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The bare facts of Grace Thrale's love, if enumerated, would have appeared familiar, pitiful, and--to some--even comical. Of this, she herself was conscious. It was the sweetness that was unaccountable.
Because the condition struck her as inborn, she raked her experience for precedent. She dwelt on a man she had known long ago in London, before her marriage--a moody schoolteacher who often broke appointments or came late, and over whom she had suffered throughout a cold summer. Only the year before, she had heard he was now a headmaster in Dorset, and had looked up his name in the telephone directory. He provided no prologue to Angus Dance. In contrast to the schoolteacher, on the other hand, Christian had appeared a model of consideration, a responsible lover whose punctuality had from the start prefigured matrimony. Angus Dance had no precursor.
She saw, or knew, that Angus Dance had come back into the room. Making sure about some cheese puffs, she found him close to her, talking to a black-haired, blue-eyed girl who had come with the Dalrymples.
And why on earth not? A man like that could not possibly be leading a celibate life, abstinent in tribute to her own romantic fancies.
When she left the place it was getting dark and there was sleet. She did not want to go home; it was as if her humiliation must be disclosed there. She shrank from home as from extra punishmentas a child, mauled by playmates, might fear parental scolding for torn clothes. But stumbled along with no other possibility. Pain rose up from her thorax, and descended like sleet behind her eyes. It was scarcely credible there should be no one to comfort her.
She thought, My mortification. And for the first time realized that the word meant death.
"I've not seen you since."
It was the mingling of great and trivial that could not be misunderstood.
He went on, "Yet we are so close."
She fell silent, leaning back into colours and shadows of the room: not in fulfillment, which could hardly be, but in voluptuous calm, at peace. Her hand was outstretched on the table, the sleeve pushed up. It was the first time he had seen her inner arm. She knew it might be the only such passage between them, ever. If the usual griefs were coming to her at last, so was this unprecedented perfection.
He said, "I am near thirty-four years of age, and live with too much vacancy." She saw his rectitude existing in a cleared space like his parents' uncluttered house. He told her, "You cannot imagine--well, I do not mean that unkindly. But you, with your completeness--love, children, beauty, troops of friends--how would you understand such formlessness as mine? How would you know solitude, or despair?"
They were matters she had glimpsed in a mirror. She felt his view of her existence settling on her like an ornate, enfeebling garment; closing on her like a trap. She leaned back on the unyielding sofa, and he stood confronting. It was an allegorical contrast--sacred and profane love: her rapture offered like profanity. To assert, or retrieve, she said, "Yet there has been nothing lovelier in my life than the times we sat together at the hospital and looked at the photographs."
He said, "I am near thirty-four years of age, and live with too much vacancy." She saw his rectitude existing in a cleared space like his parents' uncluttered house. He told her, "You cannot imagine--well, I do not mean that unkindly. But you, with your completeness--love, children, beauty, troops of friends--how would you understand such formlessness as mine? How would you know solitude, or despair?"
They were matters she had glimpsed in a mirror. She felt his view of her existence settling on her like an ornate, enfeebling garment; closing on her like a trap. She leaned back on the unyielding sofa, and he stood confronting. It was an allegorical contrast--sacred and profane love: her rapture offered like profanity. To assert, or retrieve, she said, "Yet there has been nothing lovelier in my life than the times we sat together at the hospital and looked at the photographs."
He said, "I am near thirty-four years of age, and live with too much vacancy." She saw his rectitude existing in a cleared space like his parents' uncluttered house. He told her, "You cannot imagine--well, I do not mean that unkindly. But you, with your completeness--love, children, beauty, troops of friends--how would you understand such formlessness as mine? How would you know solitude, or despair?"
They were matters she had glimpsed in a mirror. She felt his view of her existence settling on her like an ornate, enfeebling garment; closing on her like a trap. She leaned back on the unyielding sofa, and he stood confronting. It was an allegorical contrast--sacred and profane love: her rapture offered like profanity. To assert, or retrieve, she said, "Yet there has been nothing lovelier in my life than the times we sat together at the hospital and looked at the photographs."
The billionaire had been keen to give me the outline of his life story, which had begun unprepossessingly and ended – obviously – with him being the relaxed, well-heeled man who sat across the table from me today. I wondered whether in fact what he wanted now was to be a writer, with the literary magazine as his entrée. A lot of people want to be writers: there was no reason to think you couldn’t buy your way into it. This man had bought himself in, and out, of a great many things. He mentioned a scheme he was working on, to eradicate lawyers from people’s personal lives. He was also developing a blueprint for a floating wind farm big enough to accommodate the entire community of people needed to service and run it: the gigantic platform could be located far out to sea, thus removing the unsightly turbines from the stretch of coast where he was hoping to pilot the proposal and where, incidentally, he owned a house. On Sundays he played drums in a rock band, just for fun. He was expecting his eleventh child, which wasn’t as bad as it sounded when you considered that he and his wife had once adopted quadruplets from Guatemala. I was finding it difficult to assimilate everything I was being told. The waitresses kept bringing more things, oysters, relishes, special wines. He was easily distracted, like a child with too many Christmas presents. But when he put me in the taxi he said, enjoy yourself in Athens, though I didn’t remember telling him that was where I was going.
this is so funny
[...] It was impossible, I said in response to his question, to give the reasons why the marriage had ended: among other things a marriage is a system of belief, a story, and though it manifests itself in things that are real enough, the impulse that drives it is ultimately mysterious. What was real, in the end, was the loss of the house, which had become the geographical location for things that had gone absent and which represented, I supposed, the hope that they might one day return. To move from the house was to declare, in a way, that we had stopped waiting; we could no longer be found at the usual number, the usual address. My younger son, I told him, has the very annoying habit of immediately leaving the place where you have agreed to meet him, if you aren’t there when he arrives. Instead he goes in search of you, and becomes frustrated and lost. I couldn’t find you! he cries afterwards, invariably aggrieved. But the only hope of finding anything is to stay exactly where you are, at the agreed place. It’s just a question of how long you can hold out.
[...] His wife’s father summoned him to a meeting at which he was asked to relinquish any claim on their shared assets, and he agreed. He believed he could afford to be generous, that he would make it all back again. He was thirty-six years old and still felt the force of exponential growth in his veins, of life straining to burst the vessel in which it had been contained. He could have it all again, with the difference that this time he would want what he had.
‘Though I have discovered,’ he said, touching his fleshy upper lip, ‘that that is harder than it sounds.’