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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?’
    ‘Yes, I
think so. Could you just clear one thing up? Won’t take a minute.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Then I
can forget about it. Tell me exactly how it happened in there. I shall always
sort of wonder about it if I don’t know exactly.’
    ‘Well,
he’d just been saying something about people had the right not to be disturbed
in their own private houses, and then he stopped and got up, much more quickly
than he usually does, and he was staring.’
    ‘What
at?’
    ‘I
don’t know. Nothing. He was looking towards the door. Then he called out, and
Jack asked him what was the matter and was he all right, and then he fell
against the table and Jack caught him.’
    ‘What
did he call out?’
    ‘I
don’t know. It wasn’t a word or anything. Then Jack and I, we started moving
him and then you came back. He didn’t seem to be in any pain. He just looked
very surprised.’
    ‘Frightened?’
    ‘Well …
a bit, perhaps.’
    ‘Only a
bit?’
    ‘Well,
a lot, actually. He must have been feeling it coming on, you know, the cerebral
thing.’
    ‘Yes.
That would frighten you all right. I see.’
    ‘Don’t
worry about it.’ Joyce squeezed my hand. ‘You couldn’t have done anything about
it even if you had been there.’
    ‘No I
suppose I couldn’t.’
    ‘Of
course you couldn’t.’
    ‘I
forgot to tell Amy where … that he’s in his room.’
    ‘She
won’t go in