We say Goodbye

If Love's a Sweet Passion, why does it torment?
If a Bitter, oh tell me whence comes my content?
Since I suffer with pleasure, why should I complain,
Or grieve at my Fate, when I know 'tis in vain?
Yet so pleasing the Pain, so soft is the Dart,
That at once it both wounds me, and tickles my Heart.

Anon – The Fairy Queen

And the months have passed, and the autumn and the winter and the spring too, and now it is summer once more.

A good year, a fine year, a year of making, and doing, and building, and re-building. We have rebuilt many things – Mistress James and Emily James and Carrie Mason and Elias Cholmondley and me. We have remade the shop; transforming it from a failing business to a brisk and successful – or becoming successful, at least – one. We have steady customers now and, if business continues to improve, I will be able to take on an assistant next year. Not an apprentice, for I am not yet a Master, but someone who will be able to help around the place and let me dedicate all my time to the work that I love.

How would it have been for us, I ask myself, if I had lived in another world, where men must carry their daemons within themselves? How would I have been able to follow my calling, without my Viola to hold my work for me and be the hand that I will never use again?

I have never forgotten one thing that Martin James said to me, even though his words were intended to hurt, because they had truth in them too. I had been treating Elias like a servant all those years and it was high time that I stopped. My master had been a good man, a kindly man, but he had been no fool. He would not have kept Elias on in the shop if he had not, every day, made a real contribution to the prosperity of the firm. I had been very foolish not to have seen that myself. So I have honoured Master James' trust and let Elias stay on in the shop. We will never like each other, but we can work together as business partners.

Some day very soon, we will have saved enough money to repay my debt to Mister Hurst, the pawnbroker and Lyra's gift – the alethiometer – will be restored to me, and with it a greater gift; the knowledge of how to read it. I hope that I will use it well.

And now I come at last to Time Present, and it is a Sunday afternoon and Jane and I are lying together in the too-narrow bed in the attic room above the premises of James and James, Fine Clocks and Instruments, Shoe Lane, Oxford. We have been making slow, careful, rapturous love and now, warm and content, we are listening to the Sony playing a sweet, sad song from John Parry's world:

Ev'ry time we say goodbye, I die a little,
Ev'ry time we say goodbye, I wonder why a little,
Why the gods above me, who must be in the know,
Think so little of me, they allowed you to go.

My mind casts loose from the shores of reality and I drift down an endless river of Time. I do not think that I shall ever again feel that I am anchored firmly to this world, although I am happy and content to be a part of it. The time-ghosts have not returned; as I was promised would happen. But I have seen too many things – the World of the Dead, the Space Between, Cropredy, John Parry's world – to be able to believe as I did when I was a child in the solidity of the ground beneath my feet, or the certainties that once guided the course of my life. What happened, I wonder, in the world where I died in the burning gyptian cottage? What did Lady Boreal and Professor Belacqua do after my death? I cannot help but hope that Lyra broke free of the chains with which Elizabeth had bound her. It would not be like her to knuckle under to her sister – not when there was a Republic of Heaven to build. And what of Martin James? Now that he is gone I wish that I had found out more about him. I believe that he was fearfully damaged by his experiences in Bolvangar. That does not excuse the harm he did to me; but his story must be a strange and terrible one and I do not believe that it is over yet. Will we meet again one day? I do not know, and the alethiometer will never tell me. It tells the truth, yes, but it does not make predictions. Only Time will tell. I sigh, and Jane asks me if I am feeling all right. Yes, I tell her. Everything is fine.

A voice charged with ineffable yearning fills the air of the room:

When you're near there's such an air of Spring about it,
I can hear a lark somewhere begin to sing about it.

Jane pulls back the covers, gets out of bed, and stands on the centre of the rug, glorious in the sunlight that streams in through our dormer window. 'Come on, Peter, let's go out! It's far too nice to stay in here all day.'

'Coming, love.'

I extend my right arm and Jane pulls me up and out of the bed, letting my weight rest against her in the way that we have learned. 'Hey,' I say, 'let's go on the river.'

'Yes,' Jane replies. 'I'd like that.'

We put our things on and I pick up my crutch and Jane supports me as we make our way slowly down the stairs to the main landing of the house; and from there to the ground floor, and the street entrance, and Shoe Lane. From there we board an autobus which carries us down to the banks of the Isis, where the hire-boats are drawn up ready and waiting for us. We will take a punt out today, I think, and maybe the current will lift us, and carry us downstream forever, under the sun and the flying clouds and the dancing, swaying willow trees.

Behind us, in our room, the Sony plays on, in an endless loop of sound:

There's no love-song finer,
But how strange the change,
From major to minor,
Ev'ry time we say,
Goodbye.

Cole Porter's Every Time We Say Goodbye is quoted without permission.