Even so, she was fortunate. It was a slick trade-off, from the former certainties of religion, to a better state of finitude. Instead of a cloudless eternity, the prospect of an afterlife, in this age you got the consolation prize — death as the unspoken secret of life, immanent but ignored, suffering as something that happened to other people, life to be lived free of the awareness of death, like being a dog or a cat. Free and ignorant. Then suffering came as a shock, and death as something incongruous, having nothing to do with life. Perhaps it was better like that. She had read about Zeno and she understood the argument though it hardly helped. If you were rational about it, death didn’t happen to the individual because it was at the point of death that the individual ceased to be. At death, one’s subjectivity ceased. You were no longer yourself. This was all well and good, thought Rosa, quite coherent philosophically but no damn consolation for the snuffing out of me! Me of all people! she thought. This made her grip her bag in a spasm of fear, and then she turned to a man near her who was shuffling his feet and wondered how he was bearing up under the knowledge, this irrefutable knowledge that he would be nothing, one day, or at best something else entirely. Then there were days when she thought it was absurd to mind so much. There was nothing of interest about her — why not feel far more scandalised by the death of Shakespeare, or the death of Socrates — murdered by Athens — or the death of Mozart with his works unfinished? With Rosa, the world would only lose another drone, supplied with her set of interests and anxieties. For her grief, her self-mourning, she was a fool. It had sent her off in a great hurry, trying to find something she was too unreasonable to identify. She was chasing over the hills, following the weft, thinking I lost it last time, but just one more try, I’m sure I’ll find it — stamping over ruins and then it would vanish and she would be thinking some miniature thought, something diced about Liam, or her concerns would shift to the rent, or she would notice her neighbour — and here she glanced to one side and found her neighbour was a gun-faced man of forty-five, baked in body odour. She moved away from him, she didn’t want his energies flowing into hers; she didn’t want to catch a trace of his aura or id, or any other categorisable aspect of him that might be coming her way.
On this bus full of people casting sharp glances at each other, she was thinking of Socrates, who said that it was foolish to fear death, because there was no knowing if death was a better state than life. That was sensible enough, in the abstract, but there were absolutes. In the here and now death — the deaths of others — robbed you of love. While you were living it robbed you; who could say what happened later. A couple of decades ago she had been a teenager, loved by both her parents, by her remaining grandparents. She had been young and mostly oblivious, and she had passed the days driving through the Avon countryside with her friends in borrowed cars. They went off drinking cider; they went to caves in the cliffs where the boys smoked pot. They were impetuous and lucky. There was nothing illustrious about her youth. She didn’t really read and she wasn’t talking ancient Greek at the age of six. She was bred on teenage magazines and TV; it was only later she started leafing through Plato with a guilty conscience, trying to please someone or impress herself, she wasn’t sure. Of course we were barbarous, thought Rosa, but it didn’t matter. That was our undeveloped state. Now we have no excuses for our barbarity. Then we could say — hand on heart — that we were truly witless. Pure in our lack of wit. We drove out with boys in the back of the car, thrilled by their closeness, the proximity to sex they represented. Peer pressure was mighty and terrible. Despotic youth, thought Rosa, smiling to herself.
