The Map of the Sky (Trilogía Victoriana #2)(154)
After a few moments of tense silence, I heard the girl’s laughter bubble over once more, so infectious that even I smiled, despite not having heard Murray’s jest. Suddenly the delightful tinkle stopped. I didn’t need to be a genius to know that Murray had decided to kiss the girl without waiting to be the last survivors on the planet, and despite the continued threat posed by Wells and Inspector Clayton. A few moments later, I heard the girl give a faint moan, almost a sigh, and the rustle of clothing when two bodies separate with voluptuous slowness.
“I love you, Gilliam,” Emma said. “I’m in love with you, as I never thought I’d be with anyone.”
How can I describe her tone of voice as she said this? How can my clumsy words convey what Murray must have felt when he heard them, what I myself felt in my gloomy hiding place? Emma uttered these words with a voice as sweet as it was solemn, conscious that she was saying them for the very first time. She had waited years to be able to say them, fearing that day would never come, and if it did, envisaging herself in a conservatory or a garden, surrounded by beautiful flowers, not in the stinking sewers of London with only the repulsive rats for company. But that didn’t matter. She had uttered these words in the tone they merited, as though they were part of an ancient spell, as though her voice were magically emanating from her heart and not her throat. Her words were unadorned, the same words I had heard spoken hundreds of times by lovers, actors, friends, yet now they brimmed with an emotion so pure it stirred me to the depths. I reflected sadly that the girl had uttered them with full awareness that, the way things were going, she would not have many opportunities to repeat them in the future.
“I realized it when you confessed to me in Clayton’s cellar,” she went on, “yet since then I’ve done nothing but try to suppress it. I’m sorry, Gilliam, I’m sorry. But when I found out I’d fallen in love for the first time in my life, all I could feel was great sorrow. What good was this to me, a few hours before the end of the world?” There was a catch in the girl’s voice. “I thought if I told you we would suffer much more. I don’t want to see the man I love die, and I don’t want to die so soon after I’ve found you! And so I refused to accept it. But it seems that it’s impossible to refuse the Master of Time anything.”
“You’ve just made me the happiest man in the world, a title I shall bear with great honor.”
“But it’s a world that is being demolished, don’t you see?” Emma sighed. “It’s too late, Gilliam . . .”
“Too late? No, Emma, no. At your aunt’s house you told me you’d never stop dreaming again. You said you knew now that the Map of the Sky was part of you. And that map is the guardian of your dreams. Time doesn’t exist in dreams, Emma. Time stops, as it did on the pink plains of the fourth dimension . . .”
And in the long silence that followed, suggesting another passionate embrace, I breathed as noiselessly as I could, trying to get rid of the lump in my throat. I had always insisted that other people’s love was ridiculous to those outside it. In fact, I was convinced that love, as such, did not exist. I believed everyone confused it with a more or less elegant, overblown, or pompous sublimation of our fear of loneliness, boredom, or of roasting in the eternal hellfire of yearning. My feelings for my wife Victoria amounted to little more than mild affection, a vague tenderness that waxed and waned, which I was sure was no fault of hers, for I doubted I could love any other woman more. So, why had I married her? Simply because I wished to be married, to raise a family, to stop squandering my father’s fortune on ephemeral pleasures and to enjoy the illusion of peace afforded by planning a future with someone else. As you can see, my wretched, selfish, misguided way of loving was very different from how Murray loved, and realizing this I felt overwhelmingly sorry for myself. I was going to leave this world without ever having loved anyone, and what was worse, having belittled the love of every woman who had ever loved me.
My clear inability to love had shaped my life. And it was still doing so now, because from the moment I left my uncle’s house, my main concern had been to find a way of defeating the Martians in order to save the human race—a somewhat vague concept. Whom in particular did I want to save? No one, I told myself, with a sense of horror and deep regret, no one in particular. Naturally, I didn’t want my wife to die, or my cousin Andrew or his wife, but not for their sake, rather for mine, because of the way their sudden disappearance would affect me. For this reason I took refuge in an idea as abstract as the human race. At that moment, I would have given anything for there to have been someone, somewhere on the planet whose death could truly matter to me, could cause me more pain than my own. But there was no one, I realized with bitterness; there was not a single person among the millions of inhabitants on Earth whom I loved selflessly. The tripods were slaughtering my fellows, yet I was incapable of grieving for any one of them on his or her own. None stood out among the rest as Claire did for Shackleton, or Emma for Murray. I could only grieve for the extinction of the whole of which they were a part: the human race. The race to which I did not deserve to belong.
My eyes still brim with tears when I recall that moment, despite only managing at the time to sneer at my new and unexpected sensitivity. And although my hand is trembling so much I am having difficulty writing, I wouldn’t want to finish without telling the reader that if I have described these facts in such detail it is not because I wish to celebrate my discovery of the true meaning of what it is to love, but to leave a record of the noble, sublime sentiments that the finest specimens of our race are capable of generating. Perhaps love is a sentiment shared by other species in the universe. But the love that a human being can generate is exclusively his own and will die with him. After that the universe, despite its unfathomable vastness, its apparent infinity, will no longer be complete.