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By Root 1160 0

the captain’s square stars, the thin square flower of the Military Cross. The buttons shone dully in their strange new light, brass transmuted into marble. Who was it …? George stooped to read the name, which was dashingly signed along the edge of the cushion: “Professor Farinelli”—dashing and a touch pedantic too. The effigy lay on a plain white chest, with less readable lettering, Gothic and plaited, running right round it in a long band: CECIL TEUCER VALANCE MC CAPTAIN 6TH BATT ROYAL BERKSHIRE REGT BORN APRIL 13 1891 FELL AT MARICOURT JULY 1 1916 CRAS INGENS ITERABIMUS AEQUOR. It was a thoroughly dignified piece of work, in fact magnificently proper. It struck George, as the chapel itself had on that first day, as a quietly crushing assertion of wealth and status, of knowing what to do. It seemed to place Cecil in some floating cortège of knights and nobles reaching back through the centuries to the Crusades. George saw them for a moment like gleaming boats in a thousand chapels and churches the length of the land. He gripped Cecil’s marble boot-caps, and waggled them sulkily; his hand waggled, the boot-caps eternally not. Then he edged round to look at the dead man’s face.

His first polite thought was that he must have forgotten what Cecil looked like, in the ten years and more since he’d been in a room with him alive. But no, of course, the long curved nose … the wide cheekbones … the decisive mouth: they were surely what he remembered. Naturally the rather bulbous eyes were closed, the hair short and soldierly, as it must have been latterly, pushed back flat about a central parting. The nose had grown somehow mathematical. The whole head had an air of the ideal that bordered on the standardized; it simplified, no doubt, in some acceptable accord between the longings of the parents and the limits of the artist’s skill. The Professor had never set eyes on Cecil—he must have worked from photographs, chosen by Louisa, which only told their own truth. Cecil had been much photographed, and doubtless much described; he was someone who commanded description, which was a rareish thing, most people going on for years on end with not a word written down as to what they looked like. And yet all these depictions were in a sense failures, just as this resplendent effigy was … So George reasoned for half a minute, looking over the polished features, the small seamed cushions of the closed eyes that once had seen right into him, thinking already what phrases he would use when he spoke to Louisa about it; whilst he tried to hold off some other unexpected sadness—not that he had lost Cecil, but that some longing of his own, awakened by the day and the place, some occult opportunity of meeting him again, had been so promptly denied.

None the less, he thought he would sit for a minute or two, in the flanking pew—he couldn’t quite have said why; but when he was there he dropped his forehead to his raised hand, leant forward slightly and prayed, in a vague, largely wordless way, a prayer of images and reproaches. He looked up, on a level now with Cecil’s sleeping form, the obdurate nose pointing roofwards, the soldierly commonplace of the body, posed perhaps by some artist’s model, not completely unlike Cecil, not a runt or a giant, but not Cecil in any particular way. And pictures of the particular Cecil rose towards him, naked and dripping on the banks of the Cam, or trotting through the Backs in his rugger bags and clattering studs, white and unassailable before a match, filthy and bloody after it. They were beautiful images, but vague as well with touching and retouching. He had others, more magical and private, images less seen than felt, memories kept by his hands, the heat of Cecil, the hair-raising beauty of his skin, of his warm waist under his shirt, and the trail of rough curls leading down from his waist. George’s praying fingers spread in a tentative caress of recollection. And then of course the celebrated … the celebrated membrum virile, unguessed for ever beneath the marble tunic, but once so insistently alive and alert