then, buried her head under the pillows. But Pip had pulled them away and gone on, "All this rot about things being worse for those who love than those who have to endure the bloody business itself...

It had been a long time before Andrea understood why Pip had tortured her like that. Pip had passed out the essence of life to everyone and that essence for Pip had been happiness and suffering properly mixed up together. Andrea had come to realize, finally, that Pip had wanted her to suffer as much as possible so that when it was the other way, the time of sweet tenderness and comforting, that they would still be equals in what they could give each other. It had mattered so much to Pip, so very much.

In the hospital, towards the end, when there was little left but the drugs and a shred of will she had said, "Tell them the world that it's all a bit of a bloody waste, won't you, darling? I mean . . . the way we live . . . Tell them... the human race still has enemies far more important than itself. . ." Later death itself had seemed remarkably impotent in the fact of all that had gone before. The burial. The end. The newspaper accounts, terse, polite, a little genuinely sad and a little genuinely indifferent. So an English woman novelist had died of cancer at the young age of forty-one ("They never get one's age quite right when you die, darling. Whatever can it matter?" she knew Pip would have said.) and was mourned by two nations.

"I have never for the life of me been able to understand why people are always talking about the sad funerals they don't want to have. How they don't want people weeping and wailing all over the place about them or something! What kind of sense does that make? Of course, Weep for Me When I Am Dead, My Dearest! What else is life if not the things one feels at the end of someone's existence. My God, I do hope they sing the saddest possible songs at my do. I rather think, in fact, that I should like some of the Negro spirituals. They could tear out even Uncle Evelyn's heart!"

That had been before she was sick at all. Three years before one winter weekend at a ski-lodge. Oh, yes, Andrea thought suddenly, that weekend. The weekend that Pip had become involved in the one experimental little infidelity of their relationship. Something or other which had involved some shockingly silly little actress, which Pip had voluntarily reported on the same evening with something of a statement of future philosophy on the question: "A hell of a bore, you know. I shan't ever bother again. I was thinking about you through the whole dull nonsense, which is really what I wanted to find out. Well, yes, she was attractive-but she had the most indescribably weird notions. I should be embarrassed to even repeat them to you . . . Are you angry, darling?"

As a matter of fact, Andrea had been furious and had already packed one and a half suit cases before Pip's plea. Pip's reasoning. Pip's really devastating self-incrimination, Pip's outright challenge, had finally turned into Pip's fingers at the back of her neck, just softly enough, just firm enough-spreading the pleasure from the beloved long, narrow fingers across her shoulders and over her back, and Pip saying by then, nothing at all, clinging to her, her lips brushing her neck ...

Andrea smiled at the sea. There had been no more actresses. But three years. later there had been the famous Negro baritone she had hired to stand above the bier and pour out "I Been 'Buked and I Been Scorned"-and a number of other things like that about finding one's way home no matter what the condition of the soul. The two members of Pip's family who had made it from London

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