‘You’d better show him up,’ I said. I felt very superior to Smythe now, sitting in Sarah’s drawing-room, wearing Henry’s pyjamas, knowing so much about him while he knew nothing about me. He looked at me with confusion and dripped snow on to the parquet. I said, ‘We met once. I’m a friend of Mrs Miles.’
‘You had a small boy with you.’
‘That’s right.’
‘I came to see Mr Miles,’ he said. ‘You’ve heard the news?’
‘That’s why I came.’
‘He’s asleep. The doctor gave him pills. It’s been a bad shock to all of us,’ I added foolishly. He was staring round the room: in Cedar Road, coming out of nowhere, she had been as dimensionless, I suppose, as a dream. But this room gave her thickness: it was Sarah too. The snow mounted slowly on the sill like mould from a spade. The room was being buried like Sarah.
He said, ‘I’ll come back,’ and turned drearily away, so that his bad cheek was turned on me. I thought: that was where her lips rested. She could always be snared by pity.
He repeated stupidly, ‘I came to see Mr Miles and say how sorry..,’
‘It’s more usual on these occasions to write.’
‘I thought I might be of some use,’ he said weakly.
‘You don’t have to convert Mr Miles.’
‘Convert?’ he asked, ill at ease and bewildered.
‘To the fact that there’s nothing left of her. The end. Annihilation.’
He broke suddenly out,’ I wanted to see her, that’s all.’
‘Mr Miles doesn’t even know you exist. It’s not very considerate of you, Smythe, to come here.’
‘When is the funeral?’
‘Tomorrow at Golders Green.’
‘She wouldn’t have wanted that,’ he said and took me by surprise.
‘She didn’t believe in anything, any more than you claim you do.’
He said, ‘Don’t any of you know? She was becoming a Catholic’
‘Nonsense.’
‘She wrote to me. She’d made up her mind. Nothing I could have said would have done any good. She was beginning - instruction. Isn’t that the word they use?’ So she still had secrets, I thought. She had never put that in her journal, any more than she had put her sickness. How much more was there to discover? The thought was like despair.
‘That was a shock for you, wasn’t it?’ I jeered at him, trying to transfer my pain.
‘Oh, I was angry of course. But we can’t all believe the same things.’
‘That’s not what you used to claim.’
He looked at me, as though he were puzzled by my enmity. He said, ‘Is your name Maurice by any chance?’
‘It is.’
‘She told me about you.’
‘And I read about you. She made fools of us both.’
‘I was unreasonable.’ He said, ‘Don’t you think I could see her?’ and I heard the heavy boots of the undertaker coming down, and I heard the same stair creak. ‘She’s lying upstairs. The first door on the left’
‘If Mr Miles…’
‘You won’t wake him.’
I had put on my clothes by the time he came down again. He said, ‘Thank you.’
‘Don’t thank me. I don’t own her any more than you do.’
‘I’ve got no right to ask,’ he said, ‘but I wish you’d -you loved her, I know.’ He added as though he were swallowing a bitter medicine, ‘She loved you.’
‘What are you trying to say?’
‘I wish you’d do something for her.’
‘For her?’
‘Let her have her Catholic funeral. She would have liked it.’
‘What earthly difference does it make?’
‘I don’t suppose any for her. But it always pays us to be generous.’
‘And what have I to do with it?’
‘She always said that her husband had a great respect for you.’
He was turning the screw of absurdity too far. I wished to shatter the deadness of this buried room with laughter. I sat down on the sofa and began to shake with it. I thought of Sarah dead upstairs and Henry asleep with a silly smile on his face, and the lover with the spots discussing the funeral with the lover who had employed Mr Parkis to sprinkle his door-bell with powder. The tears ran down my cheeks as I laughed. Once in the blitz I saw a man laughing outside his house where his wife and child were buried.
‘I don’t understand,’ Smythe said. He held his right fist closed as though he were prepared to defend himself. There was so much that neither of us understood. Pain was like an inexplicable explosion throwing us together. ‘I’ll be going,’ he said and reached for the door-knob with his left hand. A strange idea occurred to me because I had no reason to believe he was left-handed.
‘You must forgive me,’ I said. ‘I’m rattled. We’re all rattled.’ I held out my hand to him: he hesitated and touched it with his left. ‘Smythe,’ I said, ‘what have you got there? Did you take anything from her room?’ He opened his hand and showed a scrap of hair. ‘That’s all,’ he said. ‘You hadn’t any right.’
‘Oh, she doesn’t belong to anybody now,’ he said, and suddenly I saw her for what she was - a piece of refuse waiting to be cleared away: if you needed a bit of hair you could take it, or trim her nails if nail trimmings had value to you. Like a saint’s her bones could be divided up -if anybody required them. She was going to be burnt soon, so why shouldn’t everybody have what he wanted first? What a fool I had been during three years to imagine that in any way I had possessed her. We are possessed by nobody, not even by ourselves.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘Do you know what she wrote to me?’ Smythe asked. ‘It was only four days ago,’ and I thought with sadness that she had had time to write to him but not to telephone to me. ‘She wrote - pray for me. Doesn’t it seem odd, asking me to pray for her?’
‘What did you do?’
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘when I heard she was dead, I prayed.’
‘Did you know any prayers?’
‘No.’
‘It doesn’t seem right praying to a God you don’t believe in.’
I followed him out of the house; there was no point in remaining till Henry woke. Sooner or later he had to face being on his own, just as I had. I watched Smythe jerking his way across the Common ahead of me, and I thought. An hysterical type. Disbelief could be a product of hysteria just as much as belief. The wet of the snow, where the passage of many people had melted it, worked through my soles and reminded me of the dew of my dream, but when I tried to remember her voice saying, ‘Don’t worry,’ I found I had no memory for sounds. I couldn’t imitate her voice. I couldn’t even caricature it: when I tried to remember it, it was anonymous - just any woman’s voice.
The process of forgetting her had set in. We should keep gramophone records as we keep photographs.
I came up the broken steps into the hall. Nothing but the stained glass was the same as that night in 1944. Nobody knows the beginning of anything. Sarah had really believed that the end began when she saw my body. She would never have admitted that the end had started long before: the fewer telephone calls for this or that inadequate reason, the quarrels I began with her because I had realized the danger of love ending. We had begun to look beyond love, but it was only I who was aware of the way we were being driven. If the bomb had fallen a year earlier, she wouldn’t have made that promise. She would have torn her nails trying to release me. When we get to the end of human beings we have to delude ourselves into a belief in God, like a gourmet who demands more complex sauces with his food. I looked at the hall, clear as a cell, hideous with green paint, and I thought, she wanted me to have a second chance and here it is: the empty life, odourless, antiseptic, the life of a prison, and I accused her as though her prayers had really worked the change: what did I do to you that you had to condemn me to life? The stairs and banisters creaked with newness all the way upstairs. She had never walked up them. Even the repairs to the house were part of the process of forgetting. It needs a God outside time to remember when everything changes. Did I still love or did I only regret love?