Elementals - A. S. Byatt [19]
She noticed, in the way of dreams, that someone was sitting next to her, had perhaps been there all the time. It was Tony, looking solid and well, leaner than on that last day, and smiling. He did not speak. The bloody men had been real and inescapable. She wanted Tony to stay. She was dreadfully happy to see his living face, the wrinkles at the corner of his eyes, the kink in his left brow, the warm lips. She knew then that this very real man was not real, and felt anguish. He would go, and she would wake. She said:
‘Why are they doing that?’
He smiled, as though the slaughter was normal and agreeable. He did not speak. He put a warm hand on her knee. This made her cry, and she woke.
The next day, she saw Nils Isaksen in his usual corner on the breakfast terrace. She walked straight over to him. He did not stand to greet her. She asked him if she could sit down, and he made a grudging gesture of assent. She said:
‘I have decided to go back to England, Mr Isaksen. Not permanently. Just to see what they have done with him.’
‘They?’
‘My son and my daughter.’
‘You did not speak of them.’
‘They would not have wanted – to have to worry about me.’
‘You have made sure they must,’ said Nils Isaksen, with a touch of ice.
‘I wondered,’ said Patricia, ‘if you would – care to – accompany me?’ She was thinking in French, voudriez-vous m’accompagner? Her English sounded odd. He asked, unsmiling,
‘What had you in mind?’
‘Mr Isaksen, I must see where my husband is buried. I should not have left him. Beyond that, I don’t know.’
‘I have nothing in the world to do, Mrs Nimmo. I will come with you.’
Some days later, they found Tony’s grave, in the churchyard near Benjie’s weekend cottage, in Suffolk. The church was one of those towered East Anglian flinty bastions. Benjie’s children had been christened there. The churchyard was walled, and grassed over, with yews and cedars. Patricia had supposed that it was too early for any memorial to have been put up – there were problems, she believed, with the settlement of the soil – so she missed the grave for some time, looking for recent digging, a temporary wooden marker. It was Nils Isaksen who found Tony, all staring white, a cruciform white marble head-stone standing at one end of a white marble-bordered rectangle full of glittering white marble chips. He called to Patricia, ‘Here is Nimmo,’ and she came along the path, and read the incised grey writing. Anthony Piers Nimmo. His dates. Beloved father of Benjamin and Megan. There were no flowers. Patricia had brought anemones, crimson, purple, dark blue, wax-white. She stood there, holding them, and Nils Isaksen found a jam jar, and filled it at a tap by a kind of gardener’s shed. Patricia put the jar of flowers carefully at the foot of the stone. She stood there, listening to an invisible blackbird and the soft wind in the branches. Nils Isaksen stood at a distance, not pretending not to be there, not ostentatiously doing something else, but at a distance. Patricia opened her handbag and took out a dark eyebrow pencil. She wrote across the top of the stone, in careful capital letters, smaller than the incised ones:
THE ODDS IS GONE
AND THERE IS NOTHING LEFT REMARKABLE
BENEATH THE VISITING MOON.
She said to Nils, who came up to read her graffito, ‘When I first knew I loved him, I was terrified he would die. I would lie awake at night, muttering these lines to myself. You get drunk on unreal sadness, but I was truly afraid he would die.’
They stood together. The earth smelled strongly of mould, and humus, and the energy of decay. Patricia said:
‘I hate this sort of thing. The chips, the square bed, all that. I like the earth, you know, a sort of slow vanishing. This is vulgar.’
‘It has a certain splendour. It reminds me of snow and ice and the North.’
‘I should telephone Benjie and Megan. You are right, I have treated them badly. They must know I’m alive and not ill, the bank will have