“Sure.” Cate leans in and does so, and then, suddenly self-conscious, and with no real idea of what to do next, mumbles a good-bye and moves away, joining the line for the cathedral. It is ten pounds to go inside. She balks, but pulls out her wallet and pays with her card. Inside a cobbled road leads to the cathedral entrance and the building itself rears ahead. She goes inside, into the nave, where the roof soars above her head and sweet-faced tabard-wearing guides stand selling guidebooks. She moves away, past the racks of candles, over to the far wall, reading the inscriptions on tombs set into the stone. They are a maudlin scrapbook of colonial misadventure: young men dead at Waterloo, in India, in West and South Africa, all the way up to the greatest hits of the First and Second World Wars. Tattered black flags hang from the walls. Somewhere in the distance is the sound of an organ. She stops before an oval-shaped monument, tomb of a certain Robert Macpherson Cairns, Major of Royal Horse Artillery, “taken from this sublunary scene June the 18th 1815 aged thirty.”

THIS HUMBLE MONUMENT

ERECTED BY THE HAND OF FRIENDSHIP

IS A FAITHFUL, BUT VERY INADEQUATE, TESTIMONY

OF AFFECTION, AND GRIEF WHICH NO LANGUAGE CAN EXPRESS,

OF AFFECTION WHICH LIVES BEYOND THE TOMB,

OF GRIEF WHICH WILL NEVER TERMINATE

TILL THOSE WHO NOW DEPLORE HIS LOSS

SHALL REJOIN HIM

IN THE BLEST REALMS

OF

EVERLASTING PEACE.

All these boys. All these mothers. All that grief. And here, no apology for any of it. It would be nice if somewhere, even on a tiny little plaque, it read: SORRY. WE GOT IT WRONG. ALL THAT COLONIALISM AND EMPIRE AND SLAYING OUR CHILDREN. ALL THAT GOD. LANDS GRABBED. RESOURCES PLUNDERED. PATRIARCHY UPHELD. CHURCH AND MILITARY HAND-IN-HAND.

Who’s a little soldier then?

She wants her son back. Wants to run up the hill to Harbledown and snatch him from his grandmother’s arms. It is suddenly difficult to breathe. She hurries out through the side door into the cloisters, where the wind bites and the grass of the quadrangle is a deep green. She sinks to a stone bench carved into the wall and takes great gulps of air. And it comes to her, why she doesn’t like this city: it reminds her of Oxford—the churches, the tourists, the grass on which you cannot walk. Even down to the punts, generations of students taking to the river, grasping for the Brideshead dream.

Evelyn Waugh was a fascist and a sentimentalist. Discuss.

She hated that fucking book.

There are footsteps on the flagstones. Cate looks up, sees a figure moving towards her, walking quickly. She is wearing a large man’s coat, a beanie hat pushed down on her head, but Cate recognizes her from the playgroup and pulls back against the stone wall—she does not want to be seen today, but it is too late.