Читать книгу Godless in Eden - Fay Weldon - Страница 13

Yes. But you wouldn’t think it to listen to them. They don’t sound all that appreciative. They look at TV a lot. They miss McDonald’s and the corner shop. There’s a strange-looking man lurking in the playing fields, and you see drugs behind every hedge. There’s nothing for the kids to do. Mother turns into a taxi-service, unpaid. They’ve got to see their friends, learn to ride, remedial speech, whatever. Mother’s gloomy and bored. Father’s commuting, now the home-office idea has collapsed, and becomes part of the divorce statistics. He met someone cheerful on the train. Someone who, like him, longs for a loft apartment in Islington – and if both country houses were sold and each took their half, and mother kept the children – well, they are her life – why then the move back to the city could just about be managed. For him. What’s good for the children is not necessarily good for the marriage.

But who’s listening? ‘We’re moving out,’ friends say, thrilled to the gills. ‘It will be different for us.’ And so it may be, and so I hope it will be. Humankind cannot live by reason alone, nor should they try to. And it is the spring, after all. And the mud’s drying out. And the early sun catches the hill-tops, and the wheat field’s sprouting green and strong, and lambs bounce in the fields, and what’s so good about here anyway?

The entrance to the Garden of Eden may no longer be barred by a flaying sword, but Mother has to get back to the baby. No way she can enter.