Helen Turrell
Helen is a young British woman who leaves for a visit to France around the turn of the 20th century in order to secretly give birth to an illegitimate son. When she comes back home shortly afterward, she leads everyone in town to believe that the infant is her nephew whom she’s been charged to raise due to the—actual—recent accidental fall from a horse which killed her brother. She also raises the child to believe that he is her nephew, however a secret agreement is made between the two of them to allow him to call her “Mummy” in the privacy of their home.
Michael Turrell
Young Michael accidentally learns that Aunt Helen has shared their secret agreement with someone else and becomes so terribly hurt that he vows to hurt her back—even to the point of hurting her even worse when he dies. He grows up preparing to enter Oxford just as World War I breaks out and instead enrolling in school decides to enlist in the war effort where he is killed less than a year later. The question of whether Michael ever learns that Helen is actually his mother lingers over the story through ambiguous lines of dialogue and narrative description.
Mrs. Scarsworth
After the war is over, Helen makes her first trip to visit her son’s gravesite at one of those World War I cemeteries where the tombstones seem to never end, Hagenzeele Third Military Cemetery. She meets Mrs. Scarsworth, who is making her ninth trip to one of these cemeteries, initially telling Helen that it is not to visit anyone she has a connection to, but to take pictures on commission for those families unable to make the trip. Eventually, however, she breaks down, choosing Helen as the ideal candidate to make the confession she has been withholding and reveal the truth she has been hiding all along: she does have a connection to one of the buried soldiers, but can’t tell anyone about it because, you see, she is married. Scarsworth’s odd introduction into he narrative and the details of her confession which link already link to her to Helen in terms of having to keep a secret from the world seems designed to further link the two women by revealing that her dead soldier is Michael, but Helen’s query about how long in response to the woman’s complaint about having to lie for so many years immediately dismisses this possibility and the two go their separate ways the next morning, never crossing paths again.
The Gardener
Helen’s path takes her to the cemetery where she despairs of ever being able to find Michael gravesite among so many. She sees man behind a tombstone tending to a plant in fresh soil and seeing the map of the cemetery in her hand and her look of confusion, he asks for the name of the person whose grave she is looking for. Even after Michael has grown up and died and it hardly matters anyone to anyone, much less a complete stranger, she replies with mechanical precision of a practiced lie, giving Michael's name and rank before identifying him as her nephew. The man—whom Helen will assume must have been the gardener in the story’s enigmatic closing line—offers to show her the way, notably responding in keeping with the tonal sense of ambiguity that pervades the tale that he will take her to the spot where her son lies buried.
