The Tyrant's Novel (7 page)

One of Sarah's aunts, the tender one, Maisie, turned up with Sarah's brother, Jimmy. The aunt laid Sarah out for the rest of the family to visit, while Jimmy plied me with whiskey—on top of some vodka I had already drunk that day, but so what? Everyone was welcome to come and say good-bye to her, her brown hair combed back from her forehead, so that the brow could be kissed. The medical examiner would go away and come back with his men in a few hours' time, said Dr. Colless.

Before I could stop him I was aware that Jimmy was on to a school friend of his. Yes, Jimmy apologized to the friend, tears in his eyes, I know France and Italy are playing. But it's my sister.

His face was drenched with his sorrow. But his way of dealing with it was to begin arranging the funeral tents and refreshments. He must have therefore really believed that she was dead. Of course, our type of people, what you might call the remnants of the city's middle class, unlike the farmers, preferred coffins, but that was something, he conceded to his friend, I would need to have a say in.

Put the phone down, for God's sake, Jimmy, I pleaded. But he could not renounce its comfort.

Put the fucking phone down, Jimmy, please. I can't stand it.

He made hurried excuses to his friend, who, one of death's accustomed helpmeets, was no doubt pleased to get back to the football.

My poor fellow, Alan, he told me. I would never have started this had I known it would get you upset.

I prevented myself from saying that had he murdered her, he couldn't have wanted her in the ground quicker. The relatives came, Sarah's mother and my late mother's brother, my uncle Ted, and his new wife. Ted had aged and was not doing well living off his savings. Jimmy surreptitiously gave me a mint to take away the smell of liquor—some of the older people were strict about temperance.

The visitors said the same things I had about the impossibility of believing it, and asked me had I had any hints. Stupefied by now, I told them about the headaches. The headaches must have had something to do with it. I found myself saying, They'll see what it was at the autopsy. And at the blasphemous, dreaded word, her mother began to wail and beat her head and try to rip the stitching of her dress as if she were a farmer's wife. Her behavior reminded Mrs. Douglas to rejoin her bereaved sister downstairs.

And then, more of the same. How could it have happened? She was such a beautiful girl. And not finished with the stage, by any means. I wept with them, but also considered either telling them to be quiet or rending my own clothing. But I did not have the luxury of being an unrestrained peasant. We had been partly Westernized—all our class must have been—by watching the calmer, mere sniffling of mourning which characterized American and British films. And unlike the Godfather, beloved film character of Great Uncle, I knew I had no one to shoot. Curiously I kept coming and going to look at her and kiss her forehead, and believed crazily that if I just stayed away long enough, she might be encouraged by my absence into waking.

Jimmy seemed relieved to be given the job of taking all the visitors' identity cards to the nearest metropolitan police station to get permission for them to be on the streets after curfew. Of course, Jimmy knew a lieutenant in the Overguard whom the Overalls would be able to call for verification that our grieving and our journeys were licit, and not a conspiracy against the state. As for the Kennedys, who had permanent laissez-passer for all days and all hours, they turned up just after Jimmy went away. Their intimate solicitude formed the necessary screen between me and the relatives. I had been propping up the Manners family, and they had been propping me up. Now we had two people present who were sad but not demented, and I resolved to take advantage of that. To the Kennedys I could somehow reveal my true misery, and exorcise my doubt that she was not dead in the bedroom.

She's dead, I told Andrew and Grace, the first people to whom it could be admitted.

I heard Mrs. Manners declare, from amongst the arthritic remnants of her loveliness, She goes to join her father now.

I'd never really met Sarah's father; he had been struck rather young by some sort of disabling aneurysm, and the once or twice he had addressed me before his death, he did so painfully, with partially paralyzed lips. Sarah's mother had borne all this and had been loyal to her daughter's decision to retire as a television actress, although in the circles in which she moved, she must have been plagued by questions about it—about why one so beautiful and successful should want to get off the merry-go-round. I got up, crossed the room, and embraced her. And we wept together. The Kennedys came up and told both of us, her and me, that they would take me home to stay with them.

