453

V

I crawl into bed beside Rachel. She is so heavy, immovable; her limbs lolling as though filled with water. We are face to face. The insult of her expression slaps me once again – the euphoria of release, as though she was guided to Heaven by angels.

My sleep is fractured by the lightning strikes of nightmares. Each time I wake up, I press my fingers to her throat, searching for just a flicker of heartbeat, and there is only her neck – silent, without a rhythm – and there is the panic, and the recognition, and she dies again, and again, and again.

She dies the next day when I sit up in bed and Ginny tentatively pushes open the door, bringing in some broth with a red face, asking if I might like to eat. I manage a little of it before I feel like vomiting. Ginny wishes to take away the sheets to be washed, but I stop her, pleading that I want to keep the counterpane with the paint blotches. I ask her to assist Rachel, so she washes her face and combs her hair. I am certain of having read somewhere that the hair on a human body continues to grow a few days beyond death. 454

She dies again when I lie down that night and smell the smoke in her hair, smoke which the wind will no longer wash out with its clean colours. I go to the window and scream up at the moon. I run to the hearth and toss up the ashes until I am blackened with soot.

Ginny stays silent downstairs, does not dare intrude.

She dies again when Dr. Adams arrives.

I stand by her bed, smoothing down my beard, as though it is perfectly natural to stand there, smeared with soot and paints, reeking of her death sweat. I nod politely as he explains that the cause was pneumonia and that he will make arrangements for the undertaker to visit.

Once they have removed her, there is a stain left on the bed. I pull away the paint-flecked counterpane and drape it around my shoulders like a cloak.

I go into the garden. It is the first time in days that I have been outside. How spiteful it all seems: the birds singing and the roses nodding and reaching for the light, indifferent to her passing.

The birds sing. I roar at them and they scatter.

Something inside me whispers that she would not have liked this.

I go to the kitchen and find a little stale crust. I sprinkle it over the bench where she used to sit. I watch as the birds dance and peck the crumbs. I watch their pulses fluttering in their feathered throats. I see them flying away 455with crumbs to feed their young, who will grow plump and spread their wings in turn and migrate across the sky, showing off their vitality with every swoop. Their eyes are beady and suspicious and yet I can espy their gratitude towards me.

I cannot bear to be bound back into the world. I stand up and the birds scatter again, squawking indignation. I return to the house and her bedroom. I lock the door behind me.

A letter from Finn:

Dear Father & Mother,

You see – I promised that I would write. I do hope you are both keeping well. It is so very hot here and, like Darwin in South America, I am appalled by the savagery I witness. Fanny is not happy and often spends hours in the cool of our bedroom, writing letters. I fear the heat has addled her mind, for she believes the natives are living more noble lives than us. I must confess, Father, that your conversion from atheism to agnosticism does rather vex me. At a time when science is bringing enlightenment to society, why retreat into such primitive fantasies? You claim music is the cause, but the evolutionary purpose of music still remains uncertain; perhaps its role is in ritual; but ultimately it is as useless to humanity as the invention of scones. Still, biology is destiny. Your genes haunt mine. Perhaps I too will succumb to such 456sentimentalism. Father – a better society awaits us, if we adhere to the realities of life, if we prevent the feeble-minded and poor from breeding, if we allow the masterful genes to flourish – why, we may soon evolve into magnificent beings who will look back and mock our present inferiority …

I screw the letter up and dash it into the bin; an hour later, I retrieve it and smooth it out in my study, picking up my pen to compose a reply. I sense that the cruelty of his sentiments is not simply due to the folly of his youth; he is exaggerating it in order to provoke me. But I have not the energy to rebut his repulsive philosophies. First, I must tell him of his mother’s fate. My fountain pen hovers above the paper, dropping blots like tears, and I find that I cannot begin.

I begin to dread being at home; I find every room speaks of her past presence and present absence. I stop at the post office to send a telegram to Finn. I cannot afford to send a lengthy message and even after half an hour of crafting, it still reads as callous in its matter-of-fact brevity.

Then I go to the public house, and despite my ‘tab’ being rather high, the owner is kind enough to give me several beers on the house, as well as passing me a little opium to keep me going. A middle-aged couple are sitting nearby, the man is berating his wife for drinking beer, which he deems is not ladylike. As I take my leave, I lean over and say to her, ‘Ignore your fool of a husband!’ and I hear him 457say he would knock my block off were I not so old and clearly demented. Then his eyes narrow.

‘Are you not the man I saw a week or so back, stealing my apples, right from my orchard?’

I have no idea of what crime he speaks, and clearly it has made him paranoid, but I merely shrug carelessly and saunter away.

Back home, I light a fire using a rickety chair and smoke the opium; but it is not enough for oblivion, only a limbo state between grief and a haze. It summons a watery hallucination of Rachel’s figure in the night sky through the window. She is painting the stars with her delicate precision.

Sometime in the night, a fever descends. In the grip of its swimming, dark heart, I picture our two graves, side by side, skeletons separated by a sliver of earth, skulls in symmetry. Oh, the temptation! – to join her, to slip away into a mutual darkness. My illness echoes hers, in its snivels and coughs and temperature; such mimicry feels like an act of intimacy, to know what she might have suffered.

But on the third night, I begin to revive. The loneliness of recovery is raw. Ginny brings up some soup, but there is nobody to sing me lullabies, or to clear away my vomit. There is nobody to lay their hand on my forehead, to coax and kiss me better. The cat settles at the bottom of the bed. I curl up like a foetus and sob until my ribs ache. I plead and beg with a God I do not believe in to bring her back to life.

The wind whistles his laughter down the chimney.