Read The Courtesy of Death for Free Online Page A

incredulously, ‘it would be just: Bang, Bang! Sorry, Sorry!?’
    ‘I don’t know that they would go so far as that,’ he laughed. ‘But I think it potentially dangerous to have no normal respect for death; so I wondered if you were not
investigating officially.’
    I assured him again that I was not.
    ‘Anyway it’s all nonsense,’ Dunton went on. ‘This life is exciting, varied and to some lucky people beautiful, and we psychologists make it seem a lot more difficult than
it is. As to the next life—if it exists—we don’t know a damned thing about it. Have you ever read Teilhard de Chardin?’
    ‘I’m afraid I haven’t heard of him.’
    ‘Well, as a Jesuit he was surer of immortality than you or I can be. But the main purpose of life, he thought, was to love, enjoy and seek knowledge. And if a man gave it all he’d
got he couldn’t go very far wrong.’
    ‘So if one of these people fell crazily and romantically in love, it might show up this continuity stuff as a bit doubtful?’
    ‘At any rate he would find it hard to accept death as a mere momentary inconvenience when it parted him from what he loved,’ Dunton answered.
    That very simply explained Fosworthy for me, though not why his friends should have taken his back-sliding so hard.
    ‘The trouble is that most of them are unmarried or without children and basically lonely,’ Dunton added. ‘Suppose I hadn’t the luck to have all this bouncing,
exasperating, dear life around me, then I might sublimate the death wish in dozens of odd ways. But that doesn’t explain the attraction of this nonsense for Tom Aviston-Tresco who has led a
most satisfying, full life ever since his wife ran away from him. I suppose that all the killing he must do has given him a neurosis, and he forgets all his healing.’
    The Duntons were going into Glastonbury to see a travelling circus and pressed me very warmly to join them; but I did not want to outstay my welcome. I shared their quick meal and pretended that
I had business at The Green Man and had reserved a room there.
    As soon as I was on the road, I decided that I might as well stay at the inn anyway instead of pointlessly dashing back to London. Although the Gorms did not normally take guests, they were
happy to see that the prospective purchaser was still on the hook. And indeed I was. I often day-dream of The Green Man and find myself drawing on the back of an envelope the alterations which I
would have made.
    About nine o’clock the man I had seen on the grey gelding came into the bar. He recognised me, handsomely asked me to forgive his rudeness in the afternoon and insisted on buying me a
drink. He took a polite interest in my plans—patronising, but not more so than was acceptable from someone who knew every inch of his country—and asked me why I particularly wanted the
Mendips. I told him that I wished to avoid both the sprawling suburbs of Bristol and the coast. As I have said, I am clumsy at explaining intuitive reasons. I may have sounded as if I were almost
contemptuously sparring with him.
    ‘These hills must once have been a kind of sprawl themselves,’ he said.
    I saw what he meant. One was seldom out of sight of the settlements and cemeteries of Neolithic and Bronze Ages breaking the smooth continuity of the grass.
    I wondered how their ships got there, and ordered another round of drinks.
    ‘Up the Bristol Channel with the prevailing south-westerlies behind them,’ he replied, ‘but a lot of them must have come to grief on Hartland. It was easier when men could
simply walk from France, following the game.’
    ‘Not much of a sprawl then,’ I said for something to say. ‘Just a skin tent here and there on the Glassy Hill.’
    ‘I believe the pundits won’t have Glassy Hill any more,’ he remarked. ‘Glastonbury means the town of Glasteing.’
    ‘Then why is it called Ynys Witrin in British?’
    ‘I didn’t know it was. What does it mean?’
    ‘The Island of Glass.