Читать книгу A Pure Clear Light - Madeleine John St. - Страница 14

Flora was thinking about the vast existential difference – it was, wasn’t it? – between being right, and having, as the French say, right, or right-ness: raison: reason. There, right-ness, or even righteousness, was reasonableness; and wrongness was therefore the consequence – or was it the condition? – of a logical error, a mistake. In French, to be right, d’avoir raison, was to have worked out a sum correctly, whereas in English there was no necessary suggestion of the reasonable: to be right in English was more like a piece of luck. Or a gift of God. Or a doom.

Flora was thinking about all this because she wanted to be right; the desire had arisen and was growing in her, she knew not why. The necessity was becoming almost urgent, whether to be right, or d’avoir raison, whichever it might more accurately be; and if it were a question after all of working out a sum correctly, then that would be existentially a rather different or even an entirely different affair from succumbing to a doom.

In any event, insofar as she could do the sum at all, or insofar as she could embrace her doom, Flora concluded that it would only be right to ask Lydia to come to France with them.

‘Floating World, hello.’

‘Oh Lydia is that you? Flora here.’

‘Oh Flora, hello, how nice.’

‘I know I mustn’t keep you during working hours, you must be so busy –’

‘So must you –’

‘Yes, thank God, I suppose, it’s just, I was wondering, are you going away this summer, have you anything planned?’

‘Yes, I’m going down to Italy for ten days; I’m sharing that villa in Sardinia for a bit that the Carringtons have taken with Robert’s sister, but she can’t go down until after – anyway – so that’s what I’m doing.’

‘Ah. Yes, well – I’d been wondering whether you might like to come to France with us – Simon can’t get away after all, you see, so we’ve some space –’

‘Oh, so sorry, I would’ve loved to, but it’s all settled now. You were sweet to think of me.’

‘Couldn’t you come on?’

‘Now that would be flashy; how I wish; but I can’t really leave the Floating World for that long, you see – not at this time of the year. It’s really my busiest; it’s like Christmas for Hamleys –’

‘Oh, yes, of course, yes, obviously. Well –’

‘Thank you anyway. It would have been lovely.’

‘Oh, it’s nothing. Sardinia will be lovely too.’

‘I hope so. I’ve just been and bought a new cozzie.’

‘You are brave!’

‘Yes. I had a brandy first.’

‘Did you really?’

‘Yes, truly. And then I just marched into Horrids and got it.’

‘Horrids, gosh.’

‘They have such a huge selection.’

‘That’s a point.’

‘And I couldn’t face going from shop to shop to shop.’

‘You are clever.’

‘I could do with being thinner.’

‘The swimming will see to that.’

‘So I do hope. Darling I must go now, I have to telephone the printer.’

‘Yes, right, I should be getting on with it myself, I’m doing the VAT returns. Have a lovely time in Sardinia if we don’t speak again beforehand –’

‘And you in – where, exactly?’

‘The Périgord.’

‘Oh how lovely.’

‘We’ll be in touch afterwards anyway, won’t we?’

‘Yes of course.’

They said their good-byes and Flora hung up. Well, so – she felt an odd sense of anti-climax. Honour on the one hand and selfish inclination on the other had both been satisfied: as so rarely can they be. Why then this odd sense of dissatisfaction?

She shrugged it off and went on with the VAT returns, but she could not quite divest herself of the feeling that God had been watching the whole affair from its inception, and was now laughing quietly to Himself: which, if there were no such person, was ridiculous, and, if there were such a person, was – what, exactly? She put down her pen and sat, speculating, for a moment. What, exactly, might one fairly expect the consequences of the Virgin’s mediations to be – supposing, that is, that God existed? Had she been given a sign? She saw that this would not do: any further down that road, she thought, and I’ll be back in the Middle Ages before I know it.

But then, she had in fairness to ask, is that, considering where we all now are, such a very dreadful destination? Flora felt suddenly a sense of the unmitigated grossness of the superstitions of the modern age. You could be crushed to death, if you weren’t lucky. If you got the sum wrong. Hail Mary, she said, full of grace; etcetera. You could just conceivably get to a point, she thought, where it didn’t matter whether or not God existed: where the possibility that He did, and might even listen to you, was absolutely all there was between you and hell. Because we do now know, at any rate, that hell exists.