Island - Aldous Huxley [54]
“My poor, poor Will!” They had sat down on the sofa in the living room, and she had stroked his hair and both of them had cried.
“When pain and anguish wring the brow, a ministering angel thou.” An hour later, needless to say, they were naked and in bed. After which he had moved, earth to earth, into the pink alcove. Within three months, as any fool could have foreseen, Babs had begun to tire of him; within four, an absolutely divine man from Kenya had turned up at a cocktail party. One thing had led to another and when, three days later, Babs came home, it was to prepare the alcove for a new tenant and give notice to the old.
“Do you really mean it, Babs?”
She really meant it.
There was a rustling in the bushes outside the window and an instant later, startlingly loud and slightly out of time, “Here and now, boys,” shouted a talking bird.
“Shut up!” Will shouted back.
“Here and now, boys,” the mynah repeated. “Here and now, boys. Here and—”
“Shut up!”
There was silence.
“I had to shut him up,” Will explained, “because of course he’s absolutely right. Here, boys; now, boys. Then and there are absolutely irrelevant. Or aren’t they? What about your husband’s death, for example? Is that irrelevant?”
Susila looked at him for a moment in silence, then slowly nodded her head. “In the context of what I have to do now—yes, completely irrelevant. That’s something I had to learn.”
“Does one learn how to forget?”
“It isn’t a matter of forgetting. What one has to learn is how to remember and yet be free of the past. How to be there with the dead and yet still be here, on the spot, with the living.” She gave him a sad little smile and added, “It isn’t easy.”
“It isn’t easy,” Will repeated. And suddenly all his defenses were down, all his pride had left him. “Will you help me?” he asked.
“It’s a bargain,” she said, and held out her hand.
A sound of footsteps made them turn their heads. Dr. MacPhail had entered the room.
8
“GOOD EVENING, MY DEAR. GOOD EVENING, MR. FARNABY.”
The tone was cheerful—not, Susila was quick to notice, with any kind of synthetic cheerfulness, but naturally, genuinely. And yet, before coming here, he must have stopped at the hospital, must have seen Lakshmi as Susila herself had seen her only an hour or two since, more dreadfully emaciated than ever, more skull-like and discolored. Half a long lifetime of love and lovalty and mutual forgiveness—and in another day or two it would be all over; he would be alone. But sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof—sufficient unto the place and the person. “One has no right,” her father-in-law had said to her one day as they were leaving the hospital together, “one has no right to inflict one’s sadness on other people. And no right, of course, to pretend that one isn’t sad. One just has to accept one’s grief and one’s absurd attempts to be a stoic. Accept, accept…” His voice broke. Looking up at him, she saw that his face was wet with tears. Five minutes later they were sitting on a bench, at the edge of the lotus pool, in the shadow of the huge stone Buddha. With a little plop, sharp and yet liquidly voluptuous, an unseen frog dived from its round leafy platform into the water. Thrusting up from the mud, the thick green stems with their turgid buds broke through into the air, and here and there the blue or rosy symbols of enlightenment had opened their petals to the sun and the probing visitations of flies and tiny beetles and the wild bees from the jungle. Darting, pausing in mid-flight, darting again, a score of glittering blue and green dragonflies were hawking for midges.
“Tathata,” Dr. Robert had whispered. “Suchness.”
For a long time they sat there in silence. Then, suddenly, he had touched her shoulder.
“Look!”
She lifted her eyes to where he was pointing. Two small parrots had perched on the Buddha’s right hand and were going through the ritual of courtship.
“Did you stop again at the lotus pool?” Susila asked aloud.