Free Afterlife by Colin Wilson Page A

Heywood’s agnosticism were two experiences of apparent contact with the dead. The first took place in Washington DC in the 1930s. Rosalind Heywood’s husband Frank was in the diplomatic service there. At parties they often met an attractive woman called Julia. One day, she suddenly asked Rosalind Heywood to read her hands — she dabbled in palmistry. As she took Julia’s hands, she found herself saying gravely: ‘You will never find what you are looking for in this world, will you?’ She replied, just as gravely: ‘No.’
    Some weeks later, Julia presented Rosalind Heywood with a snapshot of herself; she was just about to set out for a trip to Peru. ‘Orders’ told Rosalind Heywood that this was important; she accepted the photograph. On the journey to Peru, the plane crashed in the Andes and there were no survivors.
    She found that Julia’s name was stuck in her head, being repeated over and over again. Two days later, she wrote a letter of condolence to Julia’s mother, then lay down on a settee to rest. A Viennese woodcut suddenly fell off the wall on to the floor. The woodcut was undamaged; its cord was intact; so was the nail on the wall. ‘I was standing by my desk trying to puzzle out this conundrum when my eye caught the letter to Julia’s mother, and at that moment I heard Julia speak. She spoke in no uncertain terms. ‘Don’t send that silly letter’, she said. ‘Go to my mother now, straightaway, and tell her to stop all this ridiculous mourning at once. I’m very happy and I can’t stand it’
    She experienced an understandable hesitancy; if, as the wife of a British diplomat, she went around delivering messages from the dead, she might get a reputation for eccentricity. ‘The more I hesitated, the more insistent “Julia” became …’ At last:
    feeling indeed every kind of fool, I got out my car and went. What made the situation yet more embarrassing was that at the time Iknew nothing of the conventions of Americans from the Southern States in the face of death, and ignorantly assumed that Julia’s mother would behave like mine in similar circumstances, wear her ordinary clothes, and hide her grief under a mask of frozen normality. If this were so, to barge in and ask her to stop an excessive display of mourning seemed both pointless and rude. However, on arrival at her house, I found all the blinds down and in the hall a covey of melancholy women, talking in whispers and looking like crows. ‘May I see Mrs Howard?’ I asked them.
    They looked shocked. ‘Certainly not’, they said. ‘She’s in bed mourning.’
    That settled it. ‘I must see her’, I insisted, and after much protest they took me up to her room. There, indeed, was the poor woman, alone, in the dark, in bed. Intensely embarrassed, for I supposed this was by her own choice, I got out my message, expecting to be thrown out as mad or impertinent. But her face lit up. ‘I knew it,’ she cried, ‘I knew she’d hate it, and I didn’t want it. I shall get up and stop it at once!’
    On me the effect of her response was curious. From that moment all sense of Julia’s presence vanished; it was as if, content, she had gone off at once on her own affairs, and from then on I thought no more of her than was normal.
    Rosalind Heywood’s second experience of ‘contact with the dead’ occurred some twenty years later, in London. An old friend, Vivian Usborne, had died after a long illness. Towards the end, he expressed a certain amount of bitterness at the idea that death snuffs out man like a candle and leaves nothing behind.
    About ten days later I went early one morning to get a painting by him which had been given to me. It is perhaps relevant that I was hastening to another appointment in which I was emotionally involved and felt no nostalgic longing for Vivian. As I hurried into his room to fetch the picture I was shocked by a sickening blast of what I have come to call the smell of death. I am never quite sure whether