Alec’s face was still turned towards the window, but he saw nothing of the neat residential area, its pavements decorated with a staked lime sapling every fifty feet, through which they were now passing. He was thinking of the moment when he had first named the Trio to himself. He and two or three other people (he forgot who) had taken their music round to the Duerdens’ one Sunday evening and, after the coffee and tomato sandwiches, Jim had asked him to have a shot at the accompaniment of a duet they had bought recently. He had sat down at the piano, which had an excellent tone for an upright, and played the thing for them at sight, something of a feat with such bold, dramatic writing, full of shifting trills in both hands. It was ‘Onaway, Awake, Beloved’, a far more interesting setting than that in Coleridge-Taylor’s Hiawatha, which he had always thought — secretly, for Betty delighted in it, and had met the composer once at a wedding in Croydon — a bit of a bore. Out of the corners of his eyes Alec had been able to see both Betty and Jim as they sang, and when, with his support, the two voices swept into he had felt his own blood leaping through him in a strange, painful rhythm, as if he had stumbled on a mysterious secret. And so he had; he had discovered that there could be a relationship between three people for which none of the ordinary words — friendship, love, understanding, intimacy — would quite do. When the song finished there had been enthusiastic applause from the others, even from ten-year-old Charlie, who was staying up late as a special treat, and Alec’s excitement had passed unnoticed.
Does not all the blood within me
Leap to meet thee, leap to meet thee,
As the springs to meet the sunshine,
In the moon when nights are brightest?
The car stopped outside the cemetery. Although Alec had walked along most of the roads in the area many times in the last twenty years, the exterior of this place, and its whole location, were totally unfamiliar to him.
‘Here we are,’ Frank said. ‘Want any help, Uncle Mac?’
‘No thank you.’
He got out and began walking towards the graveside, remembering that, outside his family and their circle, Betty was the only person who had ever called him ‘Alec’, and she only for a brief period, perhaps a year after their first meeting. Then she had slipped into calling him ‘Mac’ as everyone else did, or rather as Jim in particular did. With that fine tact of hers, the finer for being unselfconscious, she had made it clear that there was not to be even the slightest and most nominal acknowledgement of what she felt for Alec, just as he had never by a single word acknowledged what he felt for her. The idea that two people could fall in love instantly and irrevocably and never mention it, let alone do anything about it, would have seemed incomprehensible or lunatic to anybody but themselves, or rather, again, to anybody but themselves and Jim. For Jim had somehow made it clear to Alec that he knew, but without hurt or resentment; he knew, but he understood and forgave, and so made it possible for Alec to go on seeing them without losing his self-respect. It was silently agreed between the three of them that while she loved Jim no less, she loved Alec too with a different — he recoiled from the mental impertinence of wondering if it were a deeper — kind of love. Few women would have been capable of that, but love had been Betty’s gift.
Alec answered an imaginary question about what he had done with his life by saying to himself that he had loved a fine woman and known a true friend. The love came first, as love must. By repeating this slowly he succeeded for a time in shutting out the presence of those standing near him and all but the first phrase of the dreadful words the clergyman was saying. Then Alec started noticing the coffin lying in the grave. It had been lowered by means of green straps that recalled to him, in their colour and texture, the webbing belt Charlie Duerden had worn with his uniform when they lunched at Simpson’s together during one of the boy’s leaves. A handful of earth was thrown on to the coffin. Alec realized that he had been very afraid of the hollow noise this might make, but it was all right, the soil was dry and chalky, without noticeable clods, and when the spades got to work it could, from the sound, have been anything at all being buried. There were the beginnings of movement away from the graveside; Alec sighed and raised his head, and the whole scene shone brightly in his eyes: the people with their varied complexions and hair, the grass, the privet hedges, the vases of red and blue flowers on the graves, the great pair of cypresses by the entrance, all slightly over-coloured like a picture postcard. In the middle of it all Alec saw the clergyman, looked squarely at him for the first time since leaving the church, and saw that the clergyman, as earlier, was looking at him.
The next moment after Alec felt he was going to cry he started crying; he could no more have prevented it than he could have prevented himself from gasping if a bucket of icy water had been thrown over him. How did it help the dead to have made the living aware of certain things? What good to anyone were ideas about lovable qualities? What use was it to learn about tenderness? What could you do when you were illuminated about human possibilities, except go round telling yourself how illuminated you were? What was knowing in aid of? And what was it to have loved someone?
‘Here we go, old chap,’ Bob’s voice said. ‘Just let’s take a little stroll together. That’s right, steady as she goes. I was wondering when you were going to crack. I was saying to myself, I wonder when old Mac’s going to crack. That’s your trouble, if I may say so, old stick: you keep things bottled up too much. Far better let ’em come out, like this. Well, you’ve picked the right time. Just a minute.’
Alec became aware of the curious hooting noise he was making, and pressed his hands over his mouth. ‘Nuisance,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’
‘Don’t talk unmitigated piffle, old thing. Holler away for a couple of hours if you feel like it. Get rid of it. Emotion has got to come out. Sooner or later it’s got to come out. That’s human nature. Here. Go on, knock it back. Down in one. I’ll join you if I may. I knew these little beggars would come in handy. Expensive way of buying booze, but still.’
‘Thirty years for nothing,’ Alec said, coughing. ‘Wasted my time.’
‘Oh no you haven’t, Mac. People who’ve really done that don’t mind. Here’s the gate.’
‘No, pipe down, I’m doing this,’ Frank said loudly. ‘Mrs Allen — another grapefruit juice? Sure you don’t want anything stronger? Mrs Holmes, what about you? Are you quite sure? Mrs Higginbotham? Ah, that’s more like it. Another for you, darling? Right. Now, Rector… large Scotch… Bob… large brandy and soda… Mr Walton?’