Falling Angel

Maude Coleman

I know every inch of the cemetery now. I know it better than my own garden. Mummy does take us there all the time, even after school in winter when it is already getting dark and we have not asked to go.

Of course it is great fun playing there. We find Simon first, and if he is free he comes with us for a bit. We play hide-and-seek, and tour the angels (there are two new ones), and sometimes we sit at our graves and Lavinia tells stories about the people buried in the cemetery. She has an old guide to the cemetery that she likes to read from, about the girl whose dress caught fire, or the lieutenant-colonel killed in the Boer War described as “brave and kindhearted,” or the man who died in a railway accident. Or she simply makes up stories, which I find rather tedious but which Simon likes. I haven’t the imagination she has. I am more interested in the plants and trees, or the kind of stone used for the memorials; or, if Ivy May is with us, I test her reading using words on the graves.

I do not know what Mummy does while we play-she wanders off and I rarely see her until she comes looking for us when it is time to go. She says it is good for us to take the air, and I suppose she is right, but I am sometimes cold and, I admit, a little weary of the place. It is funny to think how desperate I used to be to get to the cemetery when I wasn’t allowed to, and yet now that I go there all the time, it is no longer quite so special.

Kitty Coleman

He will not have me. I am mad for him but he will not have me.

For almost two years I have visited the cemetery solely for the purpose of seeing him. And yet he will not take me.

I was careful at first-although I sought him out I did not want it to appear so. I always took the girls with me, then let them go off to play and pretended to be looking for them when really I was looking for him. I have paced up and down the paths, appearing to be fascinated by the merits of Roman versus plain crosses, or obelisks in Portland stone versus granite, or the names on graves chiseled into the stone versus fastened on with metal letters. I do not know what the workers there think of me, but they have grown used to my presence, and always nod respectfully.

I have learned a great deal about the cemetery that I did not know before. I know where they dump the extra soil displaced by coffins, and where the timber is kept for shoring up the deep graves, and the green rugs they place around freshly dug graves to look like grass. I know which gravediggers sing as they work, and where they hide their bottles of spirits. I have seen the ledgers and the detailed maps, each plot numbered, used to record graves. I have grown used to the horses pulling stones about the place. I have come to know the cemetery as an industry rather than as a place of spiritual contemplation.

He runs it as if it were an immaculate passenger ship crossing the ocean. He can be hard and brutal if necessary with the staff-some of the men are very rough indeed. But I think he is fair, too, and he respects good work.

Above all, he is kind to me without making me feel a lesser person.

We talk about all sorts of things-about the world and how it works, and about God and how He works. He asks my opinions, and does not laugh at them, but considers them. He is how I had always hoped Richard would turn out to be. But I made the mistake of thinking my husband would change when we married; instead he became more entrenched.

John Jackson is not a handsome man. He is not a prosperous man, though he is not poor either. He is not from a good family. He does not attend supper parties or the theater or openings to exhibitions. He is not an educated man, though he is learned-when he showed me Michael Faraday’s grave in the Dissenters he was able to explain his experiments with magnetic fields far better than Richard or even my brother could have.

He is a truthful man, a religious man, a principled man, a moral man. It is those last qualities that have undone me.

I am not accustomed to being turned down. Not that I have offered myself as such before, but I enjoy flirting and expect a response, else I would not do it. But he does not flirt. When I tried to with him, early on, he said he does not like coquettes, that he only wants the truth, and I stopped. And so over several months-constantly interrupted by his cemetery duties-I told him what little there is to tell of my small life: of how much I miss my late parents and brother, of my dull despair, of my impossible search for a place by the fire that is neither too hot nor too cold. (Only a few things I have kept from him-my knowledge of how to avoid having a baby, my cold bed, the New Year’s Eves Richard insists upon. He would be disgusted by the latter. Myself, I am not disgusted so much as resigned.)

When, at last, in the autumn after a summer of what felt like a courtship, I told him in clear terms what I was prepared to do, he said no.

I stopped going to the cemetery for a time then, sending Jenny with the girls when they wanted to go. But I could not keep away. And so for this past year we have again seen each other, but not as often and without the heightened expectations. It is painful, but he has upheld his principles, and I have come to accept that they are more important than me.

So we meet, and he speaks kindly to me. Today he said to me that he has always wanted a sister and now he has one. I did not reply that I have already had a brother and don’t want another.