Remedy is None Read Free Page A

joke, the climax of which was imparted in a whisper that punched their heads back, leaving them groggy with laughter. The youngest one directed his laughter at the young woman, taking a side glance at Charlie to check the competition.
    Charlie’s impassivity made it obvious that he wasn’t entering. As the train gathered momentum, he strove to analyse what the news meant to him. With the numbness of the initial blow wearing off, his mind prodded tenderly at the pain, trying to determine the extent of the damage. There were certain obvious consequences. He might have to leave university. They had been very tight for money as it was. There was the house to keep. With only himself and Elizabeth living init, that wouldn’t be easy. At eighteen, Elizabeth wasn’t making much of a wage. The mess he had made with Mary was going to be impossibly complicated. It was some time to get pregnant.
    But these were merely abrasions. The sheer fact of his father’s dying must cut a lot deeper than that. He was almost afraid to examine it to the marrow. He thought tentatively what it would mean to lose his father. He tried to consider it not in the practical terms, but simply in human ones. At first, in the absence of any definite reaction to something so unassimilable, his mind struck a vague, eclectic attitude towards it, one derived from dim, subliminal sources. Death was a terrible and awesome thing. Without any experience of it, he knew that. It was the ultimate mystery, recurrent theme of poets and preachers. His thinking had been subtly conditioned to endorse a vague, idealized image of it by what he had read in books and seen in films and overheard in occasional muted references. As a boy, he had been aware of it as a furtive presence in adult conversations, accompanied by lowered voices or significant looks or suggestions that he go out and play, as if this was too fiercesome an ogre to be admitted to the understanding of a child. He had witnessed the heroism of countless cinematic deaths from decorously positioned arrows or invisible bullets, which caused the lifeblood to bloom as formally as a flower on the victim’s breast, while angelic voices choired man’s majesty and the glycerine grief of women registered irreparable loss. And he had seen most of them at an age when the moment of lonely communion in the dark was still too powerful to be dispelled by the need to evade ‘God save the Queen’ or by the glib cynicism of the foyer. He had learned of death’s stature at secondhand from the broodings of the Metaphysicals and the declamations of Shakespeare. Now he was to meet his magnificence in person.
    But, sitting in this compartment – death’s mobile anteroom – with the insistence of the wheels imposing their practical rhythm on his thoughts, what gradually impressed itself onhis mind was simply the depressing ordinariness of it all. There was no sense of grandeur about it. Nothing was any different. The random chords of the day did not combine into any impressive overture to death, but remained casually dissonant. In a station they passed through, a porter lounged in the doorway of a waiting-room, picking his teeth. Two horses stood immobile in a field, distinguishable from statues only by tail and mane. Everything that could be seen, through the patch Charlie’s hand had automatically cleared in the misted glass, was the same as ever. Was this how death happened, in the middle of a bright day that was too busy to notice? It was somehow shocking. What made it worse was that Charlie’s shock included himself. He was like a child who has closed his eyes against the imminent pain of a doctor’s touch, and opens them again in disbelief, surprised to find that it can hurt so little.
    He was ashamed of himself, ashamed not because he had dreaded pain, but because his feelings didn’t justify that dread. How could he be so callous? How could he have been so callous in the past? For this callousness must have developed