The medical examiner's men arrived and reticently put us on notice that they would soon be removing Sarah. The relatives all milled into the bedroom and queued to kiss Sarah's face, and at last departed the room so that I could remain with her. I noticed increasingly her look of faint astonishment, not an astonishment of sudden pain or unpredicted treachery, but the surprise of a person who has received a sudden gesture of friendship and grace. She had decided, for some reason, in the last moment, that death had been kind to her. This idea struck me as so pitiable and innocent that I covered her face with kisses and tears, and Dr. Colless came in and held my shoulder, and swore it would not be the last time I saw her. He swore that when her body was released, she would look as she did now. So we watched the men enter and carry her away, and I could hear her aunts and her mother in the doorway of the flat, telling each other that at this hour of the night they should try and control their tears for the sake of other residents. Since I was incapable of it, Grace Kennedy gathered some things of mine, and again I embraced Jimmy Manners and his mother, and my elderly uncle, and we all stumbled down the cold steps together, fleeing the site of the tragedy.

In the car I said to the Kennedys, I'm liquored up. Please don't dope me up any more. I need to be clear in the head.

But they assured me, No, we won't. Promise, Alan. Unless you ask us.

And Andrew shook his head over the steering wheel.

In our country it was customary, even though refrigeration made the rushing of the dead into the earth unnecessary, to bury the deceased quickly. It seemed a denial of God's will to spin out the process, and even the medical examiner's people, urged along by Dr. Colless and Jimmy Manners, worked fast. By Tuesday I was visited at the Kennedys' by Dr. Colless, who brought the news at last that the medical examiner had released Sarah's body. It had been a cerebral aneurysm that had hemorrhaged. She had died of a massive and nearly instantaneous stroke. Hence the headaches, he said—the aneurysm would have caused those before it burst. A tragedy, he said. She should have come to him earlier, and organized the CT scan. Her blood pressure must have been abnormally high for her age group—genetics would have influenced that. Hadn't her father died of a stroke? It was rotten luck. He took my arm in both of his hands. There was nothing that could be done when a subarachnoid hemorrhage came on like that. Had she somehow lived through it, she would have been . . . well, a breathing shell. She wouldn't have been there at all.

Colless must have known a trick or two about the irrationality of mourning, because I did find in this reflection a sort of marginal comfort.

Since I had Colless's word that the system which underpinned Sarah's existence had massively failed, I opted for the bourgeois practice of embalming, which was frowned upon by all but the most liberal clergymen. Inanely, I did not want the most corruptible regions of the body to hasten decay. The Mannerses' local clergyman, within the limits of what the older Mediationist clergy told him, was a decent fellow and it would not worry him. Religion was not frantically practiced in the cities in any case, and most people were intermittently devout. The centuries-old split between Intercessionists, who believed their priests spoke for God not merely on matters moral and social but even on politics, and the Mediationists, who merely saw their clergy as somewhat better informed than the average person on matters theological, was something I had not bothered studying in detail, and so I was unsure what would be required of me ritually now.

I insisted on a pure white coffin, though Jimmy said they were generally for girls. She's my girl, I told him. He had meant, of course, virgins, but then Sarah and I had barely begun on our agenda of marriage. I did not know her as a widower of eighty might know his lost wife. I felt she had taken most of her supply of secrecy with her into premature death.

Jimmy Manners, whom I was beginning to appreciate more and more, and dear Grace Kennedy prepared the flat for Sarah's body to spend its last morning at home. She was brought into the living room in her coffin, and it was placed on trestles. She lay fully enshrouded and bound except for a fringe of her hair and her face and temples.

Occasionally members of the family would adjourn to the kitchen to drink tea or, in Jimmy's and Andrew's case, brandy. All the old friends came to say how beautiful she looked: Wilf and his companion, Paul; Toby Garner, the architect who'd avoided being shot for gaps in walls; the McBriens, Matt having already acquired a good suit and a new bureaucratic dignity. He regarded me across the room as if weighing how much like me he might become should his Sonia drop down dead.

