Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand by Helen Simonson Read Free Book Online Page A

the busy Mrs. Ali a chance to make her excuses for not coming to see him.
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    He had been many decades, as man and boy, in the village of Edgecombe St. Mary, and yet the walk down the hill to the village never ceased to give him pleasure. The lane was steeply cambered to either side, as if the narrow tarmac were the curving roof of some buried chamber. The dense hedges of privet, hawthorn, and beech swelled together as fat and complacent as medieval burghers. The air was scented with their spicy dry fragrance overlaid with the tang of animals in the fields behind the cottages. Garden gates and driveways gave glimpses of well-stocked gardens and thick lawns studded with clover clumps and dandelions. He liked the clover, evidence of the country always pressing in close, quietly sabotaging anyone who tried to manicure nature into suburban submission. As he rounded a curve, the hedges gave way to the plain wire fence of a sheep field and allowed a view of twenty miles of Sussex countryside spreading beyond the roofs of the village below. Behind him, above his own house, the hills swelled upward into the rabbit-cropped grass of the chalk downs. Below him, the Weald of Sussex cradled fields full of late rye and the acid yellow of mustard. He liked to pause at the stile, one foot up on the step, and drink in the landscape. Something – perhaps it was the quality of the light, or the infinite variety of greens in the trees and hedges – never failed to fill his heart with a love of the country that he would have been embarrassed to express aloud. Today, he leaned on the stile and tried to let the colours of the landscape soak in and calm him. The business at hand, of visiting the shop, had somehow quickened his heart and overlaid the dullness of grief with an urgent and not unpleasant flutter. The shop lay only a few hundred yards downhill of his position, and the wonders of gravity helped him as he thrust away from the stile and continued to stride down the hill. He made the turn past the Royal Oak at the bottom, its timbered façade almost entirely obscured by hanging baskets of improbably coloured petunias, and the shop came into view across the gently rising roundel of the village green.
    The orange plastic sign, ‘Supersaver SuperMart’, winked in the low September sun. Mrs. Ali’s nephew was pasting to the plate glass window a large poster advertising a sale on canned peas; the Major hesitated in mid-stride. He would rather have waited until the nephew was not around. He did not like the young man’s perpetual frown, which, he admitted, might be the simple result of unfortunately prominent eyebrows. It was a ridiculous and indefensible dislike, the Major had more than once admonished himself, but it caused his hand to once again tighten around the head of his cane as he marched over the grass and in at the door. The shop bell’s tinkle made the young man look up from his task. He nodded and the Major gave a slightly smaller nod in return and looked around for Mrs. Ali.
    The store contained a single small counter and cash register up front, backed by a display of cigarettes and a lottery machine. Four narrow but clean aisles stretched back through the low-ceilinged rectangular room. They contained a well-stocked but plain selection of foods. There were beans and bread, teabags and dried pasta, frozen curries and bags of curly chips and chicken nuggets for children’s suppers. There was also a large array of chocolates and sweets, a card section, the newspapers. Only the canisters of loose tea and a dish of homemade samosas hinted at Mrs. Ali’s exotic heritage. There was an awkward extension to the back that contained a small area of bulk items like dry dog food, potting soil, some kind of chicken pellets, and plastic-wrapped multipacks of Heinz baked beans. The Major couldn’t imagine who purchased bulk items here. Everyone did their main shopping at the supermarket in Hazelbourne-on-Sea or drove to the new