First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (31 page)

I stood there at the door, stunned. Harry Greene dead! I imagined him now, at the bottom of a warm sea, his books shifting with the eddying currents, the wavering pages browsed by parrotfish that swam in and out of his skull. And Captain Stillar’s last paintings, down there too! They would have become waterlogged, the lizard tattoos would have peeled away from his models, the models themselves in time peeled away, the canvases scoured clean by the salt
water, the whole process of painting reversed.

“What is it, Andrew?” Maria called from the sofa. For I was still standing by the door. I went over and gave her the letter. She read it quickly.

“Oh, Andrew,” she said. “I’m very sorry.”

She got up and put her arms around me.

“It’s hard to believe,” I said.

“You were so fond of him,” she said.

“I was,” I said. “Yes. I was.”

We sat down on the sofa. I was still holding the other envelope. It was one of those thin, rice-paper envelopes with the air-mail edges. I recognized Harry’s handwriting on the outside—it always looked as though he was stabbing at the paper, trying to pin the words to it. I carefully tore the envelope open. The letter inside was a single page.

I gave the letter to Maria, and she read it too.

“I wish I’d met him,” she said. “He must have seen how unhappy you were when he visited you.”

“I guess he wasn’t easy to fool,” I said.

“He was old for a sailor, wasn’t he?”

“He must have been around seventy. I doubt if he ever intended to stop. He and Captain Stillar were alike: they both had to keep making yoyages to do the thing they loved most.”

“Well, let’s do as he asked,” Maria said.

“What?”

“Look up the co-ordinates,” she said. “If he spent so many years trying to find them, we should at least check them out.” And she went to the bookcase and came back with an atlas. She studied it for a while.

“There it is!” she said. She pointed to the map. “See?” She was smiling.

I looked: the co-ordinates were right over Camberloo.

“Not a very likely spot,” I said.

“Perhaps, and perhaps not,” Maria said. “Do you remember the sign on Harry’s cabin door? Do you remember the words?”

I’d seen it almost every day of the voyage to St Jude. I could see it before me again:

I recited it for her.

“It seems so true,” she said. “What if Paradise is where you are, only it’s hard to realize it? What if you can’t find it till you love and trust somebody enough, and then wherever you are is Paradise?”

I said it sounded like a good idea.

“My mother used to complain about some of the places my father was sent to,” Maria said, “and he used to tell her they weren’t so bad. He’d say, ‘A rose can grow even on a dunghill.’ Not that Camberloo’s anything like a dunghill. But I’m sure it doesn’t look the way people expect Paradise to be.”

That got her thinking about Harry again. “Do you remember he told you a good book can be a talisman,” she said, “even if you never actually got round to reading it? Maybe the same thing applies to words. Why shouldn’t a word be a talisman, too? Even if you’re not sure exactly what it means? Why shouldn’t ‘love’ be a talisman? And ‘trust’?”

I wanted to please her.

“Maybe you’re right,” I said.

“Remember what Moses Atkinson said when we were on the mountain—that snakes never learn anything by experience?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Well,” she said, “he may have been right about snakes, but not about us. Human beings can learn how to love.”

We were sitting on the sofa with the atlas still between us. She sat upright suddenly.

“Andrew, I have an idea. Will you add all this to your notebook? After all the nightmares and the horrors, will you go back to your desk, right now, and write this down?”

I was reluctant. I felt foolish.

“Please,” she said. “If you won’t do it for yourself, will you do it for me?”

I took the plunge.

“Why not?” I said. “Of course I will.”

“Will you write that love and trust are the most important things in the world?”

“Yes, I will,” I said.

She seemed delighted.

“Thank you, Andrew. And by the way, if you’re ever having one of those processions again”—she was trying not to smile—“you know: your Monstrous Regiment of Women? Will you put me in it? Put me in it holding a banner with two words on it:
LOVE
and
TRUST
. Will you do that?”

I tried not to smile, too; but I couldn’t help it.

“Yes, all right. I will,” I said.

“And so that you never forget,” she said, “will you make them the last words in your notebook?”

Yes, Maria. I will. I will and I have. The last words in the notebook are
LOVE
and
TRUST
.