And that was the end of that. The novel ended.
Those who are about to die salute thee. I, Ajax, have done my part. I have faced the past as Lady Rice could not, she being too busy with her disassociated personalities. Now I can retire again, my affidavit presented. I am a fine and competent fellow, and my misery it is to be thus confined in a female body. I could do all kinds of things to Lady Rice, if I chose. I could make her crow and strut about a bit; I could make her put on a collar and tie and be a lesbian; I could send her to seduce, shall we say, Anthea, or Susan – that would certainly work – but for that I’d have to elbow the harlot Angel out of the way, and I am nothing if not a gentleman; so I’ll allow the harlot to have her own way for a time. Lady Rice can be all angel and no Ajax.
The differing aspects of the self, the different times at which they live, begin to gather together. The places where they co-exist discover their significance.
Lodestar House stood empty for a time. Congo’s ghosts swept in and got him: one night they simply dived under his broomstick defences and nabbed him. Garotted by pirates, guillotined by revolutionaries, starved by communards, betrayed by his own heart, what difference does it make? Humiliation and pain accompanies death or does not; to try to guarantee the manner of one’s end is barely worth living this kind of life or that. Play safe as a wage slave, play fast and loose as a criminal, death ignores the justice of the matter. The wage slave can burn to death horribly on the motorway and be forgotten within the week; the evil man come to an easy end in his sleep, tucked up in bed with his wife, and the obituaries drift on and flatter, for since nothing is deserved in life, why should it be any different in death?