V
AS AUTUMN COMES
A
s Father Pennant was thinking about Elizabeth and the peace Nature might bring
her, Elizabeth was thinking â again and again and inescapably â about love. She wondered what, exactly, love was and if she was, in fact,
possessed by it. Like a cloud of midges, the questions pestered her.
     Why did people
fall
in love? Why
in
 love? Wasn't love within us? Was the love within different from the love one fell into? Did
love need an object? Did it need a person? Was love still love if unrequited?
Was it love if the object of one's love was unworthy? Could she marry a man she no longer loved in the hope she
would fall in love with him again?
     Any
one
of these questions could have kept a mind busy for months. Worse, all of them
had answers that were as difficult to deal with as the questions themselves.
The answers seemed to lead her further and further from her own feelings. In
any case, they did not bring her closer to Robbie. Nor did they make her
decision to carry through with the wedding easier to accept. Never had she been
so unsure of anything. In the past, when doubt or ambivalence troubled her,
Elizabeth had turned to her work for comfort. Doing, doing
something
, was her best way out of the disquiet: learning to make bread, helping her aunt
and uncle with whatever needed to be done â housecleaning or sod cutting. But her doubts about love could not be quelled by
physical activity.
     So, what
was
love to her? It was Robbie and it was not Robbie. It was Robbie's body, his arms and back. It was nothing physical, though it could be set off
by the physical, by the memory of the physical, by the memory of a memory. Love
was a scene in which she saw herself. It was at the heart of who she was. It
was peripheral. It was a moment. It was a thousand moments she had shared with
Robbie. But it did not matter that it was Robbie in particular because, in
these moments, adrift from herself, she was not Elizabeth Denny. Love was a
kind of anonymity, an anonymity in which she was (chiefly) âa woman in love.' It turned her into someone else, into Charlotte Brontë, into Emma Bovary, into the woman in
Brief Encounter
, so in love with Trevor Howard she would sacrifice her happiness for him. No
sooner did she imagine herself as other, however, than she was thrown back on
the very Elizabethness of everything she was and all that she wanted. And so,
at nearly every turn, waiting like a sentinel for the answer to the first
question (âWhat is love?'), was a further question: âWho am I?'
          What is love/Who am I?
          Who am I/What is love?
Neither question could be answered without answering the other.
     Unexpectedly, this impasse brought relief. âWho am I?' was a more daunting question, in some ways, than âWhat is love?,' but thinking about herself and her life, her aspirations and desires, brought
the question of love into sharper focus. It became clearer to Elizabeth that,
whatever love was, she was no longer the girl who had been âin love' with Robbie Myers. She was a woman considering marriage with a man named Robert
Myers, a man she now knew as fallible, someone who was as liable to hurt her as
not. It was a gift to know this, to think it, to face its implications.
As Elizabeth was thinking about love and Father Pennant was thinking about
Nature, Lowther Williams was thinking about life.
     Lowther had become ridiculous to himself. So, when weeks after his sixty-third
birthday, his depression lifted, he was relieved. He began to see things in a
more forgiving light. God had decided differently than he, Lowther, might have
wished. Was that reason to behave like a spoiled child? Wasn't it more sensible to treat the leftover life he had been given as a gift? He
would be the first male in his line to see sixty-four, if he kept up his
health. And he resolved to keep up his health, though he also kept an eye on
the possibility that God would, in His own way, take him before he saw
sixty-four. No tragedy, that. He had already been given more time than his
father.
     Of course, he had not planned for a long life. He had to think about how this
unanticipated portion might best be led. Should he now spend the money he had
spent years saving (and which he had promised to Father Pennant)? What would he
spend it on? He was a man who desired nothing. He had travelled all over the
world. He had eaten wonderful food. He had read all the books he considered
necessary â from Aristotle's
Metaphysics
to Zamyatin's
We
 â in preparation for an early (or, rather, timely) death. His cello was not the
best. There were certainly more expensive, warmer instruments than his, but he
loved this cello, these pieces of wood that he had touched and held, daily, for
so many years. Needing no cello, no exotic food, no new books, he could not
think what he would do with money. So, there was the first decision made for
him: he would continue his frugal existence.
     Would he continue his work at the parish? Heath had asked Lowther to consider
working with him, and the idea was appealing. Working for Heath, he would not
be bored. But Lowther had had all the excitement he needed from life. The
simplicity and quiet of the rectory was more appealing. So, he would stay with
Father Pennant. In fact, as he prepared to live out his last days (or months,
or years), the only change of routine Lowther made was to take an hour in the
evening to write music, a thing he had thought about doing for years.
     On the day Father Pennant was accosted by the sheep, Lowther went to the Thames
River with no purpose in mind. He sat on the grass by the bank of the river and
watched the river run. The sun was warm, but not oppressive, after a rain. The
ground was damp, but Lowther did not mind. He had a copy of the
Barrow Topic
, the town's newspaper, under him. The clouds above were white. There was a slight breeze
that, from time to time, brought a whiff of rotting fish. Somewhere further
along, a catfish or a carp or even a pike must have died and washed up on the
banks of the Thames. Growing wild along the riverbank: goldenrods, thistles,
clover, chicory and, of course, grass: grass that was green, sparse where
people walked, grass that made it look as if a hillock beside the river had a
bad comb-over.
