II

II

Damon finally got off to his eleven o’clock class. Frantically nervous, he could not find his hat, nor his notes for the lecture, but at last after he had stalled the car twice, it hiccupped off and Julia was alone. Her hands dropped to her sides and she sank down into the leather armchair in the study, Damon’s chair. She picked up the newspaper, folded it together and laid it beside her, face down, so that the headline was out of sight. The room felt incredibly empty as if—with Damon’s electrical presence gone—it had been uninhabited for years, instead of a few seconds. There was a dank smell of tobacco, she noticed, but she had no energy to get up and empty ash trays. It was necessary simply to sit still and attempt to pick up the pieces, pieces of herself, pieces of Damon, pieces of Edward. Until now she had been far too busy trying to soften the blow for Damon, trying to lift the burden of guilt he was carrying, as he repeated over and over, “We failed him. It was our fault, Julia.” Her whole will and energy had been bent for the last hours on persuading Damon that they had really done all they could.

“If it’s failure, it’s failure of something far bigger than just we two, than just his friends,” she kept saying.

“It was an act of violent rejection—of all of us. An attack, rather. Yes, an attack,” he said, running his hands through his hair so it stood up on end. And then he added, “It’s such a waste.”

To think that we are part of a world in which such things happen, in which a man like Edward commits suicide. What had gone wrong? Where? She sat looking at the walls, at the photographs of Damon’s grandfather and of their two children. And for just a second she felt a kind of relief, as if they had come to the end of something, some long bitterly painful argument which had (as indeed it had) been going on for years. At least now there would be no more arguments. There might be a little peace.