Next morning Jack got the breakfast as he always did. Nothing much wrong then, Christine thought, and quickly googled Alan Egglestone, to see whether he had become known in the passing years, but nothing came up that could possibly have anything whatsoever to do with him.
After breakfast, in fact just as she was leaving home to do her morning in Oxfam, she told Jack that Google know nothing at all about Alan Egglestone. So it was a waste of money on him as well, said Jack. Christine saw that Jack knew at once that he should not have said such a thing. But she left the house with only a curt goodbye before he could apologise. On the street, walking quickly, she reflected that you should no more leave the house wrathful than you should turn aside to sleep wrathful because you might go under a bus and the wrong that needed righting would remain a wrong for ever. Then quite deliberately in the back of the shop with the other Tuesday Ladies sorting out the tons of stuff families send to Oxfam or Help the Aged when a loved one dies, she thought about Steve and Alcock Tarn and the steep climb beyond into Michael’s Dale. It was early June and the shallows all around the banks of the tarn were entirely black and seething with quite big tadpoles and the word ‘selvaged’ had come back to her out of one of the poems Hardy wrote for his wife when she died and his dead love for her revived, the white-selvaged sea, the black-selvaged tarn. Steve said that in their density but every single one of them distinct, every one of them in the mass a separate possibility of further life, each driven separately into the next stage of its life, they resembled sperm, the selvage of the tarn was spermy. And she had thought that not in the least indecent or embarrassing. Her word and his were such as might occur to you if you suddenly saw something in a new light. And when they began the climb into Michael’s Dale, out of the rock face there a rowan jutted, jutted out and at once rose up, out of rock, out of very little sustenance, out and at once upwards, as it desired to, and flowered densely, creamily, in its own peculiar scent, upwards into the air, out and up over nothing, over thin air, over a sheer fall, upwards. Steve insisted that before they began the climb itself, into the dale, they should get as close as possible to where the tree started horizontally out of the ferny rock and as soon as it could aimed for the sky. He took her hand and helped her, it was almost like rock-climbing, and when they got to the place itself, the very place of the tree’s emergence out of the hill, he concentrated so hard on the sight, on the thing, on the exact nature of the phenomenon, she felt, in a nice way, quite forgotten, nice because she had the double pleasure of contemplating him, his self-and-her forgetting intense attention, and the rowan tree itself by which he was so rapt.
Back home, Jack had laid the table for lunch, which he never did. He looked very hang-dog and said at once, I’m sorry, Chris, I shouldn’t have said what I said. I know very well your course wasn’t a waste of money, you enjoyed it, didn’t you, and that’s all that matters. Yes, I did enjoy it, she replied, and it did me good. All my women friends noticed the change in me. I was well for nearly two years afterwards, if you remember. Jack cheered up. Now what are we going to do about this poor bugger Egglestone? he asked. Anything or nothing? Nothing, said Christine. What can we do? Nothing. – I mean, he didn’t say he’d phone you again, to let you know how he was getting on? And you didn’t say you’d phone him? No, said Christine. No he didn’t and no I didn’t.
So Jack and Christine Wakelin continued their own slower courses towards their separate ends. And the phone call meanwhile continued to work in them, separately. Christine had heard Alan Egglestone’s voice and could not get it out of her head. Indeed, day by day it became more present there, more insistent. Helplessly she listened to its aftertones of terror and desperation. She recalled how little she had spoken, how he had scarcely given her chance to speak, and what could she have said anyway of any use or comfort? What did he want, except not to die? Did phoning alphabetically through the address book help him in the least? All she heard now was a man talking on his own to a person who did not remember him. She pitied him, but the dominant feeling in her on his account was horror. And she saw Jack watching her. She understood, and it sickened her, that they had Alan Egglestone in common. In bed or at meals or standing side by side doing the washing-up, one or other of them without preamble, as though it were the only possible subject of reflection or conversation, might wonder aloud about him, posing a question, rhetorically, not really expecting an answer. Or from Jack or from Christine came a speculation. Perhaps, said Jack, he was hoping for a miracle. That would be quite understandable. Say there are fifty people in his address book, well perhaps one of them had heard of somebody who stopped a leukaemia dead in its tracks, halted it, by some miraculous means, or held it up for a while at least and won the dying person an extra five years, or a year, even six months? You may be right, said Christine. Though he didn’t ask me did I know any such person. She saw this made Jack wonder again why Alan Egglestone had phoned her at all. Then a day or two later, quite suddenly, she said, It struck me he was maybe going through in that methodical fashion to check there was nobody in the book he owed an apology to or who owed him an apology and he phoned to say there wasn’t much time left for making amends. At that, visibly, Jack’s suspicions really did return: Did he ask you that? – No, he didn’t. But it has occurred to me. And later that same day, actually interrupting Jack who was talking about something else, she said, It’s very wrong of him not to tell his wife and children about his condition. He must want them to feel bad when they find out he’s dead. But nobody should be vindictive when they’re near the end. Phone him and tell him, said Jack rather crossly. – I don’t know his number. – There’s ways of finding out. – I don’t want to find out. I don’t want to speak to him again. I don’t want to hear his voice. I hear it anyway, Jack, all the time. I don’t want him adding to it in the flesh.
Once or twice Jack said outright that her Mr Egglestone was a bloody nuisance. He’d no business phoning people up like that and spoiling their lives just because he was nearing the end of his. Everybody has to die, said Jack. Why is he so special? And he looked with even greater suspicion at Christine, so that she knew he believed there were things she hadn’t told him about the damned poetry course. And in town one day, trailing along with her while she did the shopping, he asked in a false-casual sort of way whether she still had anything from that course, any old letters, poems, photographs, any souvenirs at all that might help her, and him too for that matter, understand why Mr Egglestone had phoned her to tell her he was dying. No, she replied, putting the liver and bacon in her bag, if you really want to know, I threw everything in the bin one morning about two years after it when I started to feel bad again. Everything I owned about that week – it was all in a folder with a ribbon round it – I threw the whole lot in the bin, I watched through the window till the bin men had reached next-door-but-three, then I went out and threw my folder in the bin so they would certainly take it and I couldn’t change my mind. That’s what I did with my souvenirs of the poetry course. You never told me that, said Jack. No, I never told you that, said Christine.
Day by day Christine saw Jack looking more worriedly at her. I know what he’s thinking, she said to herself. Then three weeks after the phone call, to the day, another beautiful evening, down by the beans, he was watering them and she was standing oddly to one side, half watching, half not, and fingering her lower lip in the way he didn’t like but had got used to over the years, he set down the empty can and said, Chris, you’re not going funny on me again, are you?