Kéthani

TWO ONWARD STATION

That winter was the coldest in living memory, and January saw a record fall of snow across the north of England. On the last Monday of the month I sat in the warmth of the staff room and gazed out across the snow-sealed moorland, my mind completely blank. Miller, Head of Maths, dropped himself into the opposite seat, effectively blocking my view.

“Jeffrey,” he said. “You take year thirteen for Film Studies, don’t you?”

“For my sins.”

“What do you make of the Hainault girl?”

“I was away when she started,” I said. It had been mid-December, and I’d had other things on my mind.

“Oh, of course. Sorry. Well, you take them today, don’t you?”

“Last period. Why?”

He had the annoying habit of tapping the implant at his temple with a nicotine-stained finger, producing an insistent, hollow beat.

“Just wondered what you’d make of her, that’s all.”

“Disruptive?”

“The Hainault girl?” He grunted a laugh. “Quite the contrary. Brilliant pupil. Educated privately in France before arriving here. She’s wasted at this dump. It’s just…”

“Yes?”

He hesitated. “You’ll see when you take the class,” he said, and stubbed out his cigarette.

I watched, puzzled, as he stood and shuffled from the room.

“Tomlinson, Wilkins—if you want to turn out for the school team on Wednesday, shut it now.”

Silence from the usually logorrhoeic double act. I stared around the class, challenging.

“Thank you. Now, get into your study groups and switch on the screens. If you recall…” I glanced at my notes, “last week we were examining the final scenes of Brighton Rock. I want you to watch the last fifteen minutes, then we’ll talk.”

I glanced around the room. “Claudine Hainault?”

The new girl was sitting alone at the back of the class, already tapping into her computer. She looked up when I called her name, tossed a strand of hair from her eyes, and smiled.

She was blonde and slim, almost impossibly pretty. She appeared older than her eighteen years, something about her poise and confidence giving her a sophistication possessed by none of her classmates.

I moved to her desk and knelt. “Claudine, I’ll run through what’s happened so far, then leave you to it.”

“It is okay, Mr. Morrow.” She spoke precisely, with a slight accent. “I know the film.”

Only then did I notice that she was not implanted.

I returned to my desk, sat down, and willed myself not to stare at the girl.

The lesson progressed. Once, when I sensed that she was not looking, I glanced over at Claudine Hainault. The skin of her right temple was smooth, without the square, raised outline of the implant device.

With five minutes to go before the bell, a boy looked up from the screen. He shook his head. “But Mr. Morrow… he died. And this was before… before the implants. How did people live without going mad?”

I felt a tightness in my throat. “It was only two years ago,” I said. “You’ll learn all about that in Cultural Studies.”

The class went silent. They were all staring at Claudine Hainault. To her credit, she affected an interest in the screen before her.

Then the bell shattered the silence and all was forgotten in the mad scramble to be the first to quit the classroom.

At four I followed the school bus as it crawled along the gritted lane between snow-drifted hedges. I lived in a converted farmhouse five miles from the school, and Claudine Hainault, I discovered with a pang of some emotion I could not quite define, was my neighbour—our houses separated by the grim, slate-grey expanse of the reservoir.

The bus braked and the girl climbed down and walked along the track towards an isolated farmhouse, a tiny figure in a cold and inhospitable landscape. I watched her until she disappeared from sight, then I restarted the engine and drove home.

I pulled into the driveway minutes later, unlocked the front door and stepped into a freezing house. The framed photographs of Caroline glimmered, indiscernible, in the twilight. I turned on the lights and the heating, microwaved an instant meal and ate in the lounge while listening to the radio news. I washed it down with a bottle of good claret—but even the wine made me think of the Hainault girl.

For a long time I sat and stared out through the picture window. The Onward Station was situated only a mile away, a breathtaking crystalline tower, scintillating in the moonlight like a confection of spun ice. Tonight it illuminated the landscape and my lounge, a monument to the immortality of humankind, a tragic epitaph to all those who had suffered and died before its erection.

The following Friday at first break, Miller approached me in the staff room. “So what do you make of the Hainault girl, Jeff?”

