Laura put down her cup of tea very carefully.
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?
"On the contrary," said Laura, "he will complete me. He hates everyone I hate—the living, that is. The dead he treats with appropriate respect. Last Tuesday we went to a funeral together for a woman neither of us had heard of, and he held my hand through the entire service. It was more romantic than Venice."
That afternoon, she attended the general's funeral. It was a splendid affair, with a military band playing something suitably somber and a clergyman whose voice trembled with a professional sorrow that Laura found deeply soothing. She stood near a yew tree, pretending to dab her eyes with a handkerchief that smelled of lavender, and studied the other mourners. laura by saki pdf
"Love," she repeated, as though he had suggested installing a maypole in the drawing room. "Love is for people who have not discovered the pleasure of a well-attended inquest. Love is for the sort of people who send flowers to hospitals. Julian, I married you because you hated the same things I hated. If you start loving things, you will become indistinguishable from the common herd of humanity, and I shall have to divorce you."
"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."
"He is a dangerous radical!" he spluttered, when Laura announced her intention to marry Julian. "The man wrote pamphlets! Against property! Against the church! Against, I suspect, the very concept of breakfast!" Laura put down her cup of tea very carefully
There was a young man—lean, dark, with the kind of restless hands that looked as though they were perpetually searching for something to break. He did not weep. He stared at the coffin with an expression of cold, scientific curiosity. Laura was fascinated.
On the day the decree was finalized, Laura received a letter. It was from Julian, written on black-bordered paper—funeral stationery. She opened it with keen interest.
"Laura," said her brother Egbert, stirring his tea with the air of a man who had long abandoned hope of finding a clean spoon, "you cannot go to the funerals of people you have never met." Hatred is more reliable than love
"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."
"So did Shelley," said Laura dreamily. "And he drowned beautifully."
Laura beamed. "How wonderfully honest! Most people come to funerals to pretend they cared. You come to celebrate. I like you."