Sin by Josephine Hart Page B

blanket to wrap around my shoulders.
    â€œMrs. Garton. Lady Harding. It would be better for you to remove your wet clothes.”
    â€œNo.” From us both.
    Healers hate to feel useless. Hate to recognise that nothing works. Like priests, they need to prove their power. Most particularly in extremis. Except that, unlike priests, they have nothing to offer the dead body. Certainly not what the priest can offer—a new disembodied existence. Still with us. But not seen. Why should the dead want to stay? Watching the weeping but not able to join in. After all, it was their life that was lost. No future. Time finished for them. Full stop. No new sentence. No new paragraph.
    The boys’ lives. A short story. Their future, gone. No future. “Never, never, never, never, never.” Five nevers. I always thought that significant. And “kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill.” Lear needed the six beats for his rage. The two interwoven, of course. For who has grieved who has not raged? And raged, again.
    And now, along the top of the hill, ran dark figures. Rubber-armoured. For the water. Their heads encased in monstrous balaclavas for the deep.
    I swam with them to the point of my last vision of my son. As he left me. Another clasped too tightly to him. How mothers hate all others who embrace their child too tightly. They know how easy it is to squeeze life away. So that only a body remains.
    And the remains of his life, this body which I had so loved, came finally to the surface. Attached to the other. The boys’ legs, like tree trunks, were wrapped around each other. Like lovers in sleep. Motionless. Stephen’s arms locked round William’s waist. William’s face seemed pressed deeply into Stephen’s chest. As though it were a part of Stephen’s body. Stephen’s head was thrown back. His last act had been to gasp for air. Before he brought William down. How well Stephen had known all his life what it was to gasp for air.
    And suddenly it was what I had to do. Not to cry. Just suddenly, convulsively, to gasp for air. I lived.
    Dead bodies are heavy. The young divers, like warriors in a field of battle, tried to prise the boys apart.
    â€œNo.”
    â€œNo?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œMrs. Garton …”
    â€œLeave them as they are. Don’t separate them.”
    â€œBut …”
    â€œDon’t separate them.”
    The bodies—like a single statue—were laid on the bank. It seemed a single death. So much did they resemble a sculpture of one long, fine young man. His head that of Stephen. And his legs those of William.
    The men began their work. Two of them gently releasing the bodies as the others forced oxygen into their rejecting lungs. Trying, these strangers, to deceive death.
    But death had been clever. With one’s weakness, and the other’s love, death had harvested them both. And the sun still shone, in a weak October way. It did not withdraw in sorrow. Not even when death’s triumph was finally acknowledged.
    Lexington waited for us and our entourage, as we walked slowly towards it with our dead children. The boys. Our sons. Who after all would not now have the east or west wing. Perhaps Lexington rejoiced, that in time it might be left alone at last.
    Through the French windows and onto the terrace ran Charles and Dominick. My mother stood motionless, eyes closed.
    â€œOh, my God …. Oh, my God.” Dominick’s voice.
    He did not run to me. He turned, retching into the protection of the half hedge that separated the terrace from the lawn. Charles stood looking down at the stretchers, guarded on either side by Elizabeth and me, standing behind the bearers. He covered his face for a moment. Then he turned and removed my mother from the path of the carriers with their heavy burden.
    At the front of the house, the waiting ambulance received its cargo. We followed slowly in cars. Not ready yet for a longer separation. The