‘For good, baby, for good,’ said Sally. ‘That was it. You’re past the last.’
‘Past the last?’
‘You’ve come and gone, G, come and gone. It’s Styxside for you now.
‘Stickside?’
‘S for Sally, T for Terminal, Y for You and X for Fast. All that’s left is this.’ She reached over and picked up the jug of muddy water. Gaskell turned his head and looked at it.
‘What’s that for?’
‘For you, baby. Mudders milk.’ She moved up his body and sat on his chest. ‘Open your mouth.’
Gaskell Pringsheim stared up at her frantically. He began to writhe ‘You’re mad. You’re crazy.’
‘Now just lie quietly and it won’t hurt. It will soon be over, lover. Natural death by drowning. In bed. You’re making’ history.’
‘You bitch, you murderous bitch.’
‘Cerberuswise,’ said Sally, and poured the water into his mouth. She put the jug down and pulled the cap down over his face.
The Rev St John Froude rowed surprisingly steadily for a man with half a bottle of whisky inside him and a wrath in his heart, and the nearer he got to the contraceptives the greater his wrath became. It wasn’t simply that he had been given a quite unnecessary fright about the state of his liver by the sight of the things (he could see now that he was close to them that they were real), it was rather that he adhered the doctrine of sexual non-intervention. God, in his view had created a perfect world if the book of Genesis was to be believed and it had been going downhill ever since. And the book of Genesis was to be believed or the rest of the Bible made no sense at all. Starting from this fundamentalist premise the Rev St John Froude had progressed erratically by way of Blake, Hawker, Leavis and a number of obscurantist theologians to the conviction that the miracles of modern science were the works of the devil, that salvation lay in eschewing every material advance since the Renaissance, and one or two before, and that nature was infinitely less red in tooth and claw than modern mechanized man. In short he was convinced that the end of the world was at hand in the shape of a nuclear holocaust and that it was his duty as a Christian to announce the fact. His sermons on the subject had been of such a vividly horrendous fervour as to lead to his exile in Waterswick. Now as he rowed up the channel into Eel Stretch he fulminated silently against contraception, abortion and the evils of sexual promiscuity. They were all symptoms and causes and causative symptoms of the moral chaos which life on earth had become. And finally there were trippers. The Rev St John Froude loathed trippers. They fouled the little Eden of his parish with their boats, their transistors and their unabashed enjoyment of the present. And trippers who desecrated the prospect from his study window with inflated contraceptives and meaningless messages were an abomination. By the time he came in sight of the cabin cruiser he was in no mood to be trifled with. He rowed furiously across to the boat, tied up to the rail and, lifting his cassock over his knees, stepped aboard.
In the cabin Sally stared down at the bathing-cap. It deflated and inflated, expanded and was sucked in against Gaskell’s lace and Sally squirmed with pleasure. She was the liberatedest woman in the world, but the liberatedest. Gaskell was dying and she would be free to be with a million dollars in the kitty. And no one would ever know. When he was dead she would take the cap off and untie him and push his body over the side into the water. Gaskell Pringsheim would have died a natural death by drowning. And at that moment
