But now he shrugged himself upright, left the cushion lying there forgotten in the snow, headed back towards his car. Behind him and yet with him a voice said in his mind: ‘Goodbye, Harry.’ But it wasn’t Shukshin’s voice.
‘Goodbye, Ma,’ he answered. ‘And thanks. I’ll always love you.’
‘And I’ll always love you, Harry.’
‘What?’ now came Shukshin’s horrified mental gasp. ‘What! Keogh, what’s this? I saw you raise her up, but – ?’
Harry didn’t answer. He let Mary Keogh do it for him:
‘Hello, Viktor. No, you’re wrong. Harry didn’t raise me up. I raised myself up. For the sake of love, which is something you can’t understand. But that’s over now and I’ll not do it again. My Harry has others to look after him now; so I’ll just lie here, lonely in the mud. Except maybe it won’t be so lonely now . . .’
‘Keogh!’ Shukshin frantically called out after Harry again. ‘Keogh, you promised me – you said you were the only one who could talk to me. But now she is talking to me – and she hurts me most of all!’
Harry kept on walking.
‘Now, now, Viktor,’ he heard his mother’s answer, as if she spoke to a small child. ‘That will get you nowhere. Did you say you want peace and quiet? Oh, but you’ll soon get bored with peace and quiet, Viktor.’
‘Keogh!’ Shukshin’s voice was a diminishing mental shriek now. ‘Keogh, you have to get me out of this. Dig me up – tell them where to find my body – only don’t leave me here with her!’
‘Actually, Viktor,’ Mary Keogh remorselessly continued, ‘I think I’ll rather enjoy talking to you. You’re so close to me here that it’s no effort at all!’
‘Keogh, you bastard! Come back! Oh … please . . . come . . . back!’
But Harry kept on walking.
By 1:30 p.m. Harry was back in Hartlepool. The roads were nightmarish, layered with compacted snow for more than half the journey, so that in the main he was driving on his nerves. This only served to drain more of his strength, and when at last he got home it was as much as he could do to drag himself upstairs.
Brenda, his wife of eight weeks, was bright and chirpy about the flat, which had undergone some fantastic and inexplicable metamorphosis since she had moved in after their registry office wedding. She was less than three months pregnant but already blooming. Harry, too, had been in fine fettle when last she had seen him; but now, in complete contrast –
He barely managed the effort of kissing her on the cheek, was asleep almost before his head hit the pillows.
He had been away for three days, doing ‘research’, she knew, for a new book he was planning – what and where exactly he’d never bothered to say. Well, that was Harry and she should be used to it by now – but she was not used to him turning up looking like he’d spent three days in a concentration camp!
After he had slept right through the afternoon and seemed to have developed a fever, she called a doctor who visited at about 8:00 p.m. Harry didn’t bother to wake up for his visit; the doctor thought it might be
pneumonia, though the symptoms weren’t quite right; he left pills, instructions and his telephone number. If Harry got worse during the night, especially if his breathing became irregular or he started coughing, or if his temperature went up appreciably, Brenda was to call him at once.
But Harry got no worse through the night, and in the morning he was able to have a bite of breakfast, following which he engaged Brenda in a peculiar, guarded conversation which she was dismayed to find as depressing and morbid as any talk she’d ever had with him during his gloomy or morose periods of previous, less happy times. After listening to him for a little while, when he began to talk about making a will leaving everything to her, or to their child in the event she was unable to make use of it, then she rounded on him and laughed out loud.