I shrugged. “She’s very able,” I said non-committally.

“I’m worried about her. She seems withdrawn… depressed. She doesn’t mix, you know. She has no friends.” He tapped the implant at his temple. “I was wondering… you’re good at drawing the kids out. Have a word with her, would you? See if anything’s troubling her.”

He was too absorbed in relighting his cigarette to notice my stare. Troubling her? I wanted to ask; the poor girl isn’t implanted—what do you think is troubling her?

I had spent the week doing my best not to think about Claudine Hainault, an effort that proved futile. I could not help but notice her every time I took year thirteen; how she always sat alone, absorbed in her work; how she never volunteered to answer questions, though I knew full well from the standard of her written work that she had the answers; how, from time to time, she would catch my eye and smile. Her smile, at these times, seemed at odds with her general air of sadness.

At lunchtime I was staring out of the staff room window when I noticed a knot of kids gathered in the corner of the schoolyard. There were about six of them, confronting a single girl.

I rushed out and crossed the tarmac. The group, mainly girls, was taunting Claudine. She faced them, cursing in French.

“That’s quite enough!” I called. “Okay, break it up.” I sent the ringleaders off to visit the head-teacher and told the others to scarper.

“But we were just telling Claudine that she’s going to die!” one of the girls said in parting.

When I turned to Claudine she had her back to me and was staring through the railings at the distant speck of the Onward Station. I wanted to touch her shoulder, but stopped myself.

“Are you alright?”

She nodded, not looking at me. Her long blonde hair fell to the small of her back, swept cleanly behind her ears. When she finally turned and smiled at me, her expression seemed carved from ice, imbued with fortitude.

That afternoon I remained at school an extra hour, catching up on some marking I had no desire to take home. It was dark when I set off, but at least I wasn’t trapped behind the school bus, and the lanes were free of traffic. A couple of miles from school, my headlights picked out a quick, striding figure, silhouetted against the snow. I slowed down and braked, reached over and opened the passenger door.

She bent her knees and peered in at me.

“Claudine,” I said. “What on earth are you doing walking home? Do you realise how far…?”

“Oh, Mr. Morrow,” she said. “I missed the bus.”

“Hop in. I’ll take you home.”

She climbed in and stared ahead, her small face red with cold, diadems of melting snow spangling her hair.

“Were you kept back?” I asked.

“I was using the bathroom.”

I didn’t believe her. She had missed the bus on purpose, to avoid her classmates.

We continued in silence for a while. I felt an almost desperate need to break the ice, establish contact and gain her confidence. I cleared my throat.

“What brought you to England?” I asked at last.

“My mother, she is English,” she said, as if that were answer enough.

“Does your father work here?”

She shook her head minimally, staring straight ahead.

I concentrated on the road, steering around the icy bends. “Couldn’t you have phoned your mother to come for you?” I said. “She does drive?” Private transport was a necessity this far out.

“My mother, she is an alcoholic, Mr. Morrow,” she said with candour. “She doesn’t do anything.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.” I felt myself colouring. “Look,” I said, my mouth dry, “if you don’t want to catch the bus in future, I’ll drive you home, okay?”

She turned and smiled at me, a smile of complicity and gratitude.

I was aware of the pounding of my heart, as if I had taken the first irrevocable step towards founding a relationship I knew to be foolhardy but which I was powerless to prevent.

I looked forward to our short time together in the warmth of my car at the end of every school day. I probed Claudine about her life in France, wanting to know, of course, why she was not implanted. But with an adroitness unusual in one so young, she turned around my questions and interrogated me. I found myself, more often than not, talking about my own past.

At one point I managed to steer the conversation away from me. “I’ve been impressed with the standard of your work,” I said, aware that I sounded didactic. “Your grades are good. What do you plan to study at university?”

She wrinkled her nose. “Oh, I thought perhaps philosophy. I’m interested in Nietzsche and Cioran.”

I glanced at her. “You are?”

She smiled. “Why not?” she replied. “They seem to have all the answers, I think.”