     The most beautiful aspect of the afternoon was the river. No, not the river,
which included both water and bank, but rather the water itself. The water was
various tints of green, blue or bluish green, with silvery-white eddies where
it moved around the stones and clumps of reeds close to the shore. The water
was like the tail of a long animal â something living and entirely unconcerned with the life beyond its
unpredictably twisting bed. As Lowther watched, he was reminded of Tomasine
Humble. Lowther hadn't liked her any more than most people had. She had been the very definition of
miserable. But one summer afternoon, an afternoon much like this one, he had
been out for a walk. It must have been a weekday, sometime before the end of
school, because, at least in his memory, there had been no one else around. He
had seen the old woman sitting alone, her back to the world, her feet in the
water.
     It was odd that his memory had taken so deep an impression of such an
insignificant moment. Lowther experienced a rush of sympathy for the poor
woman. It wasn't easy not knowing when death would come. This ignorance now united them, though
he was years younger than she had been on the day he'd seen her with her feet in the water.
     Lowther took off his shoes and socks, walked to the side of the river, sat on a
rock and allowed both of his feet to rest on a flat stone beneath the surface.
His feet, as the clear water ran over them, were distorted, slightly distended,
and looked as if they had been fixed to his ankles at an amusing angle. How
wonderful life was!
     He had been staring at the river for some time, moving his feet over the velvet
grime of his underwater shelf, when the time came to return to the rectory to
prepare an evening meal for Father Pennant. Lowther stood up, but too quickly.
The blood rushed from his head and, disoriented, he stepped into the river
where, landing barefoot onto a smooth stone, he slipped, falling over sideways,
hitting his head on a rock, passing out and drowning in water not six inches
deep. No final words, no last rites, no deep thoughts, no music. Just a quick
incursion of darkness, a darkness that was itself like a river.
It would be difficult to exaggerate the sadness Father Pennant felt when he was
asked to identify Lowther's body in the morgue. He had been called not long after the body entered the
morgue, so that, when the sheet was lifted to show Lowther's face, Lowther's hair was still damp. It had not been combed back. It clung to his forehead and
right cheek. At his left temple, there was dried mud, and that was the most
disturbing detail. It was so unlike Lowther to look dishevelled, as if he had
been in a fight of some sort. His corpse looked almost exactly like him, but
not quite. And Father Pennant felt as if this whole business were another of
Lowther's tests to see his reaction. It was hard to keep himself from gently slapping
Lowther's face and telling him, âStop, now. That's enough. This is disturbing, Lowther. Please get up.'
     â Is everything all right, Father? asked the attendant.
     â Yes, he answered. I'm fine. Thank you.
     He walked out of the morgue, dazed.
     There were two facets of Lowther's death that Christopher Pennant found difficult to take in. First, there was
the sheer fact of Lowther's being gone. It was impossible for him to reconcile the fallen trunk of flesh
with the living being it had once been. It was almost easier to believe that
the man had gone to Europe, say, and left his body behind for when he returned.
Of course, this was how he always felt about the dead. None of them stayed and
yet it was as if none of them had gone. It wasn't the finality of death that surprised him. It was the ghostly persistence of
life. As if to say, it isn't the dead who haunt the living; it's the living who haunt the dead.
     Even more difficult to encompass: Lowther had died, as he said he would, at the
age of sixty-three. Father Pennant had not, until the very moment he looked
down at Lowther's grey face, believed him. The idea that God would kill on schedule was
ludicrous. It was like those at Medjugorje who had regular appointments with
the Virgin: not only absurd but petty, if true. One had to imagine the Lord
keeping an eye on His datebook. But could you really call Lowther's death accidental? It was a disturbingly precise accident, if so. Which was it
then? Accident or divine intervention? In the days immediately following
Lowther's death, Father Pennant chose âaccident' and let it go at that. There was too much to do: a eulogy to write, Lowther's things to dispose of or to put in order, arrangements to be made.
     Hours after seeing Lowther's body in the morgue, Father Pennant tried to write a eulogy for Lowther's funeral. His first effort was filled with platitudes. Lowther had gone âto a better place,' âGod had called Lowther to Him,' Lowther's memory would be âevergreen' for those who had known him. Reading his own words back, he felt as if he had
betrayed someone. He rewrote everything. He wrote the eulogy three or four
times, from âPlease be seated' to âAmen.' He then rewrote it a few more times before it became clear that he had no idea
what he thought about Lowther's death. He had feelings, but they weren't yet settled in him. Was it really good that God should call the âtraveller' home? Was death a better place, a reward that waited? Was it loving of God to
have made us for death and, if so, why should God's love need explaining? Was there any love worthy of the name that could be
explained?
     Days passed and not one of the words he had written, save âAmen,' remained unchanged or unexamined. He thought fleetingly, but more than once, of
allowing someone else to write the sermon for him. That seemed worse than
mouthing clichés, though. It seemed cowardly.
     The problem was that he had, in some measure, succumbed to the sheep's curse. He actually did find it more difficult now than he had previously to
imagine a world âbeyond,' a world beyond this beautiful world. How prescient the sheep (that is, Lowther
or one of his friends) had been to suggest that greater sensitivity to this
world meant a weakening of the hold God had on the imagination. In the midst of
his rewrites, Father Pennant began to think of death as nothing but an end, and
how was one to speak of a cul-de-sac or a bricked-up exit? Death was no more
than the termination of lively functions, the collective refusal to go on of a
group of organs that had, moments before, collectively refused to desist. It
was an end, no more to be mourned or explained than the end of a symphony, the
final pages of a book, the last daub of paint applied to a canvas. And so,
death: significant only in being the last of something. But if death had so
little significance, what did that make of life? Wasn't life, as they say, given its poignancy and meaning by death?