‘It doesn’t happen like that to everybody by any means,’ said Joyce.
‘No, I quite agree for some people it’s much worse. And I’m leaving out things like pain. But for most of us it’s either what I’ve said or it’s like what happened to my father. With reasonable care and a hell of a lot of luck you might last another ten years, or five years, or two years, or six months, but then of course again on the other hand as I’m sure you’ll appreciate trying to be completely objective about the matter you might not. So in future, if there is any, every birthday is going to have a lot of things about it that make it feel like your last one, and the same with every evening out, and after four of your five years or five of your six months the same with most things, up to and including getting into bed and waking up and the rest of it. So whichever way it turns out, like my father or like the other lot, it’s going to be difficult to feel you’ve won, and I don’t know which is worse, but I do know there’s enough about either of them to make you wish you could switch to the other for a bit. And it’s knowing that every day it’s more and more likely that one or the other of them will start tomorrow morning that makes the whole business so riveting.’
Nick stirred and muttered. Lucy, after glancing at me to make sure I felt I had done about enough maundering for the moment, said, ‘The fear of death is based on not wanting to consult fact and logic and common sense.’
‘Oh, in that case I’ll pack it up right away. But it isn’t exactly fear. Not altogether. There’s a bit of anger and hatred, and indignation perhaps, and loathing and revulsion, and grief, I suppose, and despair.’
‘Isn’t there something egotistical about all those feelings?’ Lucy sounded almost sorry for me.
‘Probably,’ I said. ‘But people usually feel bad when they realize they’re on one of the conveyor-belts I was talking about. Which makes it natural, at any rate, to feel something of the same when you realize we’re all on conveyor-belts to those coveyor-belts from the moment we’re born.’
‘It’s all right, Nick, I’m trying to be helpful, really. Natural, yes. But it’s natural to be all sorts of things it’d be better if we weren’t. Being afraid of the dark, for instance; that’s natural. But that’s one we can do something about, by using reason on it. The same with death. To start with, death isn’t a state.’
‘That’s what I don’t like about it.’
‘And it isn’t an event in life. All the pain and anxiety you’ve been talking about can be very horrible, no doubt, but it all takes places in life.’
‘That’s what I don’t like about life. Among other things, let it be said.’
‘I mean you’re not going to be hanging about fully conscious observing death happening to you. That might be very bad and frightening, if we could conceive of such a thing. But we can’t. Death isn’t something we experience.’
‘What we experience up to that point is quite bad enough to satisfy me. The ancient Assyrians believed in immortality without heaven or hell or any form of other world. In their view, the soul stayed by the body for eternity, keeping watch. Keeping watch for not a hell of a lot in particular, I suppose, but anyway there. Some people seem to think that’s a dreadful idea, worse than extinction, but I’d settle for it. Having somewhere to be.’
‘But nothing more than be, apparently. How would you spend the time? I’m sure you’ll have realized there’d be plenty of it.’
‘Oh yes. Well, thinking. All that kind of thing.’
‘I’m going to bed,’ said Joyce. ‘Laundry in the morning. Good night, Nick. Good night, Lucy.’ She kissed them both, then said mechanically to me, ‘Don’t be too late.’
While she departed, I got myself a Scotch and water. Nick was looking compliantly bored. Lucy seemed to be taking a minute or two off, as between one seminar topic and the next. After pouring herself a careful half-cup-and-no-more of coffee, and adding perhaps a minim-of milk, she said,
‘Uh, uh-Maurice, I take it you don’t allow any possibility of survival after death?’
‘Christ no. I’ve never believed in any of that crap, not even when I was a boy. To me, it’s always been a matter of a sleep and a forgetting, beyond all question. The other thing is egotistical, if you like. And so outré, somehow. Fit for madmen only. Why?’
‘Oh, I was just thinking that one of the traditional parts of the case for belief in some sort of hereafter is the existence of ghosts, which usually resemble actual people known when alive, and behave like them too, just as they would if they’d come back from beyond the grave.’
‘But according to you earlier on, ghosts don’t really exist as entities, and seeing one is seeing something that isn’t there.’
‘Yes, I’m not changing my mind. I don’t believe myself that ghosts are there in that sense, but there’s an arguable case that they are. And I have to admit that some ghosts do put on a remarkable show of having momentarily wandered back into our world from some place they went to after they died physically. I don’t mean so much the haunted-room sort of ghost, like the ones here; I’m thinking more of the sort that turn up under the most ordinary circumstances, sometimes by day, and speak to someone, often a person they knew well in life. Like the airman who walked into his friend’s room one afternoon and said halo to him five minutes after he’d been killed in a crash and hours before the friend heard about it. Or the woman who’d been dead for six years who appeared on the doorstep of her sister’s house at her usual time for coming to see her, only the sister had moved in the meantime, and the new occupant recognized the dead woman from a photograph the sister showed him. And even your friend Underhill … There’s one point in what you say happened in the dining-room tonight that takes him out of the category of the ordinary revenant kind of ghost.’
I judged that Lucy was fully capable of going to her grave without ever saying what this point was unless I prompted her, so I prompted her. ‘Namely?’ I said, with that sensation of taking part in Armchair Theatre on TV from which I suffered much more often, indeed continually, when dealing with Diana.
‘The fact, at least you say it’s a fact, that Underhill recognized you. Of course, he might just have mistaken you for someone else, but if he did really recognize you, then there’s an obvious case for saying that he is in some sense or other existing in the twentieth century, having died physically in the seventeenth—existing to the extent of being able to perform at any rate one kind of action, involving intelligence, memory and so on: recognition. There’s no knowing what else he may be able to do. Not at the moment, that is. But, given your views on death, I should say it’s more than ever up to you to try and get in touch with what you believe to be Underhill’s ghost.’
Nick had begun to twist about slightly in his seat. ‘Oh, Lu. Get in touch with a ghost? How do you do that?’
‘I was saying earlier, your father could see if he could touch the woman he thought he saw, or really saw—I’ve never denied that that’s a genuine possibility—or try to get her to speak to him if she appears again, and the same applies to Underhill. He seemed to hear his name being spoken tonight I still don’t think it was Underhill, but your father does. In his place, I’d spend as much time as possible sitting in that dining-room while it’s not in use and waiting for Underhill to reappear. He might speak next time. From your point of view, that’s logical, don’t you agree … Maurice?’