“Do they?” I said, surprised. “I would have thought that a young girl like you…”

We came to a halt at the end of the track leading to her house, and the sudden silence was startling. She stared at me. I could see that she had half a mind to tell me not to be so patronising. Instead she shook her head.

“Life is awful, Mr. Morrow,” she said. “It always has been. And it hasn’t improved since they arrived. If anything, it has made things even worse.”

Tentatively, I reached out and took her hand. I wondered for a second if I had misjudged the situation completely; if she would react with indignation and fright, or even report me.

“If there’s anything I can do to help…” I said. Did she realise, in her teenage wisdom, that my words were just as much a cry for help as an offer of the same?

She smiled brightly, filling me with relief. “Thanks, Mr. Morrow. It’s nice to be able to talk to someone.” She climbed out and waved to me with a mittened hand before setting off down the farm track.

That night I set out to get seriously drunk. I placed three bottles of claret on the coffee table before the fire and sat in the darkness and drank. I would be lying if I claimed that I was trying to banish the painful memories of Caroline that Claudine stirred in me. More truthfully, I wanted to banish the knowledge of the failure I had become through inaction and fear. A lonely man has the capacity for self-pity so much greater than his ability, or desire, to change the circumstances that brought about such self-pity in the first place.

I was drinking because I realised the futility of trying to seek solace and companionship from a mixed-up eighteen year-old schoolgirl.

I awoke late the following day, lost myself in a book for a couple of hours, and later that afternoon watched the live match on television. Leeds had a returnee playing up front, but after the year’s lay off he had yet to find his previous form, and the game ended in a dull nil-nil draw. At six, as a new snowfall created a pointillistic flurry in the darkness outside, I started on the half bottle of claret remaining from the night before.

I was contemplating another drunken evening when I heard a call from outside and seconds later a frenzied banging on the front door.

Claudine stood on the doorstep, wet, bedraggled, and frozen. She began as soon as I pulled open the door, “She has fallen and hit her head. The lines are down and I can’t call the ambulance. We don’t have a mobile.”

“Slow down,” I said, taking her hand and pulling her across the threshold. “Who’s fallen?”

“My mother. She was drinking. She fell down the stairs. She is unconscious.”

She was wearing a thin anorak, a short skirt, and incongruously bulky moon-boots. Her legs were bare and whipped red from the frozen wind.

“I’ve a mobile somewhere.” I hurried into the lounge, dug through the cushions of the settee for the phone, and called an ambulance.

Claudine watched me, teeth chattering. With her hair plastered to her forehead, and her bare knees knocking, she looked about twelve years old.

I took her hand, hurried her from the house to my car. She sat in silence as I drove past the reservoir and turned down the track to her house.

She had left the front door wide open in her haste to summon help. I rushed inside. “In the lounge,” Claudine said. “Through there.”

The lounge was a split-level affair, with three steps leading from the higher level to a spacious area with a picture window overlooking the water. Claudine’s mother sprawled across the floor, having tumbled and struck her head on the edge of a wrought-iron coffee table. She was a thin, tanned woman with bleached-blonde hair. In her unconscious features I saw the likeness of Claudine, thirty years on.

The reek of whisky, spilt from the glass she had been carrying, filled the room.

I rolled her onto her side and did my best to staunch the flow of blood from her forehead, noticing as I did so that she, unlike her daughter, was implanted.

The ambulance arrived fifteen minutes later. The paramedics examined Claudine’s mother, then eased her onto a stretcher. I watched them load her into the back of the vehicle, my arm around Claudine. One of the medics asked Claudine if she wanted to accompany her mother in the ambulance.

“I’ll take her in the car,” I said before she had time to reply.

The ambulance backed up the track and raced, blue light flashing, down the lane into town. I made for the car.

Behind me, Claudine said, “I don’t want to go.”

“What?”

She stood, pathetic and frozen, in the snow. She shook her head. “I don’t want to go to the hospital. I’ll stay here.”

“On your own?”

She gave an apathetic shrug.

“Look… there’s a spare room at my place. You can stay there until your mother’s released, okay?”

