Dialogues of the Dead

SERGIUS: Off the stage, everything was fine, near perfect recall. But once she trod the boards, it all went.

BROSE: How awful! I once recall drying up when I was playing Mirabell opposite Dame Judi at the Garrick …

PERCY: Oh, do shut up, Brose, and let the man finish. The sooner we get across this dreadful river, the sooner we’ll be released from this most embarrassing position.

SERGIUS: Thank you, Mr. Follows. You should understand, Mr. Bird, it wasn’t just her learned lines that went, it was all vocabulary. Can you imagine what it’s like to be in a world devoid of words? Where nothing you see has a label? Nothing you feel can be expressed? Nothing you think …well, in fact, you can’t think! This is what going on the stage meant for her. This is why she became a librarian, so she could spend her life in places where they treasured words and kept them stored safe for future generations. But all the time she wanted my forgiveness. She had a memory of me lifting her from the driver’s seat of the wrecked car and laying her on the pavement, then reaching up to pluck a spray of cypress from a tree overhanging the churchyard wall and placing it on her breast and whispering a loving reassuring word in her ear before going to take my place by the driver’s door so she wouldn’t be blamed for the crash.

DICK: That rings a bell …

SERGIUS: Indeed. I expect you’re thinking of one of your friend Mr. Penn’s translations which he used to leave lying around in what was always a vain effort to engage Rye’s affections. It’s from the poem which begins “All night long when dreaming I see your face …”

DICK: That’s right. How does the last verse go?

A word in secret you softly say

And give me a cypress spray sweetly.

I wake and find that I’ve lost the spray

And the word escapes me completely.