There are other things she thinks too, as she sits on Mr Phillips's bed in the cool of the afternoon (no longer summer now but autumn, late autumn), such cool that after a while she has even begun to shiver lightly.
That would be another good place to end the story. Whatever the true nature of this so-called treat, it does not need to be repeated. Next Saturday, if he is still alive, if she is still alive, she will come by and hold his hand again; but this must be the last of the posing, the last of the bosom-offering, the last of the blessing. After this the breasts must be closed up, maybe closed up for good. So it could end here, with this pose held for a good twenty minutes, she would estimate, despite the shivers. As a story, a recital, it could end here and still be decent enough to put in an envelope and send to Blanche without ruining whatever it was that she wanted to say about the Greeks.
But in fact it goes on a little longer, by five or ten minutes, and this is the part she cannot tell Blanche. It goes on long enough for her, the woman, to drop a hand casually on to the bedcover and begin to stroke, ever so gently, the place where the penis, if the penis were alive and awake, ought to be; and then, when there is no response, to put the covers aside and loosen the cord of Mr Phillips's pyjamas, old-man's flannel pyjamas such as she has not seen in years – she would not have guessed one could still find them in shops – and open up the front and plant a kiss on the entirely flaccid little thing, and take it in her mouth and mumble it until it stirs faintly with life. It is the first time she has seen pubic hair that has turned grey. Stupid of her not to have realized that happens. It will happen to her too, in due course. Nor is the smell pleasant either, the smell of an old man's nether parts, cursorily washed.
Less than ideal, she thinks, withdrawing and covering old Mr Phillips up and giving him a smile and patting his hand. The ideal would be to send in a young beauty to do it for him, a
As for her, Elizabeth, crouched over the old bag of bones with her breasts dangling, working away on his nearly extinct organ of generation, what name would the Greeks give to such a spectacle? Not
For that, in the end, is what she is convinced it is. From the swelling of her heart she knows it, from the utter, illimitable difference between what is in her heart and what Nurse Naidoo would see, if by some mischance Nurse Naidoo, using her pass key, were to fling open the door and stride in.
That is not what is uppermost in her mind, however – what Nurse Naidoo would make of it, what the Greeks would make of it, what her mother on the next floor up would make of it. What is uppermost is what she herself will make it of, in the car on the way home, or when she wakes up tomorrow morning, or in a year's time. What can one make of episodes like this, unforeseen, unplanned, out of character? Are they just holes, holes in the heart, into which one steps and falls and then goes on falling?
She has been invited to speak at a conference in Amsterdam, a conference on the age-old problem of evil: why there is evil in the world, what if anything can be done about it.
