The Testaments

71

Our time together is drawing short, my reader. Possibly you will view these pages of mine as a fragile treasure box, to be opened with the utmost care. Possibly you will tear them apart, or burn them: that often happens to words.

Perhaps you’ll be a student of history, in which case I hope you’ll make something useful of me: a warts-and-all portrait, a definitive account of my life and times, suitably footnoted; though if you don’t accuse me of bad faith I will be astonished. Or, in fact, not astonished: I will be dead, and the dead are hard to astonish.

I picture you as a young woman, bright, ambitious. You’ll be looking to make a niche for yourself in whatever dim, echoing caverns of academia may still exist by your time. I situate you at your desk, your hair tucked back behind your ears, your nail polish chipped—for nail polish will have returned, it always does. You’re frowning slightly, a habit that will increase as you age. I hover behind you, peering over your shoulder: your muse, your unseen inspiration, urging you on.

You’ll labour over this manuscript of mine, reading and rereading, picking nits as you go, developing the fascinated but also bored hatred biographers so often come to feel for their subjects. How can I have behaved so badly, so cruelly, so stupidly? you will ask. You yourself would never have done such things! But you yourself will never have had to.

And so we come to my end. It’s late: too late for Gilead to prevent its coming destruction. I’m sorry I won’t live to see it—the conflagration, the downfall. And it’s late in my life. And it’s late at night: a cloudless night, as I observed while walking here. The full moon is out, casting her equivocal corpse-glow over all. Three Eyes saluted me as I passed them: in moonlight their faces were skulls, as mine must have been to them.

They will come too late, the Eyes. My messengers have flown. When worst comes to worst—as it will very soon—I’ll make a quick exit. A needleful or two of morphine will do it. Best that way: if I allowed myself to live, I would disgorge too much truth. Torture is like dancing: I’m too old for it. Let the younger ones practise their bravery. Though they may not have a choice about that, since they lack my privileges.

But now I must end our conversation. Goodbye, my reader. Try not to think too badly of me, or no more badly than I think of myself.

In a moment I’ll slot these pages into Cardinal Newman and slide it back onto my shelf. In my end is my beginning, as someone once said. Who was that? Mary, Queen of Scots, if history does not lie. Her motto, with a phoenix rising from its ashes, embroidered on a wall hanging. Such excellent embroiderers, women are.

The footsteps approach, one boot after another. Between one breath and the next the knock will come.