The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters

inscription read, BELOVED HUSBAND AND FATHER , MUCH MISSED , the letters black against a marble that had once been a gleaming quartz white, but which the sooty drizzles of suburban south London were bent on staining khaki.
    Running her brush in soapy circles over the tarnished marble she thought of her brother John Arthur’s grave, just north of Combles: she and her mother had visited it, along with John Arthur’s fiancée, Edith, in 1919. They had made the journey in December – perhaps the worst time to do it, for in the bitter weather the raw, still-shattered landscape had looked like a scene from hell. There had been no shred of comfort to be found in it, only a new sort of agony in thinking of the months that John Arthur had been forced to spend there. Since then, Frances had heard people speak of the consolations of the cemeteries. One of her mother’s friends had described the sense of peace that had descended on her as she’d stood at her son’s grave. She had heard his voice, she’d said, as clearly as she had ever heard it in life: he had told her not to mourn, that mourning was wasteful, mourning would keep the world in darkness when what it needed was to progress into light. At John Arthur’s grave Frances had heard nothing save the wet cough of the elderly farmer who had guided the way to the site. The plot itself had meant little to her. It had simply been beyond belief that all she had known and loved about her brother should have had its finish in that slim depression of earth at her feet. She regretted ever having made the trip. She still visited the place, sometimes, in dreams, and felt the same empty horror; she was always alone on the sticky ground, sinking.
    Then again, Noel had no grave at all, and that was hard in a different way. He had been lost in the Mediterranean, in the final year of the War, when the ship on which he’d been travelling out of Egypt had been torpedoed. How exactly had he died? Had he drowned? Could he have been killed in the first blast? There had been confusion at the time, someone claiming to have seen him floating face-down in the water, someone else alleging that he had been hauled on to a raft, wounded but very much alive. But no such raft had ever been found. Might the enemy have picked him up? Certainly his body was never recovered; and so many tales had been told, in those days, of the miraculous reappearances of shell-shocked soldiers that for months after his death, well into the first year of Peace, Frances’s mother had clung on to the hope of his return. There had been several dreadful moments: knocks at the door at odd hours, boys on the street who faintly resembled him… Frances shuddered to remember that time now. Poor, poor Noel. He had been the baby of the family. When she thought of him she saw him not as the nineteen-year-old he had been when he was killed, but as a boy in a striped pyjama suit, his pink feet smooth and rounded as pebbles. She remembered him once on the beach at Eastbourne, crying because a wave had gone over his head; she had jeered at his faint heart. She would give anything to be able to take that jeer back.
    Don’t think of it. Chase it away. Wet the brush again, quickly, quickly. Here was a spot that she had missed. Look how nicely the marble scrubbed up! That was better… She had left the headstone now and was inching her way around the coving. A few more trips to the tap, and the job was done. Next time, she and her mother decided as they rose, they would bring a garden sieve and go through the earth properly; but they’d made it neat enough for this visit. Frances put away their tools, wiped her hands and addressed the grave.
    ‘Well, Father, there you are, all spruce and tidy for your birthday. It’s more than you deserve, I’m sure.’
    ‘Frances,’ her mother scolded.
    ‘What? I’d say the same thing to his face if he were here right now. That, and a good many other things. I suppose he’d manage not to hear