by James Lasdun
She thrust out a hand as they approached, giving no sign of recognising Richard.
Audrey was there; seated already, right at the front of the chapel with the two children. The little girl, who must have been five now, sat staring at the closed casket. The boy, not yet three, was marching up and down between the rows of chairs.
Sara instinctively made for the chairs next to Audrey, and Richard followed behind. She seemed to flinch as she saw them, but she yielded to Sara’s smile and the two embraced. With Richard, however, she remained oddly aloof. He thought she must be displacing her anger with Victor onto him, which struck him as childish, though he was careful to seem understanding. He really had half-expected her to stay away from the funeral altogether. It wasn’t as if the children were old enough to get any benefit from seeing their father in a casket while strangers said incomprehensible things about him. And what possible good could Audrey herself hope to get out of it?
The thought propelled him into the contemplation of his own circumstances. How lucky I am, he felt, glancing fondly at Sara. There was a time, not so long ago, when things might have gone badly wrong between them. He was well aware of that. But they hadn’t, and instead he seemed to have entered a new phase of happiness in his domestic life.
He thought, as he often did, of his evening at Paradise Meadow. He had fallen asleep, or passed out, in the long grass. When he awoke it was too late to pretend he’d come back from New York on the last train, which had meant he would have to wait till the morning before going home. He’d debated sleeping in the car, but instead drove to a motel in East Deerfield, where he got a few hours’ rest. Back at the house, when he’d found the bedroom empty and no sign of Sara, he’d had a brief, irrational and highly uncharacteristic attack of jealousy, wondering if the tables had been turned and it was Sara who was being unfaithful. The idea, which had never entered his mind before, had been amazingly upsetting. Imagining himself the victim of a punitive fate that was about to visit the sharpest imaginable form of humiliation on him, he was in a state of near-panic by the time he burst into Sara’s studio, having searched everywhere in the house itself. Of his encounter with the swan he remembered only a dazzle of whiteness out of which something staggeringly violent had exploded. Then he had seen Sara, and despite the blood welling out of his lips, had been flooded with relief. She’d accepted his story of coming home on the early train without any sign of suspicion, and except for the swelling on his mouth (which lasted several days and was a cause of great embarrassment at morning assembly), things had quickly gone back to normal.
It was from then, in hindsight, that he dated the onset of his present marital contentment. This was purely a private matter; not something he felt any urge to talk about to Sara, and in fact he liked thinking of it as a secret. A benign secret, unlike its corrosive predecessor; quietly strengthening the bond between them as they headed together into the late summer of their lives. It took the form of an appreciative calm, a desire to have Sara’s opinion on everything, a dislike of being apart from her, and a total lack of interest in other women.
The chapel was filling up. Polly came in, accompanied by Victor’s brother, and the room fell silent. Polly looked at the crowded seats, assumed a panicked expression, and promptly sat down, leaving the brother to officiate alone. He did this with smooth assurance, calling on people to come up and speak or read as the spirit moved them. He gave an impression of slumming it a little, here among Victor’s motley circle.
The tributes were the usual thing: funny stories, sentimental anecdotes, favourite passages from the books and articles Victor had written. Polly recovered her poise sufficiently to stand up at one point, and for a painful moment Richard thought she was going to do a dance, but she recited a poem. It appeared to be about ponies, though it struck the same note of vaguely religious solemnity as the three or four other poems that had been read, and didn’t seem any more beside the point than any of them.
Death, he thought, his attention drifting, was actually not a particularly interesting phenomenon. It was touted as the big subject; the great mystery that poets and metaphysicians were supposed to explore on behalf of the rest of us. But without all the obsolete trappings of immortality and the afterlife, what did it really amount to, in itself?
Nothing. It belonged, at best, with the ‘negative concepts’: Schopenhauer’s term for ideas like Justice or Freedom that can only be known by their absence. We think of it as an occurrence, but really it’s the reverse: a cessation of occurrence. What it means, when a friend dies, isn’t that something has happened, but just that all kinds of things will stop happening. Instead of having dinner together next week or next month or next year, you won’t be having dinner together any of those times. It sculpts itself from the cancellation of all possible future exchanges; from the emails and texts you won’t be sending each other any more, the phone conversations you won’t be having, the get-togethers you won’t be scheduling in your calendar. That’s what another person’s life is to you. Into the hollow formed by these curtailments we pour our feelings of loss like bronze into a mould, and call the resulting object the death of a loved one. But really, that was a confusion of categories.
He had thought of dredging up some amusing story about Victor’s excesses, but in the light of Victor’s shiftless and depressing last couple of years, the stories all seemed more like cautionary tales than celebrations of Victor’s supposed love of life. Anyway, he hadn’t really felt like contributing to the myth Victor’s other friends would no doubt be trying to create (and indeed were), of some lovably tragic Falstaffian character. He did love him, he supposed, but he was having a hard time finding the thread of that feeling. For a long time now the thought of Victor had roused something more like angry exasperation than affection. The rituals of their friendship had continued, but the friendship itself had become more like an official alliance between nations than a living bond between human beings. In all candour, he had written Vic off as a lost cause after that second break-up with Audrey, and the news of his death had just seemed to confirm the judgement.
