Briony was her last, and nothing between now and the grave would be as elementally important or pleasurable as the care of a child.
Arguing with the person you love is its own peculiar torment. The self divides against itself. Love slugs it out with its Freudian opposite. And if death wins and love dies, who gives a damn? You do, which enrages you and makes you more reckless yet. There’s intrinsic exhaustion too. Both know, or think they know, that a reconciliation must happen, though it could take days, even weeks.
He had reached that point – late thirties was common – when one’s parents set off on their downhill journey. Up until that time they had owned whoever they were, whatever they did. Now, little bits of their lives were beginning to fall away or fly off suddenly like the shattered wing mirror from the Major’s car. Then larger parts came away and needed to be gathered or caught mid-air by their children. It was a slow process. Ten.
To love her was to be soothed.
She had vanished into an intact inner world of which the writing was no more than the visible surface, the protective crust which even, or especially, a loving mother could not penetrate.
It is hard to slash at nettles for long without a story imposing itself, and Briony was soon absorbed and grimly content, even though she appeared to the world like a girl in the grip of a terrible mood.
From beneath her, amplified by the stone arch, came the hiss of the breeze disturbing the sedge, and a sudden beating of wings against water which subsided abruptly. These were everyday sounds magnified by darkness. And darkness was nothing – it was not a substance, it was not a presence, it was no more than an absence of light.
To step down there now as if completely free, to be released from the arduous states of play of psychological condition, to have leisure to be open and attentive to perception, to the world whose breathtaking, incessant cascade against the senses was so easily and habitually ignored, dinned out, in the interests of unexamined ideals of personal responsibility, efficiency, citizenship, to step down there now, just walk away, melt into the shadow, would be so very easy.
If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone’s thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone’s claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was. One could drown in irrelevance.
He tilted back his chair and surveyed his desk as one might a life.
But first he must cover the miles again, and go back north to the field where the farmer and his dog still walked behind the plough, and ask the Flemish lady and her son if they held him accountable for their deaths.
She would never be able to console herself that she was pressured or bullied. She never was. She trapped herself, she marched into the labyrinth of her own construction, and was too young, too awestruck, too keen to please, to insist on making her own way back. She was not endowed with, or old enough to possess, such independence or spirit. An imposing congregation had massed itself around her first certainties, and now it was waiting and she could not disappoint it at the altar.
Their love would have space and a society to grow in.
Here was a surprise, a love affair, an affair of love, as he entered his seventies.
Daylight delights you.
Love just follows you.
In that time, moral standards were high in public life and so, therefore, was hypocrisy.
He should take a different bank card to replace one that was out of date. Cars no longer had CD players, so he should look one out if he was to play her favourite disc.
Their friendship had become vague and even constrained in recent years, but it was still an old habit, and to break it now in order to become strangers on intimate terms required a clarity of purpose which had temporarily deserted them.
He had no religious belief, but it was impossible not to think of an invisible presence or witness in the room, and that these words spoken aloud were like signatures on an unseen contract.
How like Hermione Lola was, to remain guiltless while others destroyed themselves at her prompting.