must give us pause. How did one get out of
As I lay there, listening to the soft slap of the sea, and thinking these sad and strange thoughts, more and more and more stars had gathered, obliterating the separateness of the Milky Way and filling up the whole sky. And far far away in that ocean of gold, stars were silently shooting and falling and finding their fates, among those billions and billions of merging golden lights. And curtain after curtain of gauze was quietly removed, and I saw stars behind stars behind stars, as in the magical Odeons of my youth. And I saw into the vast soft interior of the universe which was slowly and gently turning itself inside out. I went to sleep, and in my sleep I seemed to hear a sound of singing.
I woke up and it was dawn. The billion stars had gone and the sky was a bland misty very light blue, a huge uniform over-arching cool yet muted brightness, the sun not yet risen. The rocks were clearly revealed, still indefinably colourless. The sea was utterly calm, glossy, grey, without even ripples, marked only by the thinnest palest line at the horizon. There was a complete yet somehow conscious silence, as if the travelling planet were noiselessly breathing. I remembered that James was dead. Who is one’s first love? Who indeed.
I pulled myself up, knelt, and began to shake my blankets and my pillow which were wet with dew. Then I heard, odd and frightening in that total stillness, a sound coming from the water, a sudden and quite loud splashing, as if something just below the rock were about to emerge, and crawl out perhaps onto the land. I had a moment of sheer fear as I turned and leaned towards the sea edge. Then I saw below me, their wet doggy faces looking curiously upward, four seals, swimming so close to the rock that I could almost have touched them. I looked down at their pointed noses only a few feet below, their dripping whiskers, their bright inquisitive round eyes, and the lithe and glossy grace of their wet backs. They curved and played a while, gulping and gurgling a little, looking up at me all the time. And as I watched their play I could not doubt that they were beneficent beings come to visit me and bless me.
Postscript:
THAT NO DOUBT is how the story ought to end, with the seals and the stars, explanation, resignation, reconciliation, everything picked up into some radiant bland ambiguous higher significance, in calm of mind, all passion spent. However life, unlike art, has an irritating way of bumping and limping on, undoing conversions, casting doubt on solutions, and generally illustrating the impossibility of living happily or virtuously ever after; so I thought I might continue the tale a little longer in the form once again of a diary, though I suppose that, if this is a book, it will have to end, arbitrarily enough no doubt, in quite a short while. In particular I felt I ought to go on so as to describe James’s funeral, although really James’s funeral was such a non-event that there is practically nothing to describe. Then I felt too that I might take this opportunity to tie up a few loose ends, only of course loose ends can never be properly tied, one is always producing new ones. Time, like the sea, unties all knots. Judgments on people are never final, they emerge from summings up which at once suggest the need of a reconsideration. Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning, whatever art may otherwise pretend in order to console us.
As I write this it is August, not the yellow Provencal August of the English imagination, but an ordinary cool London August with the wind beating down the Thames at the end of the street. For, yes, I am living in James’s flat. From a legal point of view it is my flat, but of course it remains really James’s. I dare not alter anything, I scarcely dare to move anything. The idols of ‘superstition’ surround me. I have ventured to put some of the odder ‘fetishes’ away in a cupboard, I hope they will not mind, and I took down the glass pendants in the hall because their tinkling disturbed my sleep. But the ornate wooden box with the captive demon inside is still perched on its bracket. (James never denied that there was a demon in it. He merely laughed when I asked him.) The innumerable Buddhas are still in their places, except for one that I gave to Toby Ellesmere because he seemed annoyed at not being mentioned in James’s will. The will left everything to me and, should I predecease him, to the British Buddhist Society. I gave them a Buddha too.
Another peevish shifty letter from the house agent today. Shruff End is up for sale. I never spent another night there after the night of the stars when the seals came in the morning. While sorting out my belongings for removal I stayed at the Raven Hotel. I could see the tower from my bedroom but not the house. No one seems to want to buy the place, perhaps because of the dampness, perhaps for other reasons. The Arkwrights at Amorne Farm, who have the key, said they would get the roof mended, but according to the agent have not done so. Fortunately I do not need the money urgently since James’s will has left me comfortably off.
I suppose I must describe James’s funeral as I said I was going to. There was something curiously blank about it. I did not have to organize it, thank heaven. It was organized by a Colonel Blackthorn who appeared for this purpose and then vanished. When I got to London on the day after the doctor’s letter I found Colonel Blackthorn and the doctor both actually in James’s flat. The colonel explained that he had organized the funeral (a cremation) because they had been unable to get in touch with me, but that if I wished for something different… I did not. I tried to talk to the doctor but he faded away while Blackthorn was still explaining to me how to get to the crematorium. ‘James’ had already mercifully been removed to the ‘chapel of rest’. I did not visit him.
The cremation took place two days later at one of those huge garden places in north London. There is something comfortlessly empty about a ‘garden of remembrance’ after the loquacious populated feeling of a graveyard. It was a stiff graceless business, rather hurried on by the staff, who kept us waiting outside while the previous ‘customer’ was disposed of. Doubtless the worthy colonel’s despatch in booking our ‘slot’ had been a prudent one. He was there, also the doctor. Toby Ellesmere came and seemed genuinely upset. I had never reflected before (and have not since) upon the nature of his relation with James, but whatever it was I imagine it belonged to the remote past. James and Toby had not only been young soldiers together, they had been school boys together. Perhaps Toby had simply admired him at school; such bonds can be life-long. Four other well- dressed men in smart black suits turned up, I presume they were soldiers. They showed no signs of knowing who I was, and they were unknown to Toby, with whom I exchanged a few words; indeed no one except Toby talked to me at all. The business took minutes. There was no prayer of course, only a little soft listless music and then a standing in silence, which was broken by some official noisily opening the door at the back. I wished then that there could have been a proper ceremony of some sort. But any ritual I could have devised would probably have offended James’s shade. I only wish I had had the wit to demand some decent music to see him off with.
We went outside into the garden. Colonel Blackthorn shook hands with me. Everybody began to go away. Again I tried to speak to the doctor, but he said he was expected at the hospital. Perhaps he was feeling a bit nervous about that death certificate. Toby rather half-heartedly offered me a lift in his car, but I declined. I think he wanted to be alone too. I walked about for a long time in shabby sad back-streets and lost myself.
I have just found in a drawer in the kitchen the hammer which I was trying to mend on the last evening when James came to Shruff End. He must have taken the precaution of carrying it away with him. I like the kitchen. There is a large dry larder, completely empty when I arrived. There is also a view of Battersea Power Station, which in the evening looks like an Assyrian monument.
I have sold my flat in Shepherds Bush and brought some of the furniture here. I brought back my own stuff from Shruff End, but none of Mrs Chorney’s. I resisted a temptation to keep the