She stared at me through the falling snow. “Are you sure?”

“Go get some clothes and things. And lock the door. I’ll be waiting here.”

I climbed into the car and watched as the lights in the house went out one by one. Claudine appeared at the front door, carrying a holdall and fumbling with a key ring. She climbed into the passenger seat and I set off up the track, turned right and continued along the lane until we reached my place.

I showed Claudine to the bathroom, and while she showered and changed I prepared a simple pasta dish. I had experienced a rush of adrenalin while attending to her mother and waiting for the ambulance, and I realised that something of the anxiety was with me still. My hands were shaking as I set two places at the table. I went over and over what I would say during dinner.

I was wondering what was taking her so long when I heard a voice from the lounge. “This is really a beautiful place.” There was a note of surprise in her voice, as if she thought that the domicile of a washed-up forty year-old teacher would prove to be an inhospitable dump.

I crossed the kitchen and stood in the doorway, watching her as she moved around the lounge. She was barefoot, dressed in flared jeans, which were back in fashion, and a white T-shirt that had either shrunk in the wash or was designed to reveal a strip of slim stomach.

She paused before the photographs of Caroline on the wall. She looked at me.

“My wife,” I said.

She said, casually, “I didn’t know you were married.”

“I’m not,” I said. “Any longer. She died in a car accident two years ago.”

She winced, ever so slightly. “Before they came?” she asked.

“Just a month before,” I said.

I joined her and stared at the photograph. Caroline smiled out at me. “She looked like a lovely person,” Claudine said.

I nodded. “She was.”

As if she feared that the subject might move us on to the reason why she was not implanted, Claudine drifted across the room to inspect the bookshelves.

I returned to the kitchen and served dinner.

We chatted as we ate, going over things we’d talked about before, school, local attractions, novels and films we admired.

“You can phone the hospital later,” I said at one point. “I’ll drive you over tomorrow if you like.”

She shook her head, not meeting my gaze. “It doesn’t matter. I’m not that bothered. She’ll come back when she’s better.”

I paused. “What happened between you two?” I asked at last.

She smiled up at me. She was so pretty when she smiled; then again, she had a certain sullen hauteur that was equally as attractive when she deigned not to smile.

“Oh, we have never got on,” she said. “I was always my father’s favourite. I think she was jealous. They fought a lot—it might have been because of me. I don’t know.”

“Are they separated?”

Claudine looked at me with her oversized brown eyes. She shook her head. “You might have heard of him—Bertrand Hainault? He was a philosopher, one of those popular media intellectuals you don’t have over here, I think.”

I shook my head. “Sorry. Not up on philosophy.”

“My father took his life last year,” she said quietly. “He and mother were fighting constantly, but I think it was more than that… I don’t know. It was all so confusing. I think it might have been a protest, too—a protest at what they were doing.”

Something caught in my throat. “He wasn’t implanted?”

“Oh, no. He was opposed to the whole process. He argued his position in televised debates and in a series of books, but of course no one took any notice.”

Except you, I thought, beginning at last to understand the enigma that was Claudine Hainault.

She changed the subject, suddenly brightening. “I’ll help you with the dishes, then can we watch a DVD?”

Later we sat on the settee, drank wine and watched a classic Truffaut. Claudine curled up beside me, whispering comments on the film to herself. She fell asleep leaning against me, and I watched the remainder of the movie accompanied by the sound of her breathing and the pleasant weight of her shampooed head against my shoulder.

Rather than wake her, at midnight I carefully lowered her to the cushions and covered her with a blanket. In the pulsing blue light from the TV, I sat for a while and watched her sleeping.

In the morning I was woken by the unfamiliar sound of someone moving about the house. Then the aroma of a cooked breakfast eddied up the stairs. I had a quick shower and joined Claudine in the kitchen. She was sliding fried eggs and bacon onto plates. The coffee percolator bubbled. She could hardly bring herself to meet my eyes, as if fearing that I might consider this rite of domesticity an unwelcome escalation of the intimacy we had shared the night before.

