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his new wife. Ted had aged and was not doing well living off his savings. Jimmy surreptitiously gave me a mint to take away the smell of liquor—some of the older people were strict about temperance.
    The visitors said the same things I had about the impossibility of believing it, and asked me had I had any hints. Stupefied by now, I told them about the headaches. The headaches must have had something to do with it. I found myself saying, They'll see what it was at the autopsy. And at the blasphemous, dreaded word, her mother began to wail and beat her head and try to rip the stitching of her dress as if she were a farmer's wife. Her behavior reminded Mrs. Douglas to rejoin her bereaved sister downstairs.
    And then, more of the same. How could it have happened? She was such a beautiful girl. And not finished with the stage, by any means. I wept with them, but also considered either telling them to be quiet or rending my own clothing. But I did not have the luxury of being an unrestrained peasant. We had been partly Westernized—all our class must have been—by watching the calmer, mere sniffling of mourning which characterized American and British films. And unlike the Godfather, beloved film character of Great Uncle, I knew I had no one to shoot. Curiously I kept coming and going to look at her and kiss her forehead, and believed crazily that if I just stayed away long enough, she might be encouraged by my absence into waking.
    Jimmy seemed relieved to be given the job of taking all the visitors' identity cards to the nearest metropolitan police station to get permission for them to be on the streets after curfew. Of course, Jimmy knew a lieutenant in the Overguard whom the Overalls would be able to call for verification that our grieving and our journeys were licit, and not a conspiracy against the state. As for the Kennedys, who had permanent laissez-passer for all days and all hours, they turned up just after Jimmy went away. Their intimate solicitude formed the necessary screen between me and the relatives. I had been propping up the Manners family, and they had been propping me up. Now we had two people present who were sad but not demented, and I resolved to take advantage of that. To the Kennedys I could somehow reveal my true misery, and exorcise my doubt that she was not dead in the bedroom.
    She's dead, I told Andrew and Grace, the first people to whom it could be admitted.
    I heard Mrs. Manners declare, from amongst the arthritic remnants of her loveliness, She goes to join her father now.
    I'd never really met Sarah's father; he had been struck rather young by some sort of disabling aneurysm, and the once or twice he had addressed me before his death, he did so painfully, with partially paralyzed lips. Sarah's mother had borne all this and had been loyal to her daughter's decision to retire as a television actress, although in the circles in which she moved, she must have been plagued by questions about it—about why one so beautiful and successful should want to get off the merry-go-round. I got up, crossed the room, and embraced her. And we wept together. The Kennedys came up and told both of us, her and me, that they would take me home to stay with them.
    The medical examiner's men arrived and reticently put us on notice that they would soon be removing Sarah. The relatives all milled into the bedroom and queued to kiss Sarah's face, and at last departed the room so that I could remain with her. I noticed increasingly her look of faint astonishment, not an astonishment of sudden pain or unpredicted treachery, but the surprise of a person who has received a sudden gesture of friendship and grace. She had decided, for some reason, in the last moment, that death had been kind to her. This idea struck me as so pitiable and innocent that I covered her face with kisses and tears, and Dr. Colless came in and held my shoulder, and swore it would not be the last time I saw her. He swore that when her body was