disgust; the Major couldn’t really tell.

  “I didn’t mean to upset you,” he began. “I can come back later.”

  “Anything you have to say to Mother you can say now, while I’m here,” said Jemima. “I won’t have people bothering her when she’s alone and vulnerable.”

  “Oh, Jemima, don’t be so rude to your uncle Ernest, dear,” said Marjorie. “He is one of our only friends now. We must depend on him to look out for us.” She dabbed her eyes and gave a close approximation of a tremulous smile. The Major could see a hint of steely resolve burning under the smile, but it put him in an impossible position. He was quite unable to come up with any decent way of asking for his gun in the face of his brother’s crying widow.

  He saw the gun slipping away, the velvet depression in the double gun box permanently empty and his own gun never to be reunited with its partner. He felt his own loneliness, felt that he would be bereft of wife and family until claimed by the cold ground or the convenient heat of the crematorium furnace. His eyes watered and he seemed to smell ash in the potpourri scent of the kitchen. He rose again from his chair and resolved never to mention the gun again. Instead, he would slip away to his own small fireside and try to find consolation in being alone. Perhaps he would even place an order for a single gun case, something with a simple silver monogram and a lining more subdued than dark red velvet.

  “I’ll not trouble you any more with this,” he said, his heart full with the pleasant warmth of his sacrifice. “Mortimer and I will file all the appropriate paperwork; nothing we can’t resolve between us.” He walked over and took Marjorie’s hand. She smelled of her freshly painted mauve nails and a hint of lavender hair spray. “I will take care of everything,” he promised.

  “Thank you, Ernest,” she said, her voice faint, her grip strong.

  “So what about the guns?” asked Jemima.

  “I’ll be going along now,” he said to Marjorie.

  “Do come again,” she said. “It is such a comfort to me to have your support.”

  “But let’s sort out about the guns,” said Jemima again, and it was no longer possible to block out her voice.

  “We don’t have to go into that right now,” said Marjorie through compressed lips. “Let’s leave it until later, all right?”

  “You know Anthony and I need the money right away, Mother. Private school isn’t cheap, and we need to get a deposit down early for Gregory.”

  The Major wondered whether the nurse at the clinic could have been wrong about his perfectly fine EKG. His chest felt constricted and liable to flower into pain at any moment. They were going to deny him even his noble sacrifice. He would not be allowed to withdraw without addressing the subject, but instead would be forced to verbalize his renunciation of his own gun. The feeling in his chest flowered not into pain but into anger. He drew himself up at attention, a move that always relaxed him, and tried to maintain a blank calm.

  “We’ll deal with it later,” said Marjorie again. She seemed to pat Jemima’s hand, though he suspected it was really a nasty pinch.

  “If we put it off, he’ll only get some other idea in his head.” whispered Jemima, in a voice that would have carried to the back of the Albert Hall.

  “Am I to understand that you wish to discuss my father’s sporting guns?” The Major, enraged, tried to keep his voice as calm and clipped as that of a brigadier. “I was, of course, not going to bring it up at this difficult time—”

  “Yes, plenty of time later,” interjected Marjorie.

  “And yet, since you bring it up, perhaps we should speak frankly on the subject—we’re all family here,” he said. Jemima scowled at him. Marjorie looked back and forth at them both and pursed her lips a few times before speaking.

  “Well, Ernest, Jemima has suggested that we might do very well now, selling your father’s guns as a pair.” He said nothing and she rushed on. “I mean, if we sell yours and ours together—we might make quite a bit, and I would like to help Jemima with little Gregory’s education.”

  “Yours and ours?” he repeated.

  “Well, you have one and we have one,” she continued. “But apparently, they’re not worth nearly as much separately.” She looked at him with wide eyes, willing him to agree with her. The Major felt his vision shift in and out of focus. He scoured his mind wildly for a way out of the conversation, but the moment of confrontation was upon him and he could find no alternative but to speak his mind.

  “Since you bring it up … I was under the impression … that Bertie and I had an understanding with each other as to the—to the disposition, as it were, of the guns.” He drew a breath and prepared to thrust himself even into the teeth of the frowning women before him. “It was my understanding … It was our father’s intention … that Bertie’s gun should pass into my care … and vice versa … as circumstances should dictate.” There! The words had been cast at them like boulders from a catapult; now he could only stand his ground and brace for the counterattack.

  “Dear me, I know you’ve always been very keen on having that old gun,” said Marjorie. For a moment the Major’s heart leaped at her blushing confusion. Might he even prevail?

  “That, Mother, is exactly why I don’t want you talking to anyone without me,” said Jemima. “You are likely to give away half your possessions to anyone who asks.”

  “Oh, don’t exaggerate, Jemima,” said Marjorie. “Ernest isn’t trying to take anything from us.”

  “Yesterday you nearly let that Salvation Army woman talk you into giving her the living room furniture along with the bags of clothes.” She rounded on the Major. “She’s not herself, as you can see, and I won’t have people try to walk all over her, no matter if they are relatives.” The Major felt his neck swell with rage. It would serve Jemima right if he popped a blood vessel and collapsed right on the kitchen floor.

  “I resent your implication,” he stammered.

  “We’ve always known you were after my father’s gun,” said Jemima. “It wasn’t enough that you took the house, the china, all the money—”

  “Look here, I don’
t know what money you’re referring to, but—”

  “And then all those times you tried to con my father out of the one thing his father gave him.”

  “Jemima, that’s enough,” said Marjorie. She had the grace to blush but would not look at him. He wanted to ask her, very quietly, whether this topic, which she had obviously chewed over many times with Jemima, had also been discussed with Bertie. Could Bertie have held on to such resentments all these years and never let it show?

  “I did make monetary offers to Bertie over the years,” he conceded with a dry mouth. “But I thought they were always fair market value.” Jemima gave an unpleasant, porcine snort.

  “I’m sure they were,” said Marjorie. “Let’s just all be sensible now and work this out together. Jemima says if we sell the pair, we can get such a lot more.”

  “Perhaps I might make you some suitable offer myself,” said the Major. He was not sure he sounded very convincing. The figures were already turning in his head and he failed to see immediately how he might part with a substantial cash sum. He lived very well off his army pension, a few investments, and a small annuity that had passed to him from his paternal grandmother and which, he was forced to admit, had not been discussed as part of his parents’ estate. Still, dipping into principal was not a risk he cared to take in anything but an emergency. Might he contemplate some kind of small mortgage on the house? This prompted a shiver of dismay.

  “I couldn’t possibly take money from you,” said Marjorie. “I won’t take it.”

  “In that case—”

  “We’ll just have to be smart and get the highest price we can,” said Marjorie.