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hasty three-and-a-half feet under the sunny sweet-scented fields of France where they put Morrow, Eacrett, Cheatley & Paul together so they could get on with enjoying the hurdy-gurdy of the afterlife. Instead, Abraham Swain has been caught halfway, between worlds, and this is where he’s to stay the rest of his days.
    He’s failed the Philosophy of Impossible Standard and so he lets his father believe he’s dead. He lives one of those quiet little lives no one notices, wearing brown trousers, walking to the shop, ‘Daily Mail today, sir? ’, chainsmoking through the horse-racing in the long dull afternoons.
    And, Dear Reader, years pass.
     
    But there’s always a Twist.
    Remember Oliver? Well, here comes a fine old lady, handsome, stately, wonderfully neat, who knocks with no nonsense on the door of Abraham Swain and sweeps into his room very much like Mrs Rouncewell in Bleak House (page 84, Book 179, Penguin Classics, London) from whom I have borrowed some of her character.
    Mrs Rouncewell has had two sons, of whom the younger ran wild, and went for a soldier, and never came back. Even to this hour, Mrs Rouncewell’s calm hands lose their composure when she speaks of him and, unfolding themselves from her stomacher, hover about her in an agitated manner, as she says, ‘What a likely lad, What a fine lad, What a gay, good-humoured, clever lad he was!’
    Only her name here is not Mrs Rouncewell, but Mrs Cissley. Her Oliver the very one that saved Abraham and who wrote letters to his mother from the Front – What a likely lad, What a fine lad – the poor woman’s hands fluttering about at the near mention of his name. And in these letters – ‘Look, I have them here’ – and indeed she does and dips in and takes from her large black bag a pale wing of pages smelling of peppermints.
    ‘This one,’ she says. ‘This one tells how he saved you. Abraham Swan.’
    ‘Swain.’
    She lays the letter before him. Freed of it, her hands catch each other in mid-air and pull themselves down on to her lap into a moment’s peace. Then, while Grandfather reads of himself as the miracle Swan, head turned and squinting one-eyed to inhale, Mrs Cissley says: ‘His brother died young. Oliver was Our Hope.’
    Slowly rises the Swain brow.
    Mrs Cissley’s hands rise up off her stomach, catch each other, wring, twist, interlock, fly free and fall once more to her lap, leaving in the air an old-soap scent of despair that won’t wash away. Her face cannot accommodate the population of emotions. Some of them are pushed down on to her neck where they get together to set off a poppy bloom in the shape of France.
    ‘You see, he’d want it to be you,’ she says, her hands clasped back-to-back in a reverse of praying, an exhale of peppermint into his smoke.
    Grandfather’s face is white, as if he has an instant’s foreknowledge, as if the announcement that is coming has already reached him, like the little shudder in the phone before a text comes proper.
    Mrs Cissley can hardly bear to say it, can hardly bear to let out the words because with them will go the last remnant of the long-dreamt future of her Oliver. The hands clasp a moment longer, holding to hope in Wolverhampton. ‘My husband,’ she says, and her tongue touches some bitterness on her lower lip. ‘My husband owned the Falkirk Iron Works.’ The bitterness is also inside her right cheek. The tongue presses there, the lips tighten and whiten. ‘Two million Mills grenade bombs. He made a fortune from the war.’
    Mrs Cissley makes no movement but her eyes widen.
    ‘There are lands in Ireland,’ she says at last, ‘a house and lands. They were . . .’ She can’t say it. She just can’t. Then she shakes her head and the name falls out, ‘. . . for Oliver.’ And at that her handclasp is undone, the hands open, and the soul of her son flies away.

Chapter 6
    ‘Rain today, Ruthie!’ Nan shouts up through my floor from her place by the hearth downstairs.
    She