Somebody was now reading the lesson. An actor, to judge by the self-regarding tone. It was announced as a passage from the Psalms, but Marty didn’t recognize it.
As the reading was drawing to a close, a car drew up at the main gate. Heads turned and cameras clicked as two figures emerged. A buzz spread through the crowd; people who’d taken to lying down stood up again to see what could be seen. Something roused Marty from his lethargy, and he too stood on tiptoe to glimpse the latecomers: it was quite an entrance they were making. He peered between the heads of the crowd to catch a look; caught sight, then lost it again; said “no,” quietly to himself, not believing; then pushed his way through the crowd trying to keep pace as Mamoulian, a veiled Carys at his side, glided down the pathway from gate to porch and disappeared into the church. “Who was it?” somebody asked him. “Do you know who it was?”
Hell, he wanted to answer. The Devil himself.
Mamoulian was here! In broad daylight, sun on the back of his neck, walking with Carys arm in arm like man and wife, letting the cameras catch him for tomorrow’s edition. He had no fear, apparently. This late appearance, so measured, so ironic, was a final gesture of contempt. And why did she play his game? Why didn’t she throw off his hand and denounce him for the unnatural thing he was? Because she’d gone willingly into his entourage, the very way Whitehead had told him she would. In search of what? Someone to celebrate that strain of nihilism in her; to educate her in the fine art of dying? And what might she give in return? Ah, there was the prickly question.
At long last the service came to an end. Suddenly, to the delight and outrage of the congregation, a raucous saxophone broke the solemnity, and a jazz rendering of “Fools Rush In” was blaring over the loudspeakers. Whitehead’s final joke, presumably. It earned its laughs; some of the crowd even applauded. From inside the church there came the clatter of people rising from their pews. Marty craned to get a better view of the porch, and failing, threaded his way back through the press of people to a tomb that offered a view. There were birds in the heat-drooped trees, and their pursuits distracted him, catching him up in their swooping play. When he looked back the coffin was almost parallel with him, shouldered, among others, by Ottaway and Curtsinger. The plain box seemed almost indecently exposed. He wondered what they’d dressed the old man in at the last; if they’d trimmed his beard and sewed his eyelids shut.
The procession of mourners followed on the heels of the pallbearers, a black cortege that parted the candy-colored sea of tourists. To right and left the shutters tutted; some damn fool called, “Watch the birdy.” The jazz played on. It was all gratifyingly absurd. The old man, Marty guessed, would be smiling in his box.
Finally Carys and Mamoulian emerged from the shade of the porch into the brilliance of the afternoon, and Marty was sure he caught the girl cautiously scanning the crowd, fearful that her companion would notice. She was looking for him; he was certain of it. She knew he’d be there, somewhere, and she was looking for him. His mind raced, tripping over itself in its turmoil. If he made a sign to her, however subtle, there was every chance Mamoulian would see it, and that was surely dangerous for them both. Better to hide his head then, painful as it was not to lock glances with her.
Reluctantly, he stepped down off the tomb as the clump of mourners came abreast of him, and spied what he could from the shelter of the crowd. The European scarcely raised his head from its bowed position, and from what Marty could glimpse between the bobbing heads Carys had given up her search-perhaps despairing of his being there. As the coffin and its black tail wound out of the churchyard, Marty ducked away and over the wall to watch events precede from a better vantage point.