He called an old friend and he told him. He could only have been in his fifties. Still teaching, we’d see him in The White Horse with a glass of wine on the table next time at all times of the day. He always wore black, a black t-shirt and rarely a coat. He used to have a flat here but moved somewhere nearer town, I think, last year. He was a Scot. It must’ve been the drink, he said.
He told me he’d read notice of her of death in the local paper. He looks for names he knows in the obituaries every week. No deaths, he usually says. Yesterday she was there. I listened to him tell his sister when he called her last night. She remembered her too. She and her husband used to own a cafe in town, way back. Women used to go there in their best hats, apparently. It was on an upper floor with a bay window looking down onto the street. Going there was an occasion.
What’s the name of that Irish singer you like? he asked in the early hours. I told him. She’s died, he said. I think she killed herself, though their not saying. Poor love. Poor beautiful girl. It breaks a little bit of my heart.
D plays Shubert’s Death and the Maiden on the radio and I think of Munch’s drawings of the life-filled girl, naked and clinging to Death’s bony frame.
