Black Chalk

LXVII(ii) But now the present must briefly interrupt my confession. Because there is still a life going on in this railroad flat. Only the barest scratch of a life but a life nonetheless.

Sometimes while writing I pause to wonder if Dee will come, if Dee will knock on my door and forgive me. But of course she won’t forgive me, how could she forgive such a thing? And then it occurs to me that perhaps losing her book was no accident. Maybe some terrible part of me has chosen to lose her poems, a secret piece of my mind that refuses to let her know about Mark. I have lost Dee’s book so she would flee from me, so she would never find out, never hate me for what I have done.

And it has worked. I sit all alone with my story. Only the past, the distant past.

LXVIII

LXVIII Emilia looked spectacular in black, a perfect Hitchcock widow among the candles and stained glass. Jolyon’s eyes fell first on her and Jack sitting together when he entered the church. Jack looked uncomfortable among the pews, there could be no jokes in this place. Jolyon thought he saw them holding hands during one portion of the ceremony but perhaps he only imagined it. Seated on her own, a few rows behind Emilia and Jack, was Dee. Black sat very naturally on Dee. And Chad also was sitting apart from his friends, across the aisle in a borrowed suit two sizes too big for him. But Chad looked otherwise composed, a monochrome study of stoicism.

Jolyon looked up at the ceiling of the church. It reminded him of the bar at Pitt, as if he were staring up at the undersides of enormous stone parasols. He could almost hear the chatter and bubbling laughter.

He had taken the train to London on his own and remained alone in the church, sitting as far back as he could. As far as he could from the coffin, the grief.

But it was impossible for Jolyon to remain alone at Mark’s mother’s house where everyone gathered after the funeral, the house crammed with so many bodies. And being there reminded Jolyon guiltily of how, with delicate flutes of champagne, they had toasted Mark’s nineteenth birthday only three months earlier in that house. Now he made small talk with people he only half knew. They ate sandwiches and said all the appropriate things. Shocking, tragic, so young.

The ceiling seemed to descend slowly around and around like the lid of a screw-top jar as a palpable grief began to evaporate from the dense welter of bodies. Grief gathered on the insides of the windows, trickled down the panes, collected in droplets on the window frames. And Jolyon stood there trying not to see the pain in everyone’s eyes but felt their hurt seeping into him, wordlessly drenching his heart.

And when Mark’s mother came to him, Jolyon thought he might shatter into a million black stars. Only her arms, which Mark’s mother wrapped around him as she might once have done her son, held Jolyon together. And then she said to him, ‘Mark told me all about you, Jolyon.’ She held him by the shoulders and looked into his eyes. ‘And I could tell that he loved you the most. So that’s why I’m asking you. Please, Jolyon, if you know anything, anything at all. Why did he do it? Why did my beautiful son . . . what made him . . . ?’

Jolyon’s throat was coarse and sore. He looked at Mark’s mother, her trembling lips, her sleepless eyes. If he were to say to her ‘I really don’t know, Mrs Cutler’ then it would all be over, they would hold each other again and he would say how sorry he was for her loss. But how could he do that? He had already taken her son. How could he leave Mark’s mother alone with the torment of wondering why every haunted second of every night and day?

Their game had been such a pale imitation of life, such a blunt and childish thing. Because only life had real consequences, only life could cause real pain. There was nothing Chad and Dee could ever have dreamt, no consequence imaginable, that Jolyon could less have endured than what he had to do now. He led Mark’s mother to the side of the room and they sat together at the very edge of a sofa, as if to sit any further back would be an insult to the memory of Mark.

A young man of great promise had died and no one deserved any comfort. No one deserved to rest or even to sleep or breathe. And Jolyon least of all.

LXIX

LXIX(i) Sitting here now in New York, fourteen years after that funeral, I can still hear every word I said to her, each and every lie I drizzled over Mark’s mother.