And then after time—though all at once, really—engrossed, specific, unstinting, exactly as if it was all unscripted, all new ground, whatever they did. She could find the new with great naturalness, and he was moved by the sensation that something new could occur with someone: that self-awareness could take you on to immersion and then continue for a long while. He resisted nothing, abjured nothing, never lost touch with her in all of it. It was what he wanted.

And when it was over he was for a long time lost from words. She had turned on the lamp by the bed and slept with her hand covering her eyes. And he’d thought: where had this gone in my life? How would I keep this? And then: you don’t. This doesn’t keep. You take it when it’s given.

The clock beneath the lamp said 9:19. Wales could smell the solvent and the hyacinths on her painter’s table, sharp, murky aromas afloat in the warm room. Outside, voices spoke in the hall. Twice the phone rang. He showered, then walked to the window while she slept, and looked at the painted photograph, the two people, their smiling midwestern features distorted. She must hate them. Then he remembered the Bacons in the Tate. The apes in agony.

What he wanted to think about then was the funeral day in London. It was a relief to think about it. The balmy Saturday with summer lasting on. He’d taken the train from some friends’ outside of Oxford. The station—Paddington— had been empty, its long, echoing platforms hushed in the watery light, the streets outside the same. Though the tabloids had their tombstone headlines up. WE MOURN! WE GRIEVE! THEY WEEP! GOODBYE.

At the Russell Hotel, he’d stayed in and watched it all on TV. It was an event for TV anyway—his reactions were the story. Passing on the screen were the cortège, the acre of memorials, the soldiers, the bier, the Queen, the Prince. The awful brother. The boys with their perfect large teeth and the whites of their eyes too white. Through the open window, in with a breeze, he’d heard someone say—a woman, possibly in the next room, watching it all just as he was—“This’ll never happen again, will it?” she’d said. “Ya can’t say that about much, can ya? Completely unique, ya know? Well, not her, of course. She wasn’t unique. She was a whoor. Well, sure, maybe not a whoor.