Over breakfast, I suggested that we go for a long walk across the moors. It was a dazzling winter’s morning, the sky blue and the snow an unblemished mantle for as far as the eye could see.

I drove Claudine back to her house to change into walking boots and a thick coat. We left the car at my place and started along the bright, metalled lane. Later we struck off across the moors, following a bridleway that would take us, eventually, to the escarpment overlooking the valley, the reservoir and a scattering of farmhouses.

Somewhere along the way her mittened hand found my cold fingers and squeezed. She was smiling as I exaggerated the misfortunes of the school football team, which I organised. I would never have thought that I could be so cheered by something as simple as her smile.

Claudine looked up, ahead, and her expression changed. I followed the line of her gaze and saw the sparkling pinnacle of the Onward Station projecting above the crest of the hill.

Her mouth was open in wonder. “God… This is the closest I’ve been to it. I never realised it was so beautiful.”

She pulled me along, up the incline. As we climbed, more and more of the Station was revealed in the valley below. At last we stood on the lip of the escarpment, staring down. My attention was divided equally between the alien edifice and Claudine. She gazed down with wide eyes, her nose and cheeks red with the cold, her thoughts unguessable.

It was not so much the architecture of the Station that struck the onlooker, as the material from which it was made. The Station—identical to the thousands of others situated around the world— rose from the snow-covered ground like a cathedral constructed from glass, climbing to a spire that coruscated in the bright winter sunlight.

As we watched, a pale beam—weakened by the daylight—fell through the sky towards the Station, bringing a cargo of returnees back home.

I put my arm around Claudine’s shoulders. She said, “The very fact of the Station is like the idea it promotes.”

I made some interrogational noise.

“Beguiling,” she said. “It is like some Christmas bauble that dazzles children, I think.”

“For ages humankind has dreamed of becoming immortal,” I said, staring at her. “Thanks to the Kéthani…”

She laid her head against my shoulder, almost sadly. “But,” she said, gesturing in a bid to articulate her objection. “But don’t you see, Jeff, that it really doesn’t matter? Whether we live seventy years, or seven thousand—it’s still the same old futile repetition of day-to-day existence.”

Anger slow-burned within me. “Futile? What about our ability to learn, to experience, to discover new and wondrous things out there?”

She was shaking her head. “It is merely repetition, Jeff—a going through the motions. We’ve done all these things on Earth, and so what? Are we any happier as a race?”

“But I think we are,” I said. “Now that the spectre of death is banished—” I stopped myself.

Claudine just shook her head.

Into the silence, I said, “I honestly don’t understand why you aren’t implanted.”

She looked up at me, so young and vulnerable. “I’ll tell you why, Jeff. I’ve read the philosophical works of the Kéthani and the other races out there—or at least read summaries of them. My father and I… in the early days we went through them all. And do you know what?”

I shook my head, suddenly weary. “No. What? Tell me.”

She smiled up at me, but her eyes were terrified. “They understand everything, and have come to the realisation that the universe and life in it is just one vast mechanistic carousel. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“Claudine, Claudine. Of course it doesn’t. But we must live with that. There never were any answers, unless you were religious. But you must make your own meaning. We have so much time ahead of us to live for the day, to love—”

She laughed. “Do you know something? I don’t believe in love, very much. I saw my parents’ relationship deteriorate, turn to hate. I can feel it,” she looked at me, “but I can’t believe that it will last.”

“It changes,” I began, then fell silent.

She squeezed my hand. “Let’s go home,” she said. “I’m hungry. I’ll prepare lunch, okay?”

We set off down the hillside, passing the Station. A ferryman driving a Range Rover pulled into the car park, delivering another dead citizen. Tonight, the darkness would pulse with white light as the bodies were transported to the Kéthani starship in orbit high above.

After lunch that afternoon we lounged before the roaring fire and talked. When the words ran out it seemed entirely natural, an action of no consequence to the outside world, but important only to ourselves, that we should seek each other with touches and kisses, coming in silence to some mutual understanding of our needs.

That night, as we lay close in bed, we stared through the window at the constellations. The higher magnitude stars burned in the freezing night sky, while beyond them the sweep of the Milky Way was a hazy opaline blur.

