‘I know him.’
‘The gentleman who’s just avoided a puddle, sir, is the head of Mr Miles’s department.’
‘Dunstan?’
‘That’s the name, sir.’
‘What a lot you know, Parkis.’ I had thought jealousy was quite dead: I had thought myself willing to share her with a world of men if only she could be alive again, but the sight of Dunstan woke for a few seconds the old hatred. ‘Sylvia,’ I called, as though Sarah could hear me, ‘are you dining anywhere tonight?’
‘I promised Peter.,.’
‘Peter?’
‘Waterbury.’
‘Forget him.’
Are you there? I said to Sarah. Are you watching me?
See how I can get on without you. It isn’t so difficult, I said to her. My hatred could believe in her survivaclass="underline" it was only my love that knew she existed no more than a dead bird.
A new funeral was gathering, and the woman by the rail rose in confusion at the sight of the strangers coming in. She had nearly been caught up in the wrong cremation.
‘I suppose I could phone.’
Hate lay like boredom over the evening ahead. I had committed myself: without love I would have to go through the gestures of love. I felt the guilt before I had committed the crime, the crime of drawing the innocent into my own maze. The act of sex may be nothing, but when you reach my age you learn that at any time it may prove to be everything. I was safe, but who could tell to what neurosis in this child I might appeal? At the end of the evening I would make love clumsily, and my very clumsiness, even my impotence if I proved impotent, might do the trick, or I would make love expertly, and my experience too might involve her. I implored Sarah, Get me out of this, get me out of it, for her sake, not mine.
Sylvia said, ‘I could say my mother was ill.’ She was ready to lie: it was the end of Waterbury. Poor Waterbury. With that first lie we should become accomplices. She stood there in her black trousers, among the frozen puddles, and I thought, this is where a whole long future may begin. I implored Sarah, Get me out of it. I don’t want to begin it all again and injure her. I’m incapable of love. Except of you, except of you, and the grey old woman swerved towards me, crackling the thin ice. ‘Are you Mr Bendrix?’ she asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Sarah told me,’ she began, and while she hesitated a wild hope came to me that she had a message to deliver; that the dead could speak.
‘You were her best friend - she often told me.’
‘I was one of them.’
‘I’m her mother.’ I hadn’t even remembered her mother was alive: in those years there had always been so much to talk about between us that whole areas of both our lives were blank like an early map, to be filled in later.
She said, ‘You didn’t know about me, did you?’
‘As a matter of fact… ‘
‘Henry didn’t like me. It made it rather awkward, so I kept away.’ She spoke in a calm reasonable way, and yet the tears came out of her eyes with an effect of independence. The men and their wives had all cleared off: the strangers picked their way among the three of us, going into the chapel. Only Parkis lingered, thinking, I suppose, that he might yet be of use to me in supplying further information, but he kept his distance, knowing, as he would have said, his place.
‘I’ve a great favour to ask of you,’ Sarah’s mother said. I tried to remember her name - Cameron, Chandler, it began with a C.’ I came up today from Great Missenden in such a hurry…’ She wiped the tears out of her eyes indifferently as if she were using a washcloth. Bertram, I thought, that was the name, Bertram.
‘Yes, Mrs Bertram,’ I said.
‘And I forgot to change the money into my black bag.’
‘Anything I can do.’
‘If you would lend me a pound, Mr Bendrix. You see, I have to get some dinner in town before I leave. It’s early closing at Great Missenden,’ and she wiped her eyes again as she spoke. Something about her reminded me of Sarah: a matter-of-factness in her grief, perhaps an ambiguity. Had she ‘touched’ Henry once too often? I said, ‘Have an early dinner with me.’
‘You wouldn’t want to be bothered.’
‘I loved Sarah,’ I said.
‘So did I.’
I went back to Sylvia and explained, ‘That’s her mother. I’ll have to give her dinner. I’m sorry. Can I ring you up and make another date?’
‘Of course.’
‘Are you in the book?’
‘Waterbury is,’ she said gloomily, ‘Next week.’
‘I’d love it.’ She put her hand out and said, ‘Good-bye.’ I could tell that she knew it was one of those things that had missed the moment. Thank God, it didn’t matter - a mild regret and curiosity as far as the tube station: a cross word to Waterbury over the Bartok. Turning back to Mrs Bertram, I found myself speaking again to Sarah: You see, I love you. But love had not the same conviction of being heard as hate had.
As we approached the crematorium gates, I noticed that Parkis had slipped away. I hadn’t seen him go. He must have realized that now I had no more need of him.
Mrs Bertram and I had dinner at the Isola Bella. I didn’t want to go anywhere I had ever been with Sarah, and of course at once I began to compare this restaurant with all the others we had visited together. Sarah and I never drank Chianti and now the act of drinking it reminded me of that fact. I might as well have had our favourite claret, I couldn’t have thought of her more. Even vacancy was crowded with her.
‘I didn’t like the service,’ Mrs Bertram said.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It was so inhuman. Like a conveyor belt.’
‘It seemed suitable. There were prayers after all.’
‘That clergyman - was he a clergyman?’
‘I didn’t see him.’
‘He talked about the Great All. I didn’t understand for a long time. I thought he was saying the Great Auk.’ She began to drip again into her soup. She said, ‘I nearly laughed and Henry saw me. I could see that he put that against my account.’
‘You don’t hit it off?’
‘He’s a very mean man,’ she said. She wiped her eyes with her napkin and then she rattled her spoon fiercely in the soup, stirring up the noodles. ‘I once had to borrow ten pounds from him because I’d come to London to stay and forgot my bag. It could happen to anybody.’
‘Of course it could.’
‘I always pride myself on not having a debt in the world.’
Her conversation was like the tube system. It moved in circles and loops. I began by the coffee to notice the recurring stations: Henry’s meanness, her own financial integrity, her love for Sarah, her dissatisfaction with the funeral service, the Great All - that was where certain trains went on to Henry.
‘It was so funny,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want to laugh. Nobody loved Sarah more than I did.’ How we all, always, make that claim and are angered when we hear it on another’s tongue. ‘But Henry wouldn’t understand that. He’s a cold man.’
I made a great effort to switch the points. ‘I don’t see what other kind of service we could have had.’
‘Sarah was a Catholic,’ she said. She took her glass of port and swallowed half of it in a gulp.
‘Nonsense,’ I said.
‘Oh,’ Mrs Bertram said, ‘she didn’t know it herself.’
Suddenly, inexplicably, I felt fear, like a man who has committed the all-but-perfect crime and watches the first unexpected crack in the wall of his deception. How deep does the crack go? Can it be plugged in time?
‘I don’t understand a thing you’re saying.’
‘Sarah never told you I was a Catholic - once?’
‘No.’
‘I wasn’t very much of one. You see, my husband hated the whole business. I was his third wife, and when I got cross with him the first year, I used to say we weren’t properly married. He was a mean man,’ she added mechanically.
‘Your being a Catholic doesn’t make Sarah one.’
She took another gulp at her port. She said, ‘I’ve never told another soul. I think I’m a bit tight. Do you think I’m tight, Mr Bendrix?’