Dialogues of the Dead

He felt her muscles tense preparatory to rising. Then good old God at last showed his appreciation of his servant Pascoe’s efforts to give Him a helping hand. Or foot. Somewhere behind them there was a susurrus of rising bodies and speculation as someone moved along a pew. Everyone turned to gawk, as if the “Wedding March” had just struck up to announce the bride’s arrival in the church.

But Pascoe knew who it was before his eyes confirmed it.

Slowly, silently, the slim figure of Franny Roote advanced up the aisle and climbed into the pulpit. He was wearing his usual black, broken only by a tiny white cross which, despite its size, seemed to burn against his chest.

For a long moment, he stood looking down on the congregation, his pale face expressionless, as if gathering his thoughts.

When at last he spoke his voice was low, yet like an actor’s whisper, it carried without difficulty to the furthermost corners of the silent church.

“Sam was my teacher and my friend. When I first met him, I was coming out of a bad time without any certain knowledge that a worse did not lie ahead. Behind me was a known darkness; before me was a darkness I did not know. And then, by human chance but, I am sure, by God’s design, I met Sam.

“As a teacher, he was a light in the darkness of my ignorance. As a friend, he was a light in the darkness of my despair. He showed me that I had nothing to fear by going forward in search of intellectual knowledge and everything to gain by going forward in search of myself.

“I last saw him not long before his dreadful death. Our talk was mainly of matters academic, though as always other things were mixed in, for Sam didn’t lock himself away in some elitist ivory tower. His domain was very much the real world.”

He paused and his gaze flickered towards the array of academics surrounding Linda Lupin in the front pew. Then he resumed.

“I’ve tried to think of the things he said at that last encounter, for it is my belief that death, even when he comes-indeed perhaps especially when he comes-violently and unexpectedly, never comes without sending ahead messages that he is near.

“I know we certainly spoke of death. It is hard not to speak of him when discussing, as we were, Sam’s favourite poet, Thomas Lovell Beddoes. And I know we spoke of death’s mystery, and of the way our usual, though not our sole, medium of communication, language, by its very complexity often conceals more than it reveals.

“Did he have a premonition? I recall how he smiled, it seemed to me wryly, as he quoted a fragment from Beddoes:

“I fear there is some maddening secret
Hid in your words (and at each turn of thought
Comes up a skull,) like an anatomy
Found in a weedy hole, ’mongst stone and roots
And straggling reptiles, with his tongueless mouth
Telling of murder …”

(It seemed to Pascoe that as the man spoke the word roots, his eyes sought out Pascoe’s and a faint smile flickered across those pallid lips. But perhaps he was mistaken.)

The man spoke on.

“Perhaps Sam was trying to tell me something, something he barely understood himself. Perhaps one day I will interpret that secret. Or perhaps I will have to wait till Sam himself interprets it for me.

“For though Sam did not subscribe to any organized form of religion, I know from our discussions that he had a deep belief in a life after death very different from but very superior to this grotesque bergomask we lumber through here on earth. In this, his soul was deeply in tune with that of Beddoes, and the book he was writing about him would have been a masterpiece of philosophy as well as scholarship.

“A few more lines of poetry, and I am done. Forgive me if they strike any of you as macabre, but believe me that they would not so have struck Sam. In fact he once told me that if he had the planning of his own funeral, he would like to hear these lines recited.

“So for his wish and my own comfort, let me speak them.

“We do lie beneath the grass
In the moonlight, in the shade
Of the yew-tree. They that pass
Hear us not. We are afraid
They would envy our delight,
In our graves by glow-worm night.
Come follow us, and smile as we;
We sail to the rock in the ancient waves,
Where the snow falls by thousands into the sea,

And the drowned and the shipwrecked have happy graves.”