all right and would see me in the morning.
In the dining-room, the two women were sitting on the window-seat, Diana with her arm round Joyce’s shoulders. Joyce’s head was lowered and her yellow hair had fallen over her face. Jack handed me a tumbler half- full of whisky with a little water. I drank it all.
‘Amy all right?’ asked Jack. ‘Good. I’ll look in on her in a minute. Now we’ll have to get your father on to his bed. You and I can do it, or I can go and fetch someone from downstairs if you don’t feel up to it.’
‘I can do it. You and I can do it.’
‘Come on, then.’
Jack took my father under the arms and I by the ankles. Diana was there to open the door. By holding him close against his chest, Jack saw to it that my father’s head did not loll much. He went on talking as we moved.
‘I’ll get young Palmer up here as soon as we’ve done this, if you approve, just to put him in the picture. There’s nothing more that needs doing tonight. The district nurse will be in first thing in the morning to lay him out. I’ll be along too, with the death certificate. Someone will have to take that in to the registrar in Baldock and fix things up with the undertakers. Will you do that?’
‘Yes.’ We stood now in the bedroom. ‘What are you looking for?’
‘Blanket.’
‘Bottom drawer there.’
We covered my father up and left him. The rest was soon done. All of us managed to eat a little, Jack rather more.
David Palmer appeared, listened, said and looked how sorry he was and went. I telephoned my son Nick, aged twenty-four, an assistant lecturer in French literature at a university in the Midlands. He told me he would get somebody to look after two-year-old Josephine and come down by car with his wife, Lucy, the next morning, arriving in time for a late lunch. I realized with a shock that there was nobody else to inform: my father’s brother and sister had died without issue, and I had neither. By eleven thirty, a good three-quarters of an hour before the last non- residents would ordinarily have been out of the place, word of the death had spread and everything was quiet. Finally, the Mayburys and Joyce and I stood at the doorway of the apartment.
‘Don’t come down,’ said Jack. ‘Fred’ll let us out. Have a good long sleep—Joyce one of the red bombs, Maurice three of the Belrepose things.’ Speaking neither briskly nor with emotionalism, he added, ‘Well, I’m sorry he’s gone. He was a decent old boy, with plenty of sense. I expect you’ll miss him a lot, Maurice’
This mild show of commiseration and its accompanying glance, which carried sympathy of a depersonalized sort, were Jack’s first non-utilitarian responses to what had happened, nor did he enlarge on them. He said good night in a high monotone, as somebody like Fred might call it across the bar, and led the way towards the stairs. After kissing Joyce and glancing in my direction, but not directly at me, Diana followed, She did not, I was almost touched to see, do any of this with the air of imparting by her silence a message more eloquent than any mere words could have conveyed. The same had been true of her earlier restraint of manner. I felt it was uncharitable of me to wonder how long this uncharacteristic behaviour of hers would last, but wonder I did. Nothing short of physical handicap has ever made anybody turn over a new leaf.
‘Let’s go to bed straight away,’ said Joyce. ‘You must be absolutely whacked.’
I was indeed utterly tired out in body, as if I had been standing all day in the same position, but had no inclination for sleep, or for lying down in the dark waiting to go to sleep. ‘One more Scotch,’ I said.
‘Not a giant one, Maurice. And only one.’ She spoke pleadingly. ‘Don’t sit up drinking. Bring it into the bedroom.’
I did as she said, first looking in on Amy, who was lying asleep quite unemphatically, so to speak, without the parade of concentration or abandonment I have seen in grown women. Would my father’s departure leave much of a hole in her world? I could not imagine any of the things she had said she had meant to say to him: his attitude to her had been one of uncertain geniality, she had behaved to him with something not far from a child’s version of this, a brightness that had been absent-minded and self-regarding at the same time, and they had never, so far as I had noticed, talked together much. But he had been about the place every day of the year and a half since she had come to live here after her mother’s death, and I could see that no sort of hole in a small world could really be a small hole.
‘Was she all right?’ asked Joyce when I carried my whisky into our bedroom, the next along the passage from Amy’s and no broader from window to door, but with more length. Standing in this extra space, she popped one of her red sleeping-pills into her mouth and gulped water.
‘Asleep, anyway. Have you seen the Belreposes?’
‘Here. Three sounds rather a lot, doesn’t it? With you drinking as well, I mean. I suppose Jack knows all about it.’
‘They’re not barbiturates.’
I chased the white tablets down with whisky, watching Joyce as she kicked off her shoes, pulled her dress over her head and hung it up in the wall-cupboard. The small moment in which she stepped away and turned to go down the room was enough for me to take in the fine swell of her breasts under the spotless white brassiere, in unimprovable proportion with the breadth of her shoulders and back and the spreading fullness of her rib-cage. She had not taken three paces towards the bed before I had put my glass down on her dressing-table and caught her round her naked waist.
She held me against her with a quick firmness that belonged to somebody comforting somebody. When, as she very soon did, she found that it was not comfort I was after, at least not in the ordinary sense, her body stiffened.
‘Oh, Maurice, not now, surely.’
‘Especially now. Straight away. Come on.’
I had only once before in my life felt such a totally possessing urge to make love to a woman, with the mind sliding into involuntary dormancy and the body starting to set up on its own several stages earlier than usual. That time had been as I was watching a mistress of mine cutting bread in her kitchen while her husband laid the table in the dining-room across the passage, so that my mind and body had had to return to normal working with the minimum of delay. It was not going to be at all like that tonight.
Joyce was quite naked, I only selectively so, when I dragged the quilt aside and pushed her down on the bed. By now she was responding in her long, slow rhythms, breathing deeply at no more than a marginally quickening rate, clasping her powerful limbs round me. I was just about aware of an urgency that had a way of seeming infinitely postponable. It was not really, of course, and at some imperceptible signal, a distant traffic noise or a memory or a new movement from one or the other of us or a thought about tomorrow, I took us both to the point, once and then another time or so. Very quickly after that, the facts of the last hour presented themselves as if until now I had only heard of them through some distant and inarticulate intermediary. My heart seemed to stop for a moment, then lurched into violent motion. I got out of bed at top speed.
‘Are you all right?’ asked Joyce.
‘Fine.’
After standing still for a moment, I finished undressing, put on my pyjamas and went to the bathroom. Then I looked into the drawing-room and saw the evening paper neatly folded on a low table by the place where my father had always sat, into the dining-room and saw the armchair where he had died. The triteness of these images calmed me for the moment. Back in the bedroom, I found that Joyce, usually ready for a chat at this stage, was lying with the bedclothes pulled up over her face. This went to confirm my suspicion that she was feeling ashamed, not of having made love on the night of my father’s death, but of having enjoyed it. However, when I had got into bed she spoke in a wide-awake voice.
‘I suppose it was natural, doing it like that, like an instinct. You know, Nature trying to see to it that life goes on. Funny, though, it didn’t feel like an instinct. More like something you read about. The idea, I mean.’
I had not thought of this side of things until then, and was faintly irritated by her shrewdness, or what might have seemed shrewdness to an outsider. Still, it was very consoling that I was having to deal with Joyce here, not Diana, who would have been thrown into ecstasies of needling speculation.
‘I wasn’t faking it,’ I said. ‘A man can’t fake.’
‘I know, darling. I didn’t mean that. Just how it might sound.’ Her hand came back behind her and caught mine. ‘Do you think you can sleep?’
