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'All Saints. It was built in the late seventeenth century, I believe. Are you fond of churches?' 77 'Not particularly. It was just that I saw the smoke, and . . .' 'Everybody likes a demolition scene,' he said. 'Yes,' she replied, 'I suppose that's true.' 'It's like watching a funeral. Better them than us, eh?' She murmured something in agreement, her mind flitting elsewhere. Back to the hospital. To her pain and her present healing. To her life saved only by losing the capacity for further life. Better them than us. 'My name's Kavanagh,' he said, covering the short distance between them, his hand extended. 'How do you do?' she said. Tm Elaine Rider.' 'Elaine,' he said. 'Charming.' 'Are you just taking a final look at the place before it comes down?' 'That's right. I've been looking at the inscriptions on the floor stones. Some of them are most eloquent.' He brushed a fragment of timber off one of the tablets with his foot. 'It seems such a loss. I'm sure they'll just smash the stones to smithereens when they start to pull the floor up -' She looked down at the patchwork of tablets beneath her feet. Not all were marked, and of those that were many simply carried names and dates. There were some inscriptions however. One, to the left of where Kavanagh was standing, carried an all but eroded relief of crossed shin-bones, like drum-sticks, and the abrupt motto: Redeem the time. 'I think there must have been a crypt under here at some time,' Kavanagh said. 'Oh. I see. And these are the people who were buried there.' 'Well, I can't think of any other reason for the inscriptions, can you? I was thinking of asking the work- 78 men . . .' he paused in mid-sentence, '. . . you'll probably think this positively morbid of me ..." 'What?' 'Well, just to preserve one or two of the finer stones from being destroyed.' 'I don't think that's morbid,' she said. They're very beautiful.' He was evidently encouraged by her response. 'Maybe I should speak with them now,' he said. 'Would you excuse me for a moment?' He left her standing in the nave like a forsaken bride, while he went out to quiz one of the workmen. She wandered down to where the altar had been, reading the names as she went. Who knew or cared about these people's resting places now? Dead two hundred years and more, and gone away not into loving posterity but into oblivion. And suddenly the unarticulated hopes for an after-life she had nursed through her thirty-four years slipped away; she was no longer weighed down by some vague ambition for heaven. Ont day, perhaps this day, she would die, just as these people had died, and it wouldn't matter a jot. There was nothing to come, nothing to aspire to, nothing to dream of. She stood in a patch of smoke-thickened sun, thinking of this, and was almost happy. Kavanagh returned from his exchanges with the foreman. 'There is indeed a crypt,' he said, 'but it hasn't been emptied yet.' 'Oh.' They were still underfoot, she thought. Dust and bones. 'Apparently they're having some difficulty getting into it. All the entrances have been sealed up. That's 79 why they're digging around the foundations. To find another way in.' 'Are crypts normally sealed up?' 'Not as thoroughly as this one.' 'Maybe there was no more room,' she said. Kavanagh took the comment quite seriously. 'Maybe,' he said. 'Will they give you one of the stones?' He shook his head. 'It's not up to them to say. These are just council lackeys. Apparently they have a firm of professional excavators to come in and shift the bodies to new burial sites. It all has to be done with due decorum.' 'Much they care,' Elaine said, looking down at the stones again. 'I must agree,' Kavanagh replied. 'It all seems in excess of the facts. But then perhaps we're not God- fearing enough.' 'Probably.' 'Anyhow, they told me to come back in a day or two's time, and ask the removal men.' She laughed at the thought of the dead moving house; packing up their goods and chattels. Kavanagh was pleased to have made a joke, even if it had been unintentional. Riding on the crest of this success, he said: 'I wonder, may I take you for a drink?' 'I wouldn't be very good company, I'm afraid,' she said. 'I'm really very tired.' 'We could perhaps meet later,' he said. She looked away from his eager face. He was pleasant enough, in his uneventful way. She liked his green bow-tie - surely a joke at the expense of his own drabness. She liked his seriousness too. But she couldn't face the idea of drinking with him; at least not tonight. She made her apologies, and explained 80 that she'd been ill recently and hadn't recovered her stamina. 'Another night perhaps?' he enquired gently. The lack of aggression in his courtship was persuasive, and she said: That would be nice. Thank you.' Before they parted they exchanged telephone num- bers. He seemed charmingly excited by the thought of their meeting again; it made her feel, despite all that had been taken from her, that she still had her sex. She returned to the flat to find both a parcel from Mitch and a hungry cat on the doorstep. She fed the demanding animal, then made herself some coffee and opened the parcel. In it, cocooned in several layers of tissue paper, she found a silk scarf, chosen with Mitch's uncanny eye for her taste. The note along with it simply said: It's your colour. I love you. Mitch. She wanted to pick up the telephone on the spot and talk to him, but somehow the thought of hearing his voice seemed dangerous. Too close to the hurt, perhaps. He would ask her how she felt, and she would reply that she was well, and he would insist: yes, but really? And she would say: I'm empty; they took out half my innards, damn you, and I'll never have your children or anybody else's, so that's the end of that, isn't it? Even thinking about their talking she felt tears threaten, and in a fit of inexplicable rage she wrapped the scarf up in the desiccated paper and buried it at the back of her deepest drawer. Damn him for trying to make things better now, when at the time she'd most needed him all he'd talked of was fatherhood, and how her tumours would deny it him. It was a clear evening - the sky's cold skin stretched to breaking point. She did not want to draw the curtains 81 in the front room, even though passers-by would stare in, because the deepening blue was too fine to miss. So she sat at the window and watched the dark come. Only when the last change had been wrought did she close off the chill. She had no appetite, but she made herself some food nevertheless, and sat down to watch television as she ate. The food unfinished, she laid down her tray, and dozed, the programmes filtering through to her intermittently. Some witless comedian whose merest cough sent his audience into paroxysms; a natural history programme on life in the Serengeti; the news. She had read all that she needed to know that morning: the headlines hadn't changed. One item, however, did pique her curiosity: an interview with the solo yachtsman, Michael May bury, who had been picked up that day after two weeks adrift in the Pacific. The interview was being beamed from Australia, and the contact was bad; the image of Maybury's bearded and sun-scorched face was constantly threatened with being snowed out. The picture mattered little: the account he gave of his failed voyage was riveting in sound alone, and in particular an event that seemed to distress him afresh even as he told it. He had been becalmed, and as his vessel lacked a motor had been obliged to wait for wind. It had not come. A week had gone by with his hardly moving a kilometre from the same spot of listless ocean; no bird or passing ship broke the monotony. With every hour that passed, his claustrophobia grew, and on the eighth day it reached panic proportions, so he let himself over the side of the yacht and swam away from the vessel, a life-line tied about his middle, in order to escape the same few yards of [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |
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