“Hard to believe there are hundreds of thousands of humans out there,” she said, close to sleep.

I thought of the new planets, the strange civilisations, that I would some day encounter—and I experienced a sudden surge of panic at the fact that Claudine was willingly forgoing the opportunity to do the same. I wanted to shake her in my sudden rage and demand that she underwent the implantation process.

It was a long while before I slept.

The following day an ambulance brought Claudine’s mother home, and I drove her over to the farmhouse. She kissed me before climbing from the car, suddenly solemn. “See you at school,” she said, and was gone.

Suddenly, the routine of school seemed no longer a burden. I could put up with the recalcitrance of ignorant teenagers and the petty in-fighting between members of staff. The sight of Claudine in the schoolyard, or seated at her desk, filled me with rapture. Her swift, knowing smile during lessons was an injection of some effervescent and exhilarating drug.

After school I would pull off the road, up some lonely and abandoned cart track, and we would make love in the little time we had before I dropped her off at home. She told me that she would spend the following weekend at my place— she’d tell her mother that she was staying with a friend—and the days until then seemed never-ending.

On the Friday, just as I was about to leave the building, Miller buttonholed me in the corridor. “What the hell’s going on, Jeffrey?”

My heart hammered. “What do you mean?”

“Between you and the Hainault girl, for Chrissake. It’s glaringly obvious. They way you look at each other. You’re a changed man.”

“There’s nothing going on,” I began.

“Look,” he said. He paused, as if unsure whether to go on. “Someone saw you with her yesterday—in your car on the moors.” He shook his head. “This can’t continue, Jeffrey. It’s got to stop—”

I didn’t let him finish. I pushed past him and hurried out and across to the car park. Claudine was standing by the bus stop on the main road, and as I let her in she gave me a dazzling smile that banished the threat of Miller’s words and the consequences if I ignored them.

On the Saturday night we lay in bed and talked, and I told her what Miller had said to me.

“It doesn’t matter,” she whispered in return. “They can’t do anything. We’ll be more careful in future, I think. Now forget about bloody Miller.”

We went for a long walk on the Sunday afternoon, avoiding the Station as if mutually fearing the argument it might provoke. Claudine was quiet, withdrawn, as if Miller’s words were troubling her.

She wept quietly after we made love that night. I held her. “Claudine—I’ve decided to resign, quit school. I’ll find a job in town. There’s plenty of work about. You can move in here, okay?” I babbled on, a love-struck teenager promising the world.

She was silent for a time. At last she whispered, “It wouldn’t work.”

Something turned in my stomach. “What?” I said.

“Love doesn’t last,” she said quietly. “It would be fine at first, and then…”

At that moment the room was washed in a blinding beam of light as the dead were beamed from the Onward Station to the Kéthani starship. I was appalled at what I saw in the sudden illumination. Claudine’s eyes were raw from crying, her face distorted in a silent grimace of anguish.

“Like everything,” she sobbed, “it would corrupt.”

I held her to me, unable to respond, unable to find the words that might convince her otherwise.

At last I said, “But I can still see you?” in desperation.

She smiled through her tears and nodded; touched, perhaps, by my naive hope.

In the early hours she slipped from the bed and kissed me softly on the cheek, before dressing and hurrying home.

Next day at school I desperately sought from Claudine some sign that I had not spoiled our relationship with my demands of the night before. In class, she smiled at me with forced brightness, a smile that disguised a freight of sadness and regret.

We had agreed that I would no longer drive her home, to scotch the rumours flying about the school, and that evening her absence during the journey was painful. I looked ahead to the weekend when we would be together, and the days seemed endless.

On Tuesday Claudine was not at school. I assumed that she had slept in and missed the bus.

During the first period I saw the police car pull into the school grounds, but thought nothing of it.

Fifteen minutes later the secretary tapped on the classroom door and entered. I should have guessed that something was amiss by the way she averted her gaze as she handed me the note—but what seems obvious in retrospect is never apparent at the time. The Head had called a staff meeting at first break.

