Free Time to Be in Earnest by P. D. James

to the edge of the table. Henry James did this whenever he came to tea with the Stephen family and as his long sentences untwined themselves the chair would slowly tilt backwards and the children’s eyes would be fixed on it, hoping that it would finally overbalance and deposit James on the floor. Time after time he managed to recover himself, but indeed one day it did happen. The chair went over and the novelist, undismayed, was flung on the floor. He was unhurt and, after a moment, completed his characteristically ceremonious and flowery sentence.

SUNDAY, 17TH AUGUST
    To Oxford yesterday to be Guest of Honour at a crime weekend at St. Hilda’s College, of which I am an Honorary Fellow.
    I was to have seen a friend for lunch at the Old Parsonage, but she rang to say that she has a virus so I kept the table booking and went with Alixe Buckerfield de la Roche, a friend who lives in my house in Oxford.
    She was deeply concerned about two recent student suicides at Oxford. A postgraduate student hanged herself at the end of term and Alixe witnessed the terrible distress of her parents and young brother atthe Somerville College memorial service. The suicide of the young is more common now than it was in my youth. I can’t recall the suicide of a single friend or acquaintance during my childhood or adolescence. Perhaps today we all take happiness as our right and unhappiness is seen as shameful and insupportable. Or is it that some people have an imperfect appreciation of linear time? For them, the present moment is immeasurable, fixed in an eternal agony. There can be no hope that things will be better tomorrow, because the idea of a tomorrow has no reality.
    Sitting in the garden in St. John Street I thought of the words of William Blake which I quoted in
An Unsuitable Job for a Woman:
    Down the winding cavern we groped our tedious way, till a void boundless as the nether sky appeared beneath us, and we held by the roots of trees and hung over this immensity; but I said: if you please we will commit ourselves to this void and see whether providence is here also.
    It is wonderful prose, but hardly helpful in the context of self-destruction. If providence is not there we shan’t be aware even of disillusionment.
    I returned to London by the 7:10 bus this morning, a good time to travel before the heat of the day. The sun was a smudged silver ball and the sheep seemed to move sluggishly through that early morning mist. Polly-Hodge wasn’t waiting for me at the door as she usually is, but came through the cat-flap into the kitchen as soon as I put on the kettle for the tea I didn’t wait to make in Oxford. She must have been sleeping in someone’s coal-house, if such a thing now exists, as the top of her head was black. She looked diminished and a little uncared-for, which she always manages to do if left for more than a day, even though provided with fresh food and water.
    I read the Sunday papers with little enthusiasm. Do the public really care about the antics of the Princess of Wales and her lover? Then to 11 o’clock Mass at All Saints, Margaret Street, where Prebendary Gaskill preached on death, an unusual choice of subject. He touched on the last rites. The thought that the last physical sensation of a Christian would be the touch of holy oil on the forehead is seemly, but I wonder how often that happens in practice. Death, after all, seldom comes when invited or by appointment. We are likely to take our last breath, whether peaceful, gasping, in pain, or mercifully unconscious, in a place wewouldn’t have chosen. And even if our loved ones have managed to manoeuvre their way through the traffic and have avoided hold-ups on the motorway to arrive at the hospital in time, essentially we all die alone. They will see us but we shall not see them. The most I hope for is a sight of the sky. The last person I watched as she lay dying had had nothing to look at during those last few days of consciousness but the wall of her