"I wanted to hear ..."
"He's dead. That's the end. Everything's over, finished. What's the good of talking?"
"We both loved him."
"I don't know. You can't know a thing like that—afterwards. I don't know anything any more except—"
"Except?"
"That I want to be dead too."
Martins told me, "Then I nearly went away. What was the good of tormenting her because of this wild idea of mine? But instead I asked her one question. 'Do you know a man called Cooler?'"
"An American?" she asked. "I think that was the man who brought me some money when Harry died. I didn't want to take it, but he said Harry had been anxious—at the last moment."
"So he didn't die instantaneously?"
"Oh, no."
Martins said to me, "I began to wonder why I had got that idea so firmly into my head, and then I thought it was only the man in the flat who told me so ... no one else. I said to her, 'He must have been very clear in his head at the end—because he remembered about me too. That seems to show that there wasn't really any pain.'"
"That's what I tell myself all the time (это то, что я говорю себе все время)."
"Did you see the doctor (вы видели доктора)?"
"Once (однажды). Harry sent me to him (Гарри послал меня к нему; to send). He was Harry's own doctor (он был частным: «собственным» доктором Гарри). He lived nearby, you see (он жил неподалеку, видите ли)."
Martins suddenly saw in that odd chamber of the mind that constructs such pictures (Мартинс внезапно увидел в этой странной каморке разума, которая составляет такие картинки; to construct — строить, сооружать; воздвигать; конструировать; создавать; сочинять; придумывать), instantaneously, irrationally (мгновенно, иррационально), a desert place (пустынное место), a body on the ground (тело на земле), a group of birds gathered (собравшуюся группу птиц). Perhaps it was a scene from one of his own books (возможно, это была сцена из одной из его собственных книг), not yet written (еще не написанных), forming at the gate of consciousness (формирующихся у ворот сознания). Immediately it faded (как только она потускнела), he thought how odd that they were all there (он подумал, как странно, что они все были там), just at that moment (прямо в тот момент), all Harry's friends (все друзья Гарри)—Kurtz, the doctor, this man Cooler (Куртц, доктор, этот человек Кулер); only the two people who loved him (только двух человека, которые любили его) seemed to have been missing (казалось, недоставало; missing — недостающий, отсутствующий). He said, "And the driver (а водитель)? Did you hear his evidence (вы слышали его показания)?"