So he had looked for something to read instead, trawling through the copiously marked-up copies of his beloved Transcendentalists. In the end he’d chosen a passage from Thoreau arguing that the death of a friend compels us to ‘fulfill the promise of our friend’s life’ in addition to our own. He wasn’t sure he really agreed with the sentiment but at least it managed to be uplifting without caving in to pseudo-religious palliatives. Anyway, he’d shown Sara the passage and she’d said it was perfect.
Polly finished her poem and crumpled back into her seat.
Seeing that no one else was going forward, Richard stood up. His plan was to ad lib for a few minutes after reading the passage. He had the seasoned schoolteacher’s confidence in his ability to extemporise.
Turning to face the audience he was struck by the number of tear-filled eyes glistening before him. He hadn’t picked up on the emotion in the room. It filled him with an odd mixture of shame at having failed to rise to the occasion himself, and a querulous wish to remind everyone of the shortcomings of the deceased.
He introduced himself and in his mildest, most affable morning-assembly manner announced that he was going to read something from the great Henry David Thoreau, a text he was sure many of them were familiar with.
‘“On the death of a friend,”’ he read, ‘“we should consider that the fates through confidence have devolved on us the task of a double living, that we—”’
He broke off. He had seen something so inexplicable and so disconcerting that for a moment he was unable to speak.
It was Francesca, sitting at the back of the chapel. The sight seemed to require a degree of mental agility to make sense of, that he was simply unable to summon. It was as if some very strange spatial or temporal anomaly had occurred, and either he or Francesca or the chapel full of mourners wasn’t really there.
He looked back down at his sheet of paper, and read on mechani
cally:
‘“… have devolved on us the … the task of a double living, that we have henceforth to fulfill the, uh, promise of our friend’s life also, in our own, to the world …”’ He struggled to understand the phrases he was repeating. As he made his own off-the-cuff remarks he felt as if he were talking underwater, and he returned to his seat with the sense of having spoken more or less gibberish. He smiled apprehensively at Sara as he sat down. She smiled back, though he wasn’t sure if it was out of approval or pity.
After the ceremony, coffee was served in the anterooms between the chapel and the lobby. Leaving Sara with Audrey, Richard moved off through the crowd, edging through the packed rooms until he saw Francesca. She was standing alone, wearing a soft-looking black leather jacket with a russet silk scarf. Seeing him approach, she lowered her cup of coffee to the saucer in her other hand; very slowly, as if afraid of spilling it.
‘Francesca!’
‘Hello, Richard.’
‘What are you doing here?’
She held his glance a moment.
‘Ah. Vic didn’t tell you.’
‘Didn’t tell me what?’
She cleared her throat.
‘We had sort of a – fling.’
‘My God.’
‘Well, it wasn’t a great success. But we stayed friends.’
‘My God. My God!’
‘I thought he must have told you.’
‘No!’
‘I’m sorry. He told me he was going to. He’s not – he wasn’t the most dependable man though, was he?’
She gave a smile, but Richard ignored it.
‘I’m stunned,’ he said.
She nodded.
‘I imagine it would be rather stunning. I’m sorry.’
‘How did it come about – if I can ask?’
She looked away, pursing her lips as if unsure whether she wanted to tell him, then shrugged.
‘He came to a gig. We had a chat, a drink. We met up a few times after that; purely social at first. Then just, you know, the normal …’
‘The normal! I wouldn’t—’
‘Richard, don’t be upset with me, please.’
‘It’s not you I’m upset with.’
‘Ah. Well, him either. He cared heaps about you, you know that.’
‘Heaps. Do I?’
She put her hand on his arm. They were standing close, speaking very quietly.
‘Don’t be upset, Richard. You’re happy in your life, aren’t you? Vic said you were blissfully happy. Actually, the last time I saw him he said you were nauseatingly happy! And you looked happy sitting down next to your – to Sara. That was her in the blue, right? I watched you together. You looked like the happiest couple, even from the back!’
He frowned.
‘I’m in shock, I guess.’
She nodded, withdrawing her hand.
There didn’t seem to be much else to discuss. Besides, he didn’t want to linger. Sara might see them and wonder who she was, and he had no wish to make up any more lies.
‘Well, good seeing you,’ he said.
‘You too, Richard. Take care.’
Later, driving home, Richard realised he wasn’t actually as injured as he’d first thought. Disappointed, yes, though it was hardly a surprise to discover Victor was capable of making a move on his best friend’s ex-lover. But not, after all, deeply wounded. He didn’t feel hurt or angry so much as faintly scornful of them both, as if he’d caught two pupils misbehaving in some foolish way. He was even able to go back, very calmly, over the evening the three of them had spent at that club in Tribeca, examining it for traces of some spark between them. In hindsight, it seemed to him the only real surprise was that he hadn’t seen the whole thing coming. But even this didn’t arouse any great feeling of betrayal. And just now, being with Francesca again, so unexpectedly, hadn’t had anything like the effect on him he might have predicted. He felt a nostalgic fondness, and a dim sense that she represented some large failure or shortcoming on his part, but there was none of that old anguished hankering. No feeling of old fissures reopening.
