He has read about the white stone cemeteries—“God’s Acres,” as the newspaper article called them—but this is the first one that he has seen. He is struck by the cleanness of the new-cut stone, the tidiness of it all. They are smart, these men, fixed forevermore in parade-ground order, well turned out, and playing by the rules. He thinks about standing at Edie’s side by the lych-gate four months ago and looking into the overgrown churchyard by the reservoir. The tombs in the old graveyard were carved with sleeping angels and acanthus leaves and ivy for fidelity. Lichen bloomed across the messages of IN MEMORIAM and LOVING MEMORY. Harry could see it all as sharp as a photograph still, and smell the peppermints in her mouth and the verbena soap on her skin. He looks at her now as she walks along the white line and wonders what it is that she really wants back.

They walk through the rows together. There are English garden flowers planted around the graves—pansies, harebells, and columbines. They look strange here, these cottage garden plants and clipped lawns, oddly foreign, assertively English, but also somehow not quite right. It is perhaps the straight-lined planting and the clean soil in between. There are rosebushes at the end of the rows, their scent strong. He wonders: Does Francis too now have a clean white stone and a smell of roses? There is something about this place that strikes him as a white lie.

“Five hundred thousand headstones have been ordered,” he tells her. “They all have to be shipped over from England. They sink a concrete beam into the ground and the graves all slot neatly into it, so that they’ll never fall over. Straight and true for all eternity. I suppose that they could all go down like a set of dominoes, otherwise.”

“I’m not sure that I wanted to know that.”

“There’s something slightly too tidy and practical and decent about it. Don’t you think?”

“Decent? You mean that it shouldn’t be?”

“‘The stones will endure for all time and excite the wonder and the reverence of remote generations’—I read that phrase. It rather struck me.”

There are lines of young, flimsy-looking trees planted around the edges of the cemetery. Beyond them are other trees, bent and blasted, with metal splinters embedded in some of their trunks. They are both ugly and beautiful, these stubborn trees; they are both candid witnesses and resurgent life. New growth breaks from scarred trunks, which are older than his brothers might ever be.