Paul went about from place to place, doing the business of the death. He met Clara in Nottingham, and they had tea together in a café, when they were quite jolly again. She was infinitely relieved to find he did not take it tragically.
Later, when the relatives began to come for the funeral, the affair became public, and the children became social beings. They put themselves aside. They buried her in a furious storm of rain and wind. The wet clay glistened, all the white flowers were soaked. Annie gripped his arm and leaned forward. Down below she saw a dark corner of William’s coffin. The oak box sank steadily. She was gone. The rain poured in the grave. The procession of black, with its umbrellas glistening, turned away. The cemetery was deserted under the drenching cold rain.
Paul went home and busied himself supplying the guests with drinks. His father sat in the kitchen with Mrs. Morel’s relatives, “superior” people, and wept, and said what a good lass she’d been, and how he’d tried to do everything he could for her—everything. He had striven all his life to do what he could for her, and he’d nothing to reproach himself with. She was gone, but he’d done his best for her. He wiped his eyes with his white handkerchief. He’d nothing to reproach himself for, he repeated. All his life he’d done his best for her.
And that was how he tried to dismiss her. He never thought of her personally. Everything deep in him he denied. Paul hated his father for sitting sentimentalizing over her. He knew he would do it in the public-houses. For the real tragedy went on in Morel in spite of himself. Sometimes, later, he came down from his afternoon sleep, white and cowering.
“I have been dreaming of thy mother,” he said in a small voice.
“Have you, father? When I dream of her it’s always just as she was when she was well. I dream of her often, but it seems quite nice and natural, as if nothing had altered.”
But Morel crouched in front of the fire in terror.
The weeks passed half real, not much pain, not much of anything, perhaps a little relief, mostly a nuit blanche. Paul went restlessly from place to place. For some months, since his mother had been worse, he had not made love to Clara. She was, as it were, dumb to him, rather distant. Dawes saw her very occasionally, but the two could not get an inch across the great distance between them. The three of them were drifting forward.
