'You couldn't have thought of anything that would have made me more frightened than I have been or frightened in an extra way. I must have thought of more ways of being it than you have, because it's me it's happening to. There are ways I wouldn't know how to describe, not even to you. And that's saying something, isn't it? Really, I'd hardly have believed this, but I haven't been able to remember what they were, some of them, for whole parts of today. I've been sort of separating things out.'
'You mean you're not so frightened as you were?'
'Oh, I don't know about that. I can't tell, you see. I mean you can't tell. One can't. It's impossible to tell how the next thing that comes along is going to seem. There's much less to go on than you might think. Even about dying. I don't feel I know anything at all about that. I feel I used to know more and it's as if I've forgotten. About what you're going to feel when it's starting to happen, I mean. For most people there probably isn't a moment like that, when they know it's starting to happen. But that's a tremendous way off, anyway, as far as I'm concerned. Lots of things have got to happen first. They may be very unpleasant things but they aren't it, they won't be it. And I've got a very good chance of getting away with it. Don't let's forget that. We ought to try not to, anyway. And nothing terrible can happen for the moment, while we're here. There's a lot of time yet.'
She had been speaking rather in the way Churchill remembered from the time in the White Hart when she had told him her history, quickly but calmly, with every now and then a sharp intake of breath. For the most part she kept her eyes on her cigarette or somewhere about the foot of the bed, only glancing intermittently at him and away. Once she smoothed her hair back at the side of her head, exposing most of an ear. The sight of it seemed to concentrate his feelings of outrage. For an unimportant moment he thought of the Anti-Death League. He would have had a good reason for joining it now, if it had existed and if, had it existed, joining it would have had any meaning.
'I wish I could be with you all the time,' he said.
'But you can't be. There isn't any way that could happen. And you're only going to be away on this thing for ten days.'
'I can't not go. At least I could, but it wouldn't help. They'd keep me under lock and key at least as long, probably much longer.'
'I know, you told me. Don't worry about it, darling. You'll be about for the next six days, well, five days now, and nothing can really happen in the ten days after that. I shan't like it but I'll be able to stand it. I don't think I shall be too frightened. Not for a bit, anyway. You know, this morning, I mean yesterday morning, I thought completely about dying, sort of looked straight at it and tried to be logical. And just for a minute it didn't seem so frightening. When I was frightened of Casement it was because he was going to hurt me, perhaps in some way I hadn't thought of before. And when I went mad I was frightened of everything, because I thought everything might hurt me. That was sensible in a kind of way, being frightened of nasty things happening, nasty experiences, even when I wasn't a bit clear on what they might be. But dying isn't an experience at all. It's an event as far as other people are concerned, but not as far as you are, one is. Of course, one can't go on being frightfully detached and sensible for long. You soon slip back. But I've sort of lost interest in the frightening part of it for the time being, if that doesn't sound too silly. Hating it is what I'm on now more. Hating having the chance of having to go off and leave everything. Well, I don't really mean everything, I just mean you.'
She put out her cigarette and turned and faced him for the first time since she had begun to talk.
'Another thing I was thinking this morning,' she went on, speaking less quickly now, 'was that I could leave everything else like a shot if I could just keep you. I saw a play once where you spent all your time in a room with three other people and that was meant to be hell-you know, real hell, instead of flames. Well, if it was just you and me there I wouldn't mind it at all. Even if they arranged it so we couldn't make love. I wouldn't mind never going out and seeing the sun and the flowers and things, or reading a book or anything. That was what I thought, anyway. It was ridiculous really, I suppose. In a hundred years we'd run out of things to say.'
'We wouldn't.'
'Anyway, what I hate is the idea of having to go off and leave you. After we've been together for such a short time.'
'That's the really damnable thing,' said Churchill with difficulty.
'Perhaps it is. I'm not so sure. I just said about the short time thing without thinking. I think I'd mind the idea just as much if we'd been married for fifty years. I'd never get sick of you, would I?'
'I know. It's just death that's wrong.'
'It can't be put right. Don't get all angry about it, darling. You'll only end up upset. That's all.'
'Do you believe in God?'
'I'll have to think about that. I've never been able to understand what it means, you see. It's the most difficult idea I've ever heard about. And yet people seem to be able to get results by it all the time.'
Churchill said animatedly, 'Only people with no sense of right and wrong. No real sense of it. What would you have to be like to worship something that invented every bad thing we know or can imagine?' He looked away. 'Death in particular. If there were no such thing as death the whole human race could be happy.'
'Most of the bad things that happen are done by people. All the cruelty there is.'
'Human evil is just an instrument,' he went on in the same tone. 'It's not much more than incidental. I think Dr. Best is probably about as bad as a man can get, but he didn't create his own material, did he? The wherewithal for him to be bad. Pain and madness were there already. And even more so, the first men found out that if you picked up a big rock and dropped it on somebody's head, then something very peculiar happened to him. And people had been using that effect on one another ever since, but it was all there waiting for them, before they found out about it. They didn't invent it. And if it had never existed, there'd be no point in treating people badly in other ways. The point of sending a man to prison is to shorten the part of his life he can be free in, to bring his death nearer. If you couldn't do that, he wouldn't mind going to prison and you wouldn't bother to send him. So if there were no such thing as death we wouldn't all just be happy. We'd all be innocent too.'
There was a long and total silence. Catharine lit another cigarette and looked at Churchill's averted face.