I must really be over her, he thought.
He glanced at Sara, who was gazing out the window. How grateful he was for her calmness and quietness, her steadfast dependability. Her undemonstrative, wifely love – a matter of scrupulous attentions to himself and Daniel year after year after year – seemed to him infinitely more desirable than any number of romantic gestures or passionate declarations. She had always been indispensable to him in a practical way, managing their household, running Daniel, but only recently had he become fully aware of how emotionally indispensable she was too; how linked her serenity was to his own peace of mind, his happiness. He had come to think of her as an immense piece of luck that had fallen miraculously into his hands and which, even more miraculously, he had managed not to lose despite his carelessness. He still cringed, thinking of those idiotic, clandestine trips to see Francesca in New York, and that strange interlude, or non-interlude, with Bonnie at the drumming. Bonnie, thank God, had never made any allusion, by word or manner, to his presence there or his disappearance. She was very sweet, he thought, very cool, as she herself would have no doubt put it, and this too seemed a part of his luck.
Well, those days were over. He knew that with absolute certainty. He had entered a new phase of his life, one that seemed to stretch before him like a broad, sunlit river, and he intended keeping Sara by his side as he sailed along it. Thirty-five might be the age of obsolescence as far as evolution was concerned, he reflected, picking up a familiar thread, and it was undeniable that a certain air of futility hung over the activities of men and women as they grew older, but one persisted nevertheless, and one could hardly be blamed for wanting to pass the time in a state of comfort and companionship. Even if that comfort and companionship were founded on something artificial, or at least not comprehended by the strict axioms of survival and procreation … Victor perhaps hadn’t been able to accept this, preferring to take his chances with loneliness and discomfort, which perhaps, Richard was willing to concede, made him a more courageous man, or truer to his essential self. But even if he’d gotten what he wanted, which Richard doubted, he had paid a price for it, and others had too. Marriage undoubtedly curtailed aspects of one’s nature, but better that than the mayhem Victor had inflicted on everyone around him. Better anything, really, than the feral squalor of a man growing old on his own.
In the pleasantly self-congratulatory mood brought on by these thoughts, it came to Richard that perhaps even his affair with Francesca had played a necessary role in the formation of his present happiness. I betrayed Sara before I married her so that I wouldn’t have to betray her afterwards … Was that possible? It seemed so. Everything, in that moment, seemed mysteriously balanced, well aligned, at least in his own existence. He was modest enough not to attribute this to any special quality of his own. It was luck again, pure luck, and the only position to take in regard to it was pure gratitude. Yet it was impossible to stave off the feeling of being in harmony with something more profound than simple luck; some deeper principle of order.
All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee … The words of the poem came back to him as he drove on up into the twilit mountains: All Chance, Direction which thou canst not see … Another illusion, of course, the rationalist’s reinvention of God; Jehovah refurbished as a deist version of Intelligent Design, but how hard it was to resist sometimes (and how little inclined he was to do so these days), even down to the particular childishness of cloaking that already childish fallacy in an aura of mystical benignness: All Discord, Harmony, not understood; All partial Evil, universal Good … Then something else, he forgot what, ending in -ight, and then that wondrously shocking little one-line manifesto for eternal complacency: One truth is clear, ‘Whatever IS, is RIGHT’ …
A surge of love came into him; a strong desire to say something romantic. He tried to think of some words that wouldn’t sound too sappy. He glanced at Sara in t
he mirror but she was still looking out at the sombre hills flanking the throughway. He put his hand on her knee. After a moment she laid her hand reassuringly over his.
4
Something had happened, but she wasn’t exactly sure what it was. In an effort to get some purchase on it, she was going over the progression of events that had just occurred.
At the end of the service she’d lingered in the chapel talking to Audrey while Richard disappeared off into the reception. After a while she and Audrey had left the chapel with Audrey’s two kids following behind, squeezing through the crowded vestibule to the room beyond, where the refreshments had been laid out. While Audrey poured herself a cup of coffee, Sara had been staring absently through an archway that led into another, longer room. A knot of people under the arch broke up and she’d glimpsed Richard at the far end, talking to a woman in a black jacket with a silk scarf. Richard, who was facing away from Sara, was rubbing at the bald spot at the back of his head, which was something he did when he was agitated. The woman was smiling at him in a way that seemed appeasing, or anyway actively sympathetic. She’d looked faintly familiar; her striking features and long brown hair evocative of some far-off occasion, though Sara couldn’t place her.
Audrey had come up, with her coffee. Just then the woman had put her hand on Richard’s arm and said something that made him rub his bald spot furiously.
‘Do you know who that is with Richard?’ Sara had asked.
Audrey turned. At once, a look of acute distress had appeared on her face.
‘It’s Francesca,’ she said. ‘I didn’t realise she was here. I’m leaving.’
She looked around for her kids.
