The Dragon Man - Brian Stableford [86]
It would have been nice, Sara thought, if the image of that dragon, which had hung for so many years in Mr. Warburton’s shop window, had been mounted on the wall behind the speaker’s podium. She had no idea what had happened to it; as Mike Rawlinson had told her, the shop had been stripped bare and no one seemed to know what had become of its fittings.
“It should be here,” Sara murmured, not meaning to speak aloud. She blushed as she realized that she had translated the insistent thought into an audible whisper, but calmed herself when she decided that it had been too quiet for anyone else to hear—not even Linda Chatrian, who was sitting beside her, having promised her parents to “keep an eye on her”.
It should be here, Sara repeated to herself, more discreetly. He should be here, but he’s not.
Sara savored the layers of meaning contained in the two observations. Frank Warburton was indeed, not here; that was why the funeral was taking place. But he was not present, either, in the eulogies that were being offered, turn and turn about, by people who had known him well a hundred or two hundred years before or had some slight acquaintance with his current work. Nor was he present in the hundreds of smartsuits gathered in the Hall to which he might have made some small decorative contribution. It was as if he had been buried—not literally, even though he was the product of an era when the dead sometimes had been buried—but buried in the minds of his closest friends beneath murky layers of forgetfulness, and buried in the second skins of all his myriad clients by stubborn strata of fashion and convention.
Sara felt a new significance in the fact that she had been “a witness to his last hours”. She felt, in fact, that, by virtue of that freak of chance, she had come as close to the real Frank Warburton—as close, that is, to the person he had been at the moment of his death—as anyone in the world.
She had looked around for Mike Rawlinson before she entered the Hall of Remembrance, but she had not found him in the slowly-gathering crowd that was assembling in the Memorial Garden to watch the ceremony on the hall’s exterior display-screen. It seemed to her unjust that Linda Chatrian was sitting beside her rather than him. Mike had, after all, been the catalyst that had brought her together with the Dragon Man, thus allowing her to form a unique bond with him, quite unlike any she had formed with her various parents. Mike was the one who had been moved by grief and wrath to trek across country for a whole kilometer to confront her at the window through which his Gothic emblems had been mistakenly lured. He, too, was not here.
And the eulogists droned on.
“This is pointless,” Sara murmured. Again she spoke the words aloud, but too quietly to be overheard—or so she thought, until Linda Chatrian said “Sssh!” loudly enough for at least half a dozen of their neighbors to hear.
Sara blushed, and bit her tongue.
After that, she hardly dared to form a coherent sentence in the privacy of her own thoughts, for fear that it might escape and attract the censorious attention of the whole crowd. Fortunately, the eulogies had not much further to run, and the indoor part of the ceremony was concluded soon enough.
It seemed to take forever for the crowd to file out through the doors of the Hall of Remembrance. The weight of the occasion made every step ponderous, and provoked an excessive politeness whenever two people came into competition to occupy the same space—with the result that spaces which could have been put to perfectly good use often went begging for thirty or forty seconds, until someone finally accepted the necessity of moving ahead of whoever was gesturing them forward with ever-increasing urgency.
Sara was one of the last to leave, although Ms. Chatrian made an ostentatious display of ushering her out in advance of her own venerable presence.
Ms. Chatrian was wearing neither flowers nor avian jewelry, although she had not gone so far as to manifest herself in masculine black. She was clad