The Satanic Verses

from his unconscious), her shaven head under its absurd turban, her whisky breath, and the hard thing that had entered the little lines around her mouth, that he had quite simply fallen out of love, and would not want her back even should she want (which was improbable but not inconceivable) to return. The instant he became aware of this he commenced for some reason to feel guilty, and, as a result, at a conversational disadvantage. The white-haired dog was growling at him, too. He recalled that he’d never really cared for pets.
    ‘I suppose,’ she addressed her glass, sitting at the old pine table in the spacious kitchen, ‘that what I did was unforgivable, huh?’
    That little Americanizing
huh
was new: another of her infinite series of blows against her breeding? Or had she caught it from Jumpy, or some hip little acquaintance of his, like a disease? (The snarling violence again: down with it. Now that he no longer wanted her, it was entirely inappropriate to the situation.) ‘I don’t think I can say what I’m capable of forgiving,’ he replied. ‘That particular response seems to be out of my control; it either operates or it doesn’t and I find out in due course. So let’s say, for the moment, that the jury’s out.’ She didn’t like that, she wanted him to defuse the situation so that they could enjoy their blasted coffee. Pamela had always made vile coffee: still, that wasn’t his problem now. ‘I’m moving back in,’ he said. ‘It’s a big house and there’s plenty of room. I’ll take the den, and the rooms on the floor below, including the spare bathroom, so I’ll be quite independent. I propose to use the kitchen very sparingly. I’m assuming that, as my body was never found, I’m still officially missing-presumed-dead, that you haven’t gone to court to have me wiped off the slate. In which case it shouldn’t take too long to resuscitate me, once I alert Bentine, Milligan and Sellers.’ (Respectively, their lawyer, their accountant and Chamcha’s agent.) Pamela listened dumbly, her posture informing him that she wouldn’t be offering any counter-arguments, that whatever he wanted was okay: making amends with body language. ‘After that,’ heconcluded, ‘we sell up and you get your divorce.’ He swept out, making an exit before he got the shakes, and made it to his den just before they hit him. Pamela, downstairs, would be weeping; he had never found crying easy, but he was a champion shaker. And now there was his heart, too: boom badoom doodoodoom.
    To be born again, first you have to die
.

    Alone, he all at once remembered that he and Pamela had once disagreed, as they disagreed on everything, on a short-story they’d both read, whose theme was precisely the nature of the unforgivable. Title and author eluded him, but the story came back vividly. A man and a woman had been intimate friends (never lovers) for all their adult lives. On his twenty-first birthday (they were both poor at the time) she had given him, as a joke, the most horrible, cheap glass vase she could find, its colours a garish parody of Venetian gaiety. Twenty years later, when they were both successful and greying, she visited his home and quarrelled with him over his treatment of a mutual friend. In the course of the quarrel her eye fell upon the old vase, which he still kept in pride of place on his sitting-room mantelpiece, and, without pausing in her tirade, she swept it to the floor, smashing it beyond hope of repair. He never spoke to her again; when she died, half a century later, he refused to visit her deathbed or attend her funeral, even though messengers were sent to tell him that these were her dearest wishes. ‘Tell her,’ he said to the emissaries, ‘that she never knew how much I valued what she broke.’ The emissaries argued, pleaded, raged. If she had not known how much meaning he had invested in the trifle, how could she in all fairness be blamed? And had she not made countless attempts, over the years, to apologize and atone? And she was dying, for heaven’s sake; could not this ancient, childish rift be healed at the last? They had lost a lifetime’s friendship; could they not even say goodbye? ‘No,’ said the unforgiving man. – ‘Really because of the vase? Or are you concealing some other, darker matter?’ – ‘It was the vase,’ he answered, ‘the vase, and nothing but.’ Pamela thought the man petty and cruel,but Chamcha had even then appreciated the curious