Читать книгу A Pure Clear Light - Madeleine John St. - Страница 19

Simon was too busy to go in for extra-marital love affairs, even if he’d believed them to be permissible. He hadn’t in fact considered seriously the question of whether they were, or were not, permissible; there had been no reason to do so, for it had never arisen.

Of course, if Simon had had an ideological bias towards, or a natural proclivity for, extra-marital love affairs, it might have been another matter: he might have found the time, somehow – in the way that a lot of men even busier than he did. (Women, too, come to that.) Simon, if you’d asked him, would probably have said, after all, I have to direct such a lot of it I don’t have any libido left for the real thing, ha ha.

All the same, a lot of men (and women, too, come to that) would have found – did indeed find – that directing sex scenes only increased their libido. But it didn’t take Simon that way. Simon just got on with his work, efficiently, on time and within budget, and then went home to Flora and the kids.

And Flora might be looking a bit seedy, as was to be expected after three children and so on, but he loved her, whatever that might mean – not that Simon could have told you, precisely, what it did in fact mean. Who can? He hadn’t given the question any conscious or prolonged thought; he had not needed to; it had not arisen.

David Packard was a television writer – author, indeed, of more than one of those sex scenes which Simon in his time had directed and it was his partner Sarah Frame, an actress (although not now conceivably in sex scenes) who coming across Simon in the canteen one lunch-time had taken pity on his bachelor state and invited him to dinner at the Packard-Frame establishment in Camden Town. ‘Dave’d love to see you I know,’ she said. ‘He’s working on a new six-part series.’ ‘Oh yes?’ said Simon. ‘Sounds great.’ ‘You haven’t even heard about it yet,’ said Sarah. ‘No, nor have I,’ Simon agreed. ‘But it sounds just great.’ ‘Well, let’s see, how about Friday?’ said Sarah. ‘Great,’ said Simon. He didn’t want to go at all, but how could one refuse these well-meant invitations? So on the Friday night which marked almost exactly the halfway point in his family’s absence from home Simon found himself looking for a parking space in the vicinity of Camden Square. He was driving the little Fiat because Flora had taken, naturally, the big car.

It was Sarah who opened the door to him. ‘Come through,’ she said. ‘We’re in the kitchen.’ So he followed her down the narrow passageway to the back of the house, where there was a big overdressed kitchen, and there, sitting at the wooden table in its centre, was a woman he didn’t know, hadn’t foreseen, couldn’t have expected, here or indeed anywhere else, a woman whom Sarah – as if this were still the mundane world where such things naturally follow – introduced to him as Gillian Selkirk. ‘Gillian,’ repeated Simon. ‘How do you do?’ And she simply smiled.