When the bell went I crossed the hall to the staff room. I recall very well what I was thinking as I pushed open the door. My thoughts were full of Claudine, of course. The next time I saw her in private, I would plead with her to live with me once I had resigned my post at the school; to her claim that love never lasted I would counter that at least we should give it a try.

The room was crowded with ashen-faced teachers, and a dread silence hung in the air. Miller made his way to my side, his expression stricken.

“What?” I began, my stomach turning.

The Head cleared his throat and began to speak, and I heard only fragments of what he said.

“Claudine Hainault… Tragic accident… Her body was found in the reservoir…”

I felt myself removed from proceedings, abstracted through shock from the terrible reality unfolding around me.

Teachers began to weep. Miller gripped my arm, guided me to the nearest chair.

“The police think she slipped… went under… It was so cold she was paralysed and couldn’t get out.”

I wanted to scream at the injustice, but all I could do was weep.

“Such a terrible tragedy…” The Head paused and stared around the room. “As you know, she refused to be implanted.”

I made myself attend the funeral.

I drank half a bottle of whisky before leaving the house, and somehow survived the service. It brought back memories of another funeral, just over two years ago. Claudine was buried in the Oxenworth village churchyard, just three graves along from Caroline, beneath a stand of cherry trees which would flower with the coming of spring.

A television crew was present, along with reporters and photographers from the national press. So few people really died these days, and Claudine’s being young and attractive made the story all the more sensational. Relatives flew in from France. Her mother was an inconsolable wreck. I tried to ignore Miller and his begrudging words of commiseration; his attitude was consoling and at the same time censorious, unable to condone my love for Claudine.

I watched the coffin being lowered into the black maw of the grave, finding it impossible to accept that Claudine was within it. Then I slipped away and walked to the reservoir. A pathetic spread of wind-blown flowers, left by pupils and stricken locals, marked the spot on the bank where she had fallen.

That night I wrote a letter of resignation to the school authorities. It would be impossible to go back to the place where I had first met Claudine, to the classrooms haunted by her absence. I considered selling the house and moving from the area. Claudine still seemed present, as if she might at any second emerge from another room, smiling at me.

That night I drank myself unconscious.

In the morning, waking from oblivion to face the terrible fact of her death anew, I dressed and made my way downstairs and saw the letter lying on the doormat.

I read my name and address in Claudine’s precise schoolgirl hand.

With trembling fingers I ripped open the envelope and pulled out the single folded sheet.

I sank to the floor, disbelieving. I moaned with grief intensified, made more painful than I ever imagined possible.

I read her note a second time, then again and again, as if by doing so I might change what she had written, and what it meant.

My Dear Jeff, she began, and continued with words I would never forget, I’m sorry. I’m so very sorry—but I can’t go on. I love you, but it can’t last, nothing lasts. I’ve known joy with you and perhaps it is best to end that joy at its height, rather than have it spoil.

And I wanted to cry, no! I wanted the chance to vent my anger and tell her how very wrong she was.

You know I don’t want immortality. Life is so very hard to bear at the best of times. To face life everlasting… I feel at peace when I contemplate what I’m going to do—please try to understand. She was going to leave her house—had left her house—and walk to the reservoir, and give herself to the frigid embrace of the water… How could I understand that? How could I understand an act so irrational, an act of violence provoked by fears and pressures known only to herself? How often since have I wished I had known her better, had been a lover capable of being there when she needed me most?

I can hear you asking how could I do this to you. But, Jeff, you will survive—you have all the time in the universe. In a hundred years I will be a fleeting memory, and in a thousand…

They say that time heals all wounds.

And she had finished, With all my love, Claudine.

I spend a long time contemplating the events of the past, going over my time with Claudine and wondering where I went wrong. I blame myself, of course, for not persuading her to undergo the implantation process, for not being able to show her how much I loved her. I blame myself for not giving her reason enough to go on living.

I am haunted by her words, You have all the time in the universe…

At night I sit in the darkened lounge and stare out at the rearing edifice of the Onward Station, marvelling at its beauty and contemplating the terrible gift of the Kéthani.