Free Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand by Helen Simonson Page B

breaking themselves to pieces on the shingle.
    There was a generous spirit about nature, he thought. The sun gave its heat and light for free. His spirit by contrast was mean, like a slug shrivelling on the bricks at midday. Here he was, alive and enjoying the autumn sunshine, while Bertie was dead. And yet even now he couldn’t give up the niggling annoyance he had felt all these years that Bertie had been given that gun. Nor could he shake the unworthy thought that Bertie knew and was now paying him back for his resentment.
    It had been a midsummer day when his mother called him and Bertie into the dining room, where their father lay wasting away from emphysema in his rented hospital bed. The roses were very lush that year, and perfume from the nodding heads of an old pink damask came in at the open French doors. The carved sideboard still displayed his grandmother’s silver soup tureen and candlesticks, but an oxygen pump took up half the surface. He was still angry at his mother for letting the doctor dictate that his father was too frail to sit up in his wheelchair anymore. Surely there could be only good in wheeling him out to the sunny, sheltered corner of wall on the small terrace overlooking the garden? What did it matter anyway, if his father caught a chill or got tired? Though they cheerfully congratulated his father every day on how well he was doing, outside the sickroom no one pretended that these were anything other than the last days.
    The Major was a second lieutenant by then, one year out of officer training, and he had been granted ten days’ special leave from his base. The time had seemed to flow slowly, a quiet eternity of whispers in the dining room and thick sandwiches in the kitchen. As his father, who had sometimes failed to convey warmth but had taught him duty and honour, wheezed through the end of his life, the Major tried not to give in to the emotion that sometimes threatened him. His mother and Bertie often crept away to their rooms to wet pillows with their tears, but he preferred to read aloud at his father’s bedside or help the private nurse in turning his emaciated body. His father, who was not as addled by his disease as everyone assumed, recognised the end. He sent for his two sons and his prized pair of Churchills.
    “I want you to have these,” he said. He opened the brass lock and pushed back the well-oiled lid. The guns gleamed in their red velvet beds; the finely chased engraving on the silver action bore no tarnish, no smudge.
    “You don’t have to do this now, Father,” he said. But he had been eager; perhaps he had even stepped forward, half-obscuring his younger brother.
    “I wish them to go on down through the family,” said his father, looking with anxious eyes. “Yet how could I possibly choose between my two boys and say one of you should have them?” He looked to their mother, who took his hand and patted it gently.
    “These guns mean so much to your father,” she said at last. “We want you to each have one, to keep his memory.”
    “Given to me by the Maharajah from his own hand,” whispered their father. It was an old story so rubbed with retelling that the edges were blurry. A moment of bravery; an Indian prince honourable enough to reward a British officer’s courageous service in the hours when all around were howling for Britain’s eviction. It was his father’s brush with greatness. The old tray of medals and the uniforms might desiccate in the attic, but the guns were always kept oiled and ready.
    “But to break up a pair, Father?” He could not help blurting out the question, though he read its shallowness in his mother’s blanched face.
    “You can leave them to each other, to be passed along as a pair to the next generation – keep it in the Pettigrew name, of course.” It was the only act of cowardice he had ever seen from his father.
    The guns were not listed as part of the estate, which was passed to his mother for her lifetime use