Laura By Saki | Pdf

The wedding was small, sharp, and awkward. Egbert did not attend. He sent a letter instead, warning Laura that she was making a catastrophic mistake. Laura framed it and hung it in the hallway, next to a funeral card for a child she had never met. For six months, the marriage was a triumph of mutual misanthropy. Laura and Julian attended twenty-seven funerals together. They kept a ledger, ranking each for quality of music, depth of grave, and quantity of genuine tears shed by the bereaved. A funeral with no tears was considered "efficient"; a funeral with hysterical weeping was "excellent sport."

It was not, unfortunately, a question of whether Laura would attend the funeral; it was a question of how many funerals she would contrive to attend in the course of the week. Her obituaries, read with the thrilling detachment of a booking agent scanning racecards, had already yielded three promising prospects: a distant cousin who had left her a pug, a retired general whose liver had finally mutinied, and a wealthy philanthropist whose charities she had never patronized but whose buffet she had thoroughly admired.

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?

She rather liked coincidences.

Julian began to linger too long at gravesides. He started talking about the "nobility of suffering" and the "quiet dignity of grief." He bought a black cat and named it Mourning. Laura was alarmed.

She did not write back. Instead, she began planning her next funeral. It was, she had heard, going to be a very good one. The deceased had been a tax collector, universally detested. There would be no tears. There might, if she was lucky, be a fistfight.

"You are morbid," he said.

Laura beamed. "How wonderfully honest! Most people come to funerals to pretend they cared. You come to celebrate. I like you."

"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."

"Why not?" replied Laura, adjusting a hat that looked like a small, feathered hearse. "They will not complain of the crowding. And one meets such interesting people at funerals—people who are not merely dying to meet you, but have actually achieved the distinction of being dead in your vicinity." laura by saki pdf

Julian looked at her with an expression she had never seen before—soft, almost tender. It was disgusting.

Laura put down her cup of tea very carefully.