Julian looked at her with an expression she had never seen before—soft, almost tender. It was disgusting.
"I am practical," she countered. "Living people are so terribly particular. They want you to remember their birthdays, their ailments, their opinions on the drainage system. The dead ask only that you stand quietly by their grave for ten minutes and look appropriately sorrowful. It is the most restful social engagement left in England."
"Why not?" replied Laura, adjusting a hat that looked like a small, feathered hearse. "They will not complain of the crowding. And one meets such interesting people at funerals—people who are not merely dying to meet you, but have actually achieved the distinction of being dead in your vicinity."
"Julian," she said one evening, "you are becoming sentimental. Yesterday you sighed at a widow. A real, actual sigh. I thought you were above such biological weaknesses." laura by saki pdf
Laura read the letter twice. Then she smiled—a small, sharp smile that Egbert would have recognized as the prelude to something regrettable.
The wedding was small, sharp, and awkward. Egbert did not attend. He sent a letter instead, warning Laura that she was making a catastrophic mistake. Laura framed it and hung it in the hallway, next to a funeral card for a child she had never met. For six months, the marriage was a triumph of mutual misanthropy. Laura and Julian attended twenty-seven funerals together. They kept a ledger, ranking each for quality of music, depth of grave, and quantity of genuine tears shed by the bereaved. A funeral with no tears was considered "efficient"; a funeral with hysterical weeping was "excellent sport."
But then, quietly at first, a change crept in. Julian looked at her with an expression she
"You are not Shelley. You are a woman of thirty-four who collects mourning clothes like other women collect butterflies. This man will ruin you."
Egbert winced. He had a sensitive soul, which Laura regarded as a kind of internal malformation, like a cleft palate of the character.
Laura beamed. "How wonderfully honest! Most people come to funerals to pretend they cared. You come to celebrate. I like you." "Living people are so terribly particular
She rather liked coincidences.
Yours in mutual contempt, Julian
Dear Laura, it read. You were right. Hatred is more reliable than love. I have spent these last weeks trying to love the world, and I find it insufferably tedious. The living are, as you once said, terribly particular. They expect gratitude, reciprocity, and other exhausting performances. I miss you. I miss our funerals. I miss the way you used to rank the sandwiches afterwards. Will you not reconsider?
She did not write back. Instead, she began planning her next funeral. It was, she had heard, going to be a very good one. The deceased had been a tax collector, universally detested. There would be no tears. There might, if she was lucky, be a fistfight.