The Walking Dead

'She's nice. Vicky's a bit scatterbrain, but the heart's there — she's doing good things in year five's craft class. I hope they stay.'

'I think they will. Most of the new migrants who've had — what did you call it, an earthquake? — some damn great upheaval, they don't have anywhere further to run. Mr Wright and his lady are here to stay.'

* * *

Faria looked after her invalid mother and never went further from home than the Khans' corner shop.

Khalid drove a mini-cab in west London, Syed worked in the family's fast-food take-away, and Jamal had started the second year of his business-studies course.

None of them would again be sleepers, or willing to be woken.

* * *

Two elderly men, one a retired power-company engineer, the other a retired quantity surveyor studied the stands on which the Horticultural Society's show entries were displayed, and eyed where the judges had laid the prize-winning rosettes.

The engineer said, 'That man, Anne's husband, he's never been seen here before — never put anything in before — and first time up he's taken the gold with his tomatoes.

'I've the impression that he's lived with them since they were two-inch plants, cosseted them and fussed over them, probably slept with them each night. It takes an utter obsession to produce tomatoes of that quality totally life-consuming.'

'What did he do before taking his pension?'

'She's never said, Anne hasn't. Some dreary job in Whitehall, I suppose — and exchanged it for a greenhouse. He's so damned aloof…has the manner of someone who used to think himself important, but it was probably only pushing paper…Maybe I'm wrong, maybe it was life-and-death stuff, but the knife came down and it's exchanged for tomatoes.'

* * *

'And that's your Englishman?'

'That's him.'

'Your stranger?'

'Less of a stranger now. He came to us in the spring, now it's the autumn.'

It was only once a year that the bishop visited the village and its priest. It was near the end of the day and a cool wind came from the north, chilled by the high points of the Pyrenees. Leaves fluttered down around them. After the heat of summer, a cruel winter was usual at this lonely, unlovely cluster of homes and its church, which lay between the larger communities of Calacete and Maella.

'And he spends his days here?'

'And his evenings writing letters — which is why you are visiting and can see him for yourself.'

The bishop's body threw a long shadow and the chill wind blustered the cloak he wore. He stared across a slight ravine over bare, fallen rocks and past a long cattle barn that was now broken into disrepair. Beyond it there was a flat space of dull sun-scorched earth where weeds grew high. There the man sat, his back to them. If their voices carried to him he showed no sign of caring that they intruded on the privacy of his space.

'The hospital was in that barn?'

'It was.'

'And the dead were buried where the weeds grow?'

'They were…but it is difficult to be exact about where the graves lie. There are no witnesses in the village. Everyone had been evacuated before the battle for the Ebro began. They were forcibly removed or fled. The village was a shell. When people came back, they had too many bitter memories and they did not believe it correct to relive those dark days…They had chosen the wrong side, they had supported the losers. It is natural that the dead of the defeated should not be honoured.'

'They were difficult times.'

The bishop saw a man, lit by the last of the day's sun, sitting motionless on the hard ground. The man, he thought, was well built in an athletic way and had none of the flab of middle age. His hair was tousled in the wind. Too young a man to be so captured by the dead: a man of an age at which life still stretched ahead and where ambition for the future should not be denied. In the files at his office, the bishop had seven translated letters from this man, all signed 'Respectfully, David Banks', and all written in a clear, strong hand.

'And he has been to other battlefields before coming and staying in your village?'

'He went to the old barracks at Albacete, then to Madrid. He has walked in the Jarama valley and at Brunete, and he has been down to the Ebro river…He did all of that before he came to us and took a lodging in the village. He has lived here very simply. He does not take alcohol and he is polite in all his dealings with us. Each day he leaves the village and walks up — past where we are now — to the barn where the wounded were treated, and where some died, and then he goes to the place where it is said the graves were dug. He has been there when the sun was fierce on him, without shade, and when the rain has tipped on him, without shelter…and he has written those letters to you.'

'And I, alone, have the power to free him?'

'I believe so.'

'Then it has to be done…'