'Well, if there's anything-'
'But there is! I want help. This is the worst thing that's ever happened to me.'
'But don't you see, Shelly? This is something you and Denis have got to work out for yourselves. Nobody else-'
'God! You
'Look! Is Denis there?'
'Of course he's not, you fool.'
'Please don't call me a fool, Shelly! Get a hold on yourself and put things in perspective - and just remember who you're talking to!'
'Denis!'
'You get back to bed. I'll sleep in the spare room.'
'No.
'I don't give a sod who sleeps where. We're just not sleeping in the same room, that's all.'
His eyes were still full of anger and anguish, though his voice was curiously calm. 'We've got to talk about
this. For a start, you'd better find out the rights and wrongs and the rest of it about people involved in divorce on the grounds of adultery. Not tonight, though.'
'Denis! Please let's talk
'What die hell about? About
In silence, in abject despair, Shelly Comford listened, and the tears ran in furrows down her cheeks.
'We're finished. The two of us are finished, Shelly -do you know, I can hardly bring myself to call you by your name? Our marriage is over and done with - make no mistake about that. You can feel free to do what you want now. I just don't care. You're a born flirt! You're a born prick-teaser! And I just can't live with you any longer. I just can't live with the picture of you lying there naked and opening your legs to anodier man. Can you try to get dial into your thick skull?'
She shook her head in utter anguish.
'You said' (Comford continued) 'you'd have given anything in life to see me become Master. Well, / wouldn't - do you understand that? But I'd have given anything in life for you to be faithful to me - whatever the prize.'
He turned away from her, and she heard the door of the spare bedroom close; then open again.
'When was it? Tell me that.
'This morning.'
'You mean when I was out jogging?'
'Yes,' she whispered.
He turned away once more; and she beheld and could see no sorrow like unto her own sorrow.
The keys to her car lay on the mantelshelf.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
Monday, 4 March
I work all day, and get half-drunk at night. Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare. In time the curtain-edges will grow light. Till then I see what's really always there: Unresting death, a whole day nearer now, Making all thought impossible but how And where and when I shall myself die (Philip Larkin,
NEVER, IN HIS lifetime of muted laughter and occasional tears, had Morse spent such a horrifying night. Amid fitful bouts of semi-clumber - head weighted with pain, ears throbbing, stomach in spasms, gullet afire with bile and acidity - he'd imagined himself on the verge of fainting, of vomiting, of having a stroke, of entering cardiac arrest. One of Ovid's lovers had once besought the Horses of the Night to slacken dieir pace and delay diereby the onset of the Dawn. But as he lay turning in his bed, Morse longed for a sign of the brightening sky through his window. During diat seemingly unending night, he had consumed several glasses of cold water, Alka-Seltzer tablets, cups of black
coffee, and the equivalent of a weekly dosage of Nurofen Plus.
No alcohol, diough. Not one drop of alcohol.
At last Morse had decided to abandon alcohol.
Lewis looked into Morse's bedroom at 7.30 a.m. (Lewis was the only person who had a key to Morse's flat.)
In the prestigious area of North Oxford, most householders had long since fitted their homes with anti-burglar devices, with neighbours holding die keys to the alarm mechanism. But Morse had litde need of such a device, for die only saleable, stealable items in his flat were the CDs of all die operas of die man he regarded as a towering genius, Richard Wagner; and his eamesdy assembled collection of first editions of die greatest hero in his life, the pessimistic poet A. E. Housman, who, like Morse, had left St John's College, Oxford, without obtaining a degree.
But not even North Oxford burglars had tastes that were quite so esoteric.
