Читать книгу A Pure Clear Light - Madeleine John St. - Страница 16

12

Simon might not believe in the existence of God – indeed, he categorically did not – but he knew he was on the way to the great cutting-room in the sky nevertheless. He might not believe that a person called God was going to put him through the viewing machine and decide whether or not to save him or let him fall to the floor, but he had some sense nevertheless of there being some ineradicable rule by which this decision might – however purely theoretically – be made. He was on his way to a time, a place, where – when – this awful accounting would have occurred if there had been a person called God; that there was no such person did not alter the inexorability of the journey or of its theoretical destination. Simon had not idly given Flora the word she apparently sought: life was above all else transitory – oh, how tragically, yet fortunately, transitory! As the Wanderer (or was it the Seafarer? who could remember which was which!) had insisted: Just as that sorrow passed, so shall this.

In any event, you could hardly live in Hammersmith without being all but overwhelmed with the realisation of life’s essential transience; the place was a monument to transiance; and if that was a paradox, so much the better. Simon, in the family’s absence, had taken to walking in the long summer evenings: one walked for a few miles, and then one came to a pub; one had a few pints and walked home again, and went to bed. One walked down impossible blighted streets, past lovely, blighted houses, the motorway roaring overhead, the river coming into view, every transient item supporting a stream of transient life: their only absolute reality was their passing.

Simon was looking out, tentatively, for locations for his script: he meant – tentatively – to tell the story which would reveal this tragic yet fortunate transience. It was the only story there now was; it was the only story that remained. He began to believe that he would stumble across the detail of the story as long as he just kept on walking. There would be – say – a house, in a row of others like it, in which the door would open: a woman would come out, and stand there for a moment at the top of the steps, uncertain –

directed by

SIMON BEAUFORT

and he might have found the house, the row of houses, seen the door open and the woman who came out and stood at the top of the steps – stunned by the sudden magnitude of the motorway traffic’s roar – for a moment, uncertain, so soon as the end, say, of the first week of his solitude; might have begun to see the details of that story coming, slowly, then faster, into focus, might even have sat down and begun actually to write something (it was a long time since he’d actually written something: he could remember, just, what it felt like to write). He might have done all this were it not that, tragically, or perhaps fortunately – he couldn’t, one couldn’t, say which – the dinner invitations started to come in.

‘Oh Simon you poor old thing. A whole month! Come round for a meal one night – let’s see, what about Thursday?’

‘Oh Simon I hear you’re a grass widower – poor Simon! Why don’t you pop round here for a square meal one night – are you doing anything on Tuesday?’

For as everyone knows, men can, but don’t, look after themselves when their wives are away, and it is one’s duty – and, it must be admitted, one’s pleasure – to give them a dinner or two. Poor Simon! He even found himself sharing the honours one evening with poor Alex – poor Alex Maclise, Claire being away – at the compassionate dinner table of the Ainsworths. ‘I thought I might as well kill two birds,’ said Lizzie to Alf. ‘Poor old things.’

And it was at one such dinner table – this one, as it happened, in Camden Town – that Simon met a woman called Gillian Selkirk. The name alone ought to have been enough to warn him off: as Louisa Carrington was, much later, to observe to Robert of that ilk, ‘It writhes. And so I dare say does she.’