Strengthen What Remains

Arthur Sutton is awake now, with his dead wife's pencilled margins and a question he does not know how to hold.

The world's new allegiance comes to England the way everything comes to England now — dressed in heritage. Not a barcode but a liturgy: a National Act of Dedication, taken kneeling at the altar rail, recorded and folded into common worship, and the established church rings its bells for it. A christened-and-buried nation forms the queue it has always formed, and signs what it has always signed.

To refuse is to lose the little the forms still protect. But Arthur has spent forty years keeping the registers of the dead — and finds, now, that keeping the living is the same work: routes, rotas, food, names, the few who are also awake.

Strengthen what remains, the old words say. It is, exactly, his trade.