Mrs. Manners, reasonably enough, still spoke of the congenital flaw which had deprived her of a husband and her daughter, two of the finest people she had ever known. Then, towards eleven, there was at last a knock on the door—the undertaker's men were here. Her mother kissed her a last time, Jimmy, the aunts and uncles, Grace Kennedy. Then they left me alone with her for a final time. The undertaker called softly, Just tell us when, Mr. Sheriff, and closed the door behind everybody, leaving me within.

I gazed at Sarah, but whatever they had done to her, it had removed the girlish look of surprise from her face. In a funerary sense she was now a statue, an artifact, and yet the only artifact I owed anything to. I went to my desk in the living area and packed up what had been until then my life as defined in the public sense, the printout of my novel in the original and in English and the two disks on which it was stored. Then I called up the ten files of the novel on the hard drive and obliterated them one by one as a funerary tribute. Later that night, I thought, I would drop the laptop in the river so that nothing could tempt me to retrieve the cyber ghost of my work. I had barely begun to think that I might owe the publisher the advance. If the publisher wanted it, I would pay it back perhaps. And I would not receive the further payments for delivery and publication. That did not matter against the fact that I already intended to end my life too. If not, I would be a lifelong laborer to repay Random House. But the manuscript did not belong to them anymore. Only Sarah had heard and read this tale of the tyranny of sanctions, and the cruel jokes of the black market under the broader tyranny of Great Uncle. I put the whole thing and the disks in a huge envelope and took it to Sarah's capacious white coffin, which I had doubted, at the point of purchase, would fit her, but within which she was a waif. I owed her my work, plain as it might be, to fill out the space, and, of course, I owed her myself.

Now I went to the door and invited the undertaker and his men in, and they clamped down the coffin lid over Sarah, removing her and my banal offerings to her from the world's light. The mourners on the stairs made way and then followed the white sepulchre, jolting on the bulky shoulders of balding but experienced men, down the stairs. Mrs. Douglas joined us meekly on her level, muttering condolences to me. She was so beautiful, she looked so young. And such an actress!

We passed through the lobby, sobbing, and piled into cars, myself and the family into the undertaker's limousines. But before we reached the gates of the cemetery, according to the gracious custom, we all got out, appropriately for a species so flawed that its most dazzling member could be obliterated by a little venous defect, and so we walked the last quarter mile, the sun burning the bared scalps of the men of the party, behind the pallbearers and into the cemetery gates, where the Reverend Cooper and, a little more distantly, the white tent set up for the funeral feast waited.

When I was a student I predictably thought that clergymen invoked our helplessness chiefly as a means of keeping us in our place. But this was the right morning for me to hear that all our splendors were accidental ones, and could be so easily erased, leaving only God remaining in a universe in which all other voices had been quenched. I could almost imagine myself a believer. Later, at the funeral repast in the tents on the edge of the cemetery, I saw Dr. Colless give Grace a prescription, and she came up to me and said, Now it's final, Alan, you must take something. You must sleep.

For I had been wide-eyed and mute for days, held in insomniac suspension between disbelief in and the certainty of this hour we had now reached. I would certainly take soporifics. I would take the lot.

I drank grape juice into which Jimmy had humanely inserted a considerable quantity of vodka. I had resolved my destiny. I was, in my head, halfway in the presence of my love. Colless had kindly written up a means of exit. Comforting myself with the certainty of my own obliteration, at ease with the idea that nothing could cause me fear or delight, I was surprised by the sudden jolt of blood brought on by the sight of someone from the past, the antique times of a week or so before. Mrs. Carter wore a shawl, and was coming to comfort me. In my crazed condition, I was convinced that she carried on her face a look of awful appeasement, and was delighted to welcome me, her substitute son, into the cold ring of victimhood. She appeared to me pleased that though I had had the impudence to avoid becoming one of the lost of Summer Island like her son, Sarah's faulty human vascular system had evened the score for me. The idea of her coming touch, of her taking my hand, filled me with terror. I dropped the glass of fortified fruit juice I had held, and rushed from the tent without apology. I weaved amongst graves to make pursuit difficult, then out the cemetery gates, and into the small garden farms beyond. Andrew Kennedy caught up with me as I stood gasping by an irrigation culvert.