And now she was thinking of grandmother Lily, who never really recovered from the death of her husband. Grandfather Tom went modestly, in his prime. It had become his custom to spend the days after his retirement working under the car, for no real reason other than his liking for spanners and grease. He emerged around teatime smelling of sweat, wiping his hands on a rag. In the evenings he liked to go to the working men’s club. He played bowls, watched Tom and Jerry cartoons, wrote comic verse, smoked with friends. One day he had observed the usual ritual, wiped a rag around the back of the car, polished it and washed his hands and he was sipping tea in the kitchen when it started to rain. Grandmother Lily ran outside to bring the washing in, calling to her husband to help. He failed to follow her; exasperated, she dragged the basket in, preparing to remonstrate, and found he had collapsed. He recovered a little in hospital, waking to say that he had fulfilled all his ambitions; he had no complaints, he said, and then he had another heart attack and died. But grandmother Lily preserved a quite unSocratic view of things. She wasted slowly, grew thin and blotched. And there was grandmother Mary, tall and graceful, with her hair newly permed. She was the direct antithesis of grandmother Lily: she was always smart and cheerful; she went out regularly for a shampoo and set. She had ten outfits that she wore in strict rotation. A pleated skirt or two, a cashmere jumper. Much of it in pink and blue. Then she had a pair of blue trousers, long and wide-legged. Her clothes were forties in style. She had fixed her taste as a young woman, and had never faltered. She liked watching snooker — she called it snukker — and reading crime novels. Rosa always thought it was incongruous: her delicate, kindly grandmother, holding a book with a bloody corpse on the cover. She had a drawer full of multicoloured pencils. They had belonged to grandfather Don, who had been an engineer. She was devout, a quiet member of the church. Dear grandmother Mary, who never worked in her life. She knitted jumpers and made Victoria sponges. She helped with a thousand village fetes. Early in her marriage she took in girls — fallen women, pregnant at sixteen, cast out by their families. It was a gentle life, spent in small villages, dealing with people who knew her well. Virtuous, in its way. When Rosa thought of grandmother Mary she saw her in the living room of her house surrounded by ancestral china, in repose.
Grandmother Mary believed that things were orchestrated by a benevolent deity. Still she died alone, stricken by dementia. She never questioned the God that sent her mad, but Rosa wondered how she might have understood it, had she still been capable of rational enquiry. Because the self was memory and memory defined the self, and at the last grandmother Mary had no memory at all. She would be a fugitive eternal being, unable to find anyone she recalled in the celestial wash of souls, or confusing those she found, mixing up her father and her husband, uncertain of her friends. Though there might be an essence, and Rosa had hoped this was what grandmother Mary had thought, on those few days when she was lucid enough to understand what was happening to her. There might still be a kernel of the self, untouched by disease, preserving the original personality of the creature. This might have been what Socrates meant, thought Rosa, when he talked of the self. Something untouched by all the things of life. Untouched even by memory and the shifting pattern of concerns that define the individual. An eternal spark, divorced from everything ephemeral.
She shook her head hard, and forced herself to focus. Now the bus was stuck behind a ritual file of cars, hemmed in on all sides. Gathering her bags around her, her hold all weighed down with a pair of Jess’s walking boots and now these presents in their plastic wrappers, Rosa stared at the street, at the flecks of brown and black on the buildings, flecks of great age, at the columns of a church, the glass sheen of an office block. The street was a mingled frieze of shine and drab. It was mottled, but she liked it. She stared around at the other passengers. She watched a pair of boys slapping each other warmly around the head. There was a man with an immense nose reading a paper, apparently absorbed in it. Each nostril a work of art. Truly unusual. That was a characterful face, she thought. The bus was taking its time, shuddering along Euston Road, the glass shaking. Not far from here, thought Rosa, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote her works, birthed her children, and expired. Rousseau declares that a woman should be made a coquettish slave in order to render her a more alluring object of desire, a sweeter companion to man, whenever he chooses to relax himself. What nonsense! Still the wind was gusting down the streets. Everything outside the bus was controlled by the force of the wind; on one side of the road people were hunched against it, on the other they were gusted onwards. The bus came to a sudden halt, and everyone jerked forwards. For a moment their faces showed confusion and injured pride. For a brief instant, they knew the whole thing was unnatural and absurd, being on this bus in this road jammed with traffic, being jolted around as the bus trembled on its sluggish course. They understood, briefly, all of them, that it was crazy, that wherever they were trying to go it didn’t really matter, and really they should have just stayed in the savannah swamps firing arrows at the fauna. That would have been better than sitting it out on this rattling clattering bus with a mounting feeling of nausea and this underlying sense of perplexity, this semi-suppressed question of why the hell? But then she looked around again and they were all rustling newspapers, and she was no longer sure if that was what they had been thinking at all.