‘I wanted to hear –’

‘He’s dead. That’s the end. Everything’s over, finished. What’s the good of talking?’

‘We both loved him.’

‘I don’t know. You can’t know a thing like that – afterwards. I don’t know anything any more except –’

‘Except?’

‘That I want to be dead too.’

Martins told me, ‘Then I nearly went away. What was the good of tormenting her because of this wild idea of mine? But instead I asked her one question. “Do you know a man called Cooler?”’

‘An American?’ she asked. ‘I think that was the man who brought me some money when Harry died. I didn’t want to take it, but he said Harry had been anxious – at the last moment.’

‘So he didn’t die instantaneously?’

‘Oh, no.’

Martins said to me, ‘I began to wonder why I had got that idea so firmly into my head, and then I thought it was only the man in the flat who told me so – no one else. I said to her, “He must have been very clear in his head at the end – because he remembered about me too. That seems to show that there wasn’t really any pain.”’

‘That’s what I tell myself all the time.’

‘Did you see the doctor?’

‘Once. Harry sent me to him. He was Harry’s own doctor. He lived near by, you see.’

Martins suddenly saw in that odd chamber of the mind that constructs such pictures, instantaneously, irrationally, a desert place, a body on the ground, a group of birds gathered. Perhaps it was a scene from one of his own books, not yet written, forming at the gate of consciousness. It faded, and he thought how odd that they were all there, just at that moment, all Harry’s friends – Kurtz, the doctor, this man Cooler; only the two people who loved him seemed to have been missing. He said, ‘And the driver? Did you hear his evidence?’

‘He was upset, scared. But Cooler’s evidence exonerated him. No, it wasn’t his fault, poor man. I’ve often heard Harry say what a careful driver he was.’

‘He knew Harry too?’ Another bird flapped down and joined the others round the silent figure on the sand who lay face down. Now he could tell that it was Harry, by the clothes, by the attitude like that of a boy asleep in the grass at a playing-field’s edge, on a hot summer afternoon.

Somebody called outside the window, ‘Fräulein Schmidt.’

She said, ‘They don’t like one to stay too long. It uses up their electricity.’

He had given up the idea of sparing her anything. He told her, ‘The police say they were going to arrest Harry. They’d pinned some racket on him.’

She took the news in much the same way as Kurtz. ‘Everybody’s in a racket.’

‘I don’t believe he was in anything serious.’

‘No.’