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I’ve got to think —’
    ‘I’ve got those securities, and of course you might get a grant.’
    ‘Go to bed, girl dear, will you, go to bed.’
    ‘All right, all right, moody man. Don’t work too long on your book, will you. Why, it’s still quite light outside. How odd the garden looks.’
 
    Montague Small was awakened suddenly by a curious sound inside the house. Or had he dreamt it? He sat up. The memory that Sophie was dead came the usual split-second after waking. As if one were to see the flash of the sword before it bit. The intensity of the pain took all his attention for the moment. He listened again. Silence. It must have been part of his dream. Then he remembered the dream.
    On a huge empty plain, a large strange monster lay decapitated. Monty approached and saw the long iron-grey neck, scantily covered with black hairs, the dried blood, the gaping mouths of the severed blood vessels. The huge hideous head lay a little way away from the body, and he saw with fear and horror that something on the surface of the head was moving. Then he saw that a tiny monster, a baby replica of the slain beast, was clinging to the hair at the side and weeping piteously. He saw the falling tears like seed pearls. Suddenly he felt himself to be choking with wild grief, weeping and weeping.
    He sat now dry-eyed. Odd that he had been crying so in his dream, but could not cry in real life, had not cried since. Oh, if only tears would come. How terrible all his dreams were now. The freshness and brightness of dream images, as he had once known them, was gone. His hand quested over the night table touching the glass of water, the bottle of sleeping-pills and tranquillizers which Dr Ainsley had given him, his watch, the base of the lamp. He switched the light on. Not yet four o’clock. He would not sleep again now. Dreams conspire with the sleeping consciousness, they feed each other and draw into forgetfulness. But now the thread was broken, the critical suffering mind hideously alert, not to be coaxed and charmed; switched on like clockwork, it raced in misery. It was no good turning the pillow over and pretending to start afresh. He put on his watch. If he wore it in bed it always somehow crept up beside bis ear and woke him with a deafening beat, the sound of eternity heard in a child’s delirium.
    He got out of bed and put on a dressing-gown. His abandoned bed lay crumpled and terrible behind him, like snake skin, like a vile face. It smelt foul. He had dismissed the charwoman. How dreadful Sophie had been at the end, clawing at him savagely to share her terror and despair. He thought, she screamed horrors at me to help herself endure. She could not so have loaded any other being. It should have been a cue for compassion, even for pride. He ought to have accepted that suffering from her with profound gratitude as a proof of her love. Instead, when she spitefully attacked him, he shouted back. Their life together ended in a mess of stupid quarrels. They were quarrelling when she died. He would never forgive himself. After all that filth of suffering one might have felt that death was a clean agent: the vile rubble of consciousness cleared away for ever, the poor victim safe beyond the hooks and pulleys of pain, beyond the malignity of the world and of God. But he had made even this austere consolation impossible for himself. He felt that joy, which is a part of all essential things, had departed from his life for ever. Sickening terrors, which he had long wished to spurn away, fed by catastrophe now prowled again. There were moments when he could not see how he could go on living with his mind.
    He pulled back the window curtains and switched off the lamp. The garden was already fully visible in cold white lightless dawn light, very quiet, very appalling. The long empty lawn receded, colourless, textureless, like the sheet spread for a ceremonial disembowelling. The two big Douglas firs were motionless, brimful of alienated