Arthur & George

his mother six; he had read obituaries in the newspapers and gone to the funerals of colleagues; and he was here for the great farewell to Sir Arthur. But never before had he understood – though it was more a visceral awareness than a mental comprehension – that everybody was going to be dead. He had surely been informed of this as a child, although only in the context of everyone – like Uncle Compson – continuing to live thereafter, either in the bosom of Christ or, if they were wicked, elsewhere. But now he looked about him. Prince Albert was dead already, of course, and so was the Widow of Windsor who had mourned him; but that woman with a parasol would be dead, and her mother next to her dead sooner, and those small children dead later, although if there was another war the boys might be dead sooner, and those two dogs with them would also be dead, and the distant bandsmen, and the baby in the perambulator, even the baby in the perambulator, even if it lived to be as old as the oldest inhabitant on the planet, a hundred and five, a hundred and ten, whatever it was, that baby would be dead too.
    And though George was now nearing the limit of his imagination, he continued a little further. If you knew someone who had died, then you could think about them in one of two ways: as being dead, extinguished utterly, with the death of the body the test and proof that their self, their essence, their individuality, no longer existed; or you could believe that somewhere, somehow, according to whatever religion you held, and how fervently or tepidly you held it, they were still alive, either in a way predicted by sacred texts, or in some way we had yet to comprehend. It was one or the other; there was no position of compromise; and George was privately inclined to think extinction the more probable. But when you stood in Hyde Park on a warm summer’s afternoon among thousands of other human beings, few of whom were probably thinking about being dead, it was less easy to believe that this intense and complex thing called life was merely some chance happening on an obscure planet, a brief moment of light between two eternities of darkness. At such a moment it was possible to feel that all this vitality must continue somehow, somewhere. George knew he was not about to succumb to any uprush of religious sentiment – he was not going to ask the Marylebone Spiritualist Association for some of the books and brochures they had offered him when he had taken his ticket. He also knew that he would doubtless go on living as he had done, observing like the rest of the country – and mainly because of Maud – the general rituals of the Church of England, observing them in a kind of half-hearted, imprecisely hopeful way until such time as he died, when he would discover what the truth of the matter was, or, more likely, not discover anything at all. But just today – as that horse and rider trotted past him – that horse and rider as doomed as Prince Albert – he thought he saw a little of what Sir Arthur had come to see.
    It all made him feel breathless and panicky; he sat on a bench to calm himself. He looked at the passers-by but saw only dead people walking – prisoners released on licence but likely to be recalled at any moment. He opened
Memories and Adventures
and began flipping its pages in an attempt to distract himself. And instantly two words presented themselves to his eyes. They were in normal type, but they struck him like capitals: ‘Albert Hall’. A more superstitious or credulous mind might have found significance in the moment; George declined to view it as anything more than a coincidence. Even so, he read, and was distracted. He read how, nearly thirty years previously, Sir Arthur had been invited to judge a Strong Man competition in the Hall; and how, after a champagne supper, he had walked out into the empty night and found himself a few steps behind the victor, a simple fellow preparing to walk the London streets until it was time to catch the morning train back to Lancashire. George feels himself in a sudden, vivid dreamland. There is fog, and people’s breath is white, and a strong man with a gold statue has no money for a bed. He sees the fellow from behind, as Sir Arthur had; he sees a hat at an angle, the cloth of a jacket pulled tight by powerful shoulders, a statue clamped casually under one arm, its feet pointing backwards. Lost in the fog, but with a large, gentle, Scottish-voiced rescuer