Ornate cross on upper back

The cross came back to us this week, in the end, though not the way anyone expected. Mr Tallis's boy found it lying in the long grass behind the lych gate, wrapped in a sheet of the Gazette as if someone had meant to keep it dry. It is the little wrought cross from the Okonedo grave, the one with the curled ends like ferns unrolling. Somebody had prised it off the iron railing, and the bolts were still bright where the rust had been scraped away.

I spent most of Tuesday on my knees with a wire brush and a tin of linseed, working the black back into the scrolls. You would laugh at me. I talked to it the whole time, the way Dad talked to the mower. Every scroll had a tiny hollow at its centre, where the smith had punched a dot with a nail head, and I found myself wondering how many hands had touched that cross before mine, and whether any of them had been sorry to see it go.

Mrs Okonedo came by on Thursday with a flask of tea and a face like thunder. She looked at the cross on the bench for a long while without saying anything. Then she said it had been her mother's before it was ever a grave marker, a gate ornament from a house in Deptford that was pulled down before the war. She had asked for it to be set above her mother's plot because it was the only thing left of that garden.

I have it back on the railing now, bolted tight, with a new washer on each side. The hedge behind it has had its autumn cut, so the light comes through clean. I think you would like it. It is still a little crooked, but I have decided that suits it.