O Caledonia

She mused upon her own remote and unalarming death and the arrangements for her funeral which she had for a long time now been inscribing in the back of her special notebook, adding new pleasures as they came to mind. The place was, as always, up in the hills, among the pine groves above the brown and secret pool. There would be bagpipes and there would be Gregorian chants. The Papal Count might be present, as a disembodied voice, singing “Danny Boy”; she was not entirely sure about this. For a little time one faithful dog would sit beside the grave, while others ran and skirmished in merry insouciance along the shadowed woodland paths, possibly flushing out the capercailzie. This was another point of uncertainty, for although he was a kind of genius loci, his demeanour might lower the dignity of the occasion. The word

preposterous, she thought, could have been coined especially for the mighty caper. Cats would be stretched, couchant and motionless along the tree branches, staring down with glittering eyes. She saw no people there. If John McCormack could be disembodied so could the piper and the chanters. But in time to come an occasional ghostly visitant might make his way through the trees and pause by her stone and think of how she had loved him, furling his cloak against the winds of dawn. At present these pilgrims would include W. B. Yeats, Catullus, Virgil, Alfred de Vigny, Rupert Brooke, John Donne, Racine, Alain-Fournier, Henry Vaughan, Sophocles and Tacitus. Shakespeare would be too busy. She would have liked to have had Baudelaire, but she could imagine no circumstances, ghostly or otherwise, which would have persuaded him to come. If only she were an affreuse juive.

Oh well, tant pis.

Chapter Ten

Janet lay in bed in the sanatorium at St. Uncumba’s. In the distance she could hear the girls’ voices, jostling and raucous like birds, the thud and bounce of tennis balls, the click of a cricket bat, cries of seagulls. Through the drawn curtains watery light washed the room, forming and reforming intermittent bright splashes which trembled against the walls and ceiling. She felt weightless and immaterial, deliciously remote. With great caution she moved her head, moved her eyes; the headache had gone. She rolled her eyes in all directions. There was no answering pain. The iron vise which had been clamped about her skull for days on end had dissolved into thin air, just as though it had never been. Now she could scarcely imagine it, had almost forgotten how she had been walking and seen rain about her but had felt none, so that she had moved forward like a blind person, with hands outstretched trying to catch the bright droplets, until the sudden agony had gripped her head and she dared not make one step farther, dared not cry out for help. Motionless she had stood, engulfed in pounding pain while the crazy rainstorm flashed about her and her lips moved silently. Girls wandered past, unsurprised by her behaviour, nudging each other or tapping their foreheads. Break ended, lessons began again and still she stood there. Far away in the black pulsating torture chamber of her skull she perceived the form of the weeping manatee, and the word humanity

and the word manatee merged in dolour. At last someone had come and led her in to the matron.