Free Judgment Day by Penelope Lively

surprise, was agitated; a nerve twitched in his cheek, his complexion wasblotchy. He wondered what was up. The conversation was taking an odd turn, too, these remarks about Mrs. Paling. Exchanges between them, normally, were confined entirely to matters of expediency: keys and hymnals and weddings and organ music and the flower-arranging roster. Well, it was nothing to do with him, nothing to get involved with.
    “Calls herself an agnostic,” said George Radwell. “Not that that bothers me at all—it takes all sorts, as far as I'm concerned. No, no—that doesn't worry one. Question of personal choice, and that's all there is to it.”
    Sydney shuffled in discomfort. He didn't like that sort of talk, least of all from the vicar. It was embarrassing. He looked around for a way of escape.
    “I said to her, look, Mrs. Paling, I'm as broad-minded as the next man, your beliefs are your own concern, and whatever they are, you and your family are very welcome in the parish, glad to have you with us.”
    The starling flew across the nave, crashed into the War Memorial window on the west wall, and thumped to the ground.
    “Ah,” said Sydney gratefully. “Pity. They're always doing that. I'll put it in the incinerator.”
    He left George standing there, and carried the bird outside into the churchyard. But there, holding it in one hand, he saw the tremor of movement in one gray eyelid and felt, he fancied, a shiver in the light body. It must be stunned, not dead. He set it down gently on the grass and watched it. The bird lay motionless and now he knew what it was that had been itching away in his mind while the vicar had been talking, like a message forgotten, like an obligation overlooked.
    Jennifer had found a dead bird once, in the Mansell Road garden, what passed for a garden, the scrubby London backyard. Jennifer when she was eight, a thin child with plaits wearing a green-and-white-checked cotton frock, standing at the kitchen door with the bird in her hands. And he had gone into the garden with her and dug a hole in the sour ground and buried it with her looking on, solemn. She had wanted him to put a cross with sticks, and he had explained that wasn't right, not for a creature, that was only for people. Late in 1940 that would have been, his last leave with them, the last time he saw them.
    Except the very last time, in the mortuary. He'd asked to go, though there was no need, the identifying had been done already, before he came up from Portsmouth, done by the A.R.P. Warden, who was a neighbor, who knew them well. They were side by side, and the attendant had pulled back the sheet that covered Mary first and for a moment he'd been shattered anew, thought wildly that perhaps there could have been a mistake, because her hair was gray, quite gray, her short, fine, brown hair. And then he'd realized it was the plaster, the plaster dust that had spewed out of the house as it fell about them, covering them, drowning them, suffocating them. And he had stood there staring not at her face, which was gray-white too, but at her dusty hair, until at last someone put a hand on his arm and steered him away.
    Perhaps the starling would revive; if not, he would deal with it later. He didn't like to see the churchyard untidy, from time to time he went through the long grass by the wall with a plastic bag in his hand, stuffing into it the rubbish that found its way from the pub car park.
    *  *  *
    Mr, Porter from next door came out of the church holding something, which he then put down on the grass by the path. Then he stood there, for ages, for hours, it seemed, staring at the ground. When at last he went away Martin had pins and needles from keeping still, crouched down behind the big stone chest thing (those had dead people in, too} under the yew tree. Mr. Porter had nearly seen him before, when he'd walked over to the wall, and Martin had had to slither off quickly, keeping low.
    He slipped out, cautiously. It was a bird, a