David Dickinson - Death Called to the Bar

‘You sound as if you think it’s a sad painting, Edward,’ said Sarah, taking his hand.

‘No, I don’t think it’s sad,’ he said, his eyes locked now on Saturn with his lyre. ‘These Seasons in a way are all trapped in their dance, like the characters in Keats’ ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn’ whose happy melodist, like Saturn here, unwearied, is forever piping songs forever new. They could go faster but the painter won’t allow it. They could change places but Poussin won’t allow that either. If you were inside the circle, you wouldn’t be able to get out. Maybe, for the moments we look at the painting, we’re trapped too, trapped in the contemplation of our own mortality.’

‘You’re sounding very philosophical today, Edward. Do you think it’s the influence of Treasure Island ?’

‘No,’ said Edward laughing. ‘It just made me think about time and time passing, Sarah. What’s happening over there in the square also makes you think of time passing. You can’t help it.’ You can’t put it off much longer, Edward said to himself. ‘You think time doesn’t affect you. People talk about having all the time in the world. They don’t. We don’t. It’s going away from us constantly, like the sand in those hourglasses. Eventually time, our time, quite literally, is going to run out.’

Suddenly Sarah thought she understood what was going on, the visit to the painting, the philosophical musings, the digressions into the history of art.

‘So, you see, Sarah,’ Edward went on, unaware that he had been rumbled, ‘I have been thinking that sometimes we must seize time in the way people talk about seizing the day. We can’t put things off till another day or week or month. Delay is futile. We must grasp the moment. Sarah, will you marry me?’

The question came on Sarah very unexpectedly. She knew it was coming but she hadn’t expected it to pop out so suddenly. Maybe Edward hadn’t intended it either. Maybe Time had seized Edward rather than the other way round. She squeezed his hand very tight.

‘Of course I’ll marry you, Edward,’ she said. ‘What took you so long? I thought you’d never ask.’

Lady Lucy was keeping watch in the hour before midnight. The nurse had tiptoed out of the room, saying she would be waiting outside on the stairs. This, Lady Lucy realized, was the first time she had been alone with Francis since he was shot. All day she had been seeing the same scene. She was at a funeral. She was burying another husband. Like the first one, this funeral had an honour guard of military colleagues, jackets pressed, trousers immaculate, clouds and sky visible in the burnished toecaps of their boots, polished swords raised in unison to give the last salute. By the graveside she had a child holding each of her hands as if their hearts would break. The Dead March from Handel’s Saul echoed round her head to accompany these pictures. She remembered the military bands playing it as Victoria’s funeral cortege had made its melancholy way through the streets of a mourning London.

She was sitting on the edge of the bed, holding her husband’s hand. She remembered him suddenly at the National Gallery where he had taken her on their first outing and she had talked about Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire . She remembered him talking to the twins only the week before, walking them in his arms up and down the drawing room, that soft voice telling the latest of his children about the house he came from in Ireland, and the blue colour of the mountains and the great fountain at the bottom of the steps. She started to cry. She hadn’t let herself cry very much in case it upset the children but now there was nobody here, only Francis, and he couldn’t hear and he couldn’t see and she might never hear his voice again. She was racked by sobs, wondering if he knew how much she loved him, how happy he had made her, how her whole life with him had been illuminated by the power of his love for her.

‘Oh Francis,’ she whispered to him, ‘my poor darling. I love you so much. Please come back. I can’t bear it when you’re not here.’ Suddenly she remembered saying ‘Please come back’ to him before, at that terrible early morning parting at the railway station when he went off to the Boer War. Day after day, she remembered, there had been notices of the fallen in the newspapers, columns of names of the dead that seemed to grow longer every month. But Francis had survived all that. He had come home without a scratch. Now this investigation into an Inn of Court had left him virtually dead. She made a resolution there at a quarter to midnight on the fourth day of her husband’s illness. When he was better she was going to take him away somewhere warm, Amalfi perhaps or Positano, where they could look at the spectacular views and the deep blue sea. She would give him a beaker full of the warm south, with beaded bubbles winking at the brim. And when he was better, not before, she was going to ask him to give up investigating for ever. No more heaps of masonry falling on him in cathedral naves. No more maniacs tracking him through the elegant galleries of the Wallace Collection. No more desperate races down the mountain roads of Corsica with the bullets whining off the rocks. No more butchered bodies dumped in the fountains of Perugia. Nobody could be expected to put up with all that any more. She certainly couldn’t. Then, as she looked at that beloved face, which seemed now to be turning slightly grey, she started weeping uncontrollably again. For she might never have the chance to take Francis off to the Italian sunshine and the winding streets of Positano. He might be dead before she had the chance to take him there. He might die tomorrow. He might die tonight.

Somewhere above her she heard a child weeping. It’s Olivia, she thought, come for her midnight cry. She began to compose herself. As she trudged slowly off to comfort her weeping daughter, she tried to steady herself with the words of Dr Tony: ‘Of course there’s hope. Let us not forget that. Let us never forget that. There is always hope.’

Next morning the children continued their progress through Treasure Island , Olivia, possibly because she wasn’t reading, becoming much better at hopping round the room on her crutch broomstick. If she were allowed outside with it, Johnny Fitzgerald felt sure, she would begin hurling it at her enemies like Long John Silver himself. Just after lunch Edward and Sarah arrived and their engagement was toasted in champagne. Edward apologized for daring to bring any glimmer of happiness into such a tragic household and was immediately told to shut up by Johnny Fitzgerald. Olivia wanted to know what an engagement was. She thought gauges had something to do with trains. She remembered a long story her father had told her once which involved, for some reason, train gauges. Were Edward and Sarah going on a train? If so, could she come too? Like her father, she was very fond of trains. When all was explained to her Olivia decided that she had better not ask any more questions. She thought now it would be like the twins’ christening all over again but with Edward and Sarah having to put their heads in the font.

After lunch Johnny Fitzgerald ordered a change in the reading matter for Francis. Lady Lucy and he, Johnny informed the company, were going to read Tennyson. Tennyson, after all, had been one of Francis’s favourite poets. Johnny did not think it wise to mention it, but he remembered Francis saying years ago in India that he would like someone to read the last section of the poem he, Johnny, was going to read at his, Powerscourt’s, graveside after his funeral. And, Johnny remembered, it was a poem Francis knew off by heart.

Lady Lucy gave a spirited rendering of ‘The Lady of Shalott’, the children and the nurse enchanted by the rhythm and the romance of the story. Then Johnny began ‘Ulysses’, a poem about the Greek warrior hero who finally comes home to his island of Ithaca after twenty years of war and wandering. Soon he is bored, he cannot rest from travel.