WELL, WELL, WELL."
He starts at the voice, the sensation of weight pulling the blankets taut. Gaye, in formal coat and tie, sits on the edge of his bed. He holds Hermione in his lap. To his surprise, Hardy is happy to see them.
"It's been so long since you've visited me," he says.
"Busy, busy, busy," Gaye says. "Every week is May week here. Balls and balls and balls. And what a long way you've come, Harold, since last I saw you!"
"How do you mean?"
"Yet another suicide to your credit."
"Suicide attempt. And it wasn't my—"
"I stand corrected. Attempt." Gaye strokes Hermione's neck, so that she purrs. "Mine worked, of course. But then again I never intended it not to. You know if you look carefully you can nearly always tell the difference between the ones who really mean it and the ones who just want some attention. It's rarely ambiguous."
"It wasn't ambiguous in your case."
"No, I meant to die. You see, I'm methodical. I thought it all out very carefully in advance, I made a list of all the possible methods, correlating the likelihood of success with the degree of pain. Unluckily for me, I'm afraid of pain. Some people aren't. Hermione, for instance. You were a brave girl, even through the death agonies, weren't you?" And he picks her up, so that her tiny pink nose touches his. "But where was I? Oh yes. So I wrote out the options. It was in early February that I started planning, just as it was becoming clear you wanted nothing more to do with me—"
"I never—"
"First tablets . . . Now tablets, Harold, are very good in that they won't cause much pain, but then again they're not necessarily guaranteed to take. If you choose the wrong ones, you'll just vomit, and even if you choose the right ones, there's every chance someone's going to barge in and find you sprawled out on the floor and drag you to hospital. So tablets—out. Next knives—but here the pain factor is very high, and besides, it's so easy to cut in the wrong place and just maim yourself, so I scratched that off the list. No pun intended."
"Please stop."
"Then I thought of jumping out a window—that's pretty much a safe bet, if you can get high enough. Unfortunately, at Trinity there's every chance you'll land on a bush, or fall just hard enough to break your neck and be paralyzed the rest of your life and then, once you're paralyzed, you'll have to ask someone else to help you do it, and humans being the skittish creatures they are, they're going to be afraid, no matter how sympathetic they feel, because it's murder, isn't it, and who wants to go to prison? You, for instance, would never have helped me. Hermione, yes—if she could have. Cats are not sentimentalists."
"Why are you doing this?"
"Which leaves guns. Now here are the advantages of a gun. First of all, assuming you put it in your mouth, it's instantaneous, so there's no pain. Second of all, the effect after the fact is really quite impressive. You know, the handsome young man lying atop his bed with his brains splattered all over his pillow. And on Easter Sunday to boot! The only pity was that it was the bedmaker who found me.
"You didn't want her to find you?"
"Of course not! I had nothing against that bedmaker. Poor woman, I gave her the fright of her life."
"God, how you must have hated me."
"No, you're wrong there, dear. I loved you." Gaye nods toward the open door. "Now that one . . . I'm not sure, but my guess is, he does too. So bravo to you, Harold. That's two you've driven to it."
"I haven't driven anyone to anything. I want to make this perfectly clear, you both have free will. You put a gun in your mouth, he jumped—"
"Ah, but I never said you killed anyone, I said you drove us to it. Consider my situation for starters. I loved you and you stopped loving me. I said I couldn't live without you and I proved it. And in his case . . ."
"He doesn't love me."
"He owes you everything. You brought him to England, you gave him a chance when no one else would. 'The Hindoo Calculator.' Only the trade-off is that he's sick. And now, to cap things off, Trinity doesn't want him."
"That's not my doing."
"Who said it was? And it wouldn't necessarily have made things better. Some are born for fame. I was. It was my calling. I had the hunger for it, not to mention the equipment to cope with it. But alas, I didn't have the goods. The talent. Such an irony . . . Those who can cope with it never get it, whereas those who get it can't cope with it."
"So is that why he did it? Because he couldn't cope with fame?"
"There's never just one reason. Trinity dropped me, too, remember, thanks to Barnes—"
"Barnes had nothing to do with it."
"Whether he did or not, I lost my fellowship. And then what was I supposed to do? Move back in with the family? Get a job as a master at some dreary second-rate public school? You can't know, it never happened to you. You work like a fiend, then someone decides he doesn't like you, and that's it, mate."
"I can assure you that Barnes had nothing to do with your losing your fellowship, Russell."
"Well, there are other routes to fame. So I finished the Aristotle translation, signed my name to it, and left instructions for a copy to be sent to you. I assume you received it."
"Yes."
"But you didn't come to the funeral."
"I couldn't face your family."
"Bravery was never your strong suit."
"Russell—"
"The point is, there comes a moment when things add up, and one day, you're there in the station and you're looking at that line, you know, the one you're never supposed to cross, because if you cross it, you'll be too close to the tracks. And you just think, why in bloody hell shouldn't I? Because it's so easy to step across that line . . . Like one of your asymptotic formulae, Harold, half an inch closer, then a quarter of an inch, then an eighth, a sixteenth, a thirty-second . . . And the closer you get, the more obvious it becomes that no one's going to reach out and stop you, because no one's paying you the slightest attention. They're all thinking about themselves. And even though you don't know what you'll find on the other side of the line, at least you know it'll be something different to this. And this is hell, isn't it? So you just . . . move your feet . . . and cross it."
"I've never been tempted to cross it."
"No, not yet."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
Gaye laughs. "You should know. You're the one who's got Oliver Lodge by your bedside. When the dead come to visit from the other side, they usually bring warnings, right? Foreshadowings, precognitions. Well, I wouldn't want to disappoint you. So write this down on your tongue. Beware a man in black. Beware the hour of twilight. There may be an accident in your future. And don't imagine that you, too, won't one day try to cross the line . . ."
"Try?"
"Ah!" Gaye throws his hands into the air. "But the spirit has departed! A candle goes out, the medium drops her turbaned head to the table, exhausted from her labors."
"It's not fair. I only ever wanted to help."
"No, you wanted to save. There's a difference."
"Oh God."
"Exactly. Why do you think I chose Easter Sunday?"
"Bertie told Norton I vampired you. That was the word he used: 'Vampired.'"
"Now Bertie—there's a man who knows how to handle fame. He got his chance, he planted the seed, he cultivated it. Now look where he is! Whereas you, Harold, you're one of those who'll never make anything of what you've been given." Gaye smiles. "Poor Harold." And he lays a hand on Hardy's cheek, a hand Hardy feels. It is cold and dry—how he welcomes it! But when he tries to put his own hand over Gaye's, Gaye withdraws. He stands from the bed and holds Hermione up in the air. "I'm flying! I'm flying!" he says, pretending to be her. "Remember, Harold? Remember how we used to make her fly?"
"I remember."
"And now she flies all the time. You're an angel cat, aren't you, Hermione?"
As if in answer, she wriggles out of his grasp, scuttles across the floor, and starts to sharpen her claws on the curtains. Gaye follows her. "Bad girl," he says, bending down and detaching her claws, which rake the silk.
"Don't leave," Hardy says, but he already feels the severing, smells the smoke of the guttered candle.
He climbs out of bed; switches on the lamp. The room is empty. And though he knows before he tries that he'll feel no striations or rips in the silk, still, he kneels before the curtain and fingers the hem. In the deep silence he hears no voices, only Ramanujan's breathing across the corridor. And this Hardy holds on to as tightly as he does the curtain's edge. Its steady rise and fall is like a railing to him, something to guide him through to morning. This one he loves also, and this one, he reminds himself, is still alive.