A Pure Clear Light. Madeleine John St.
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.
It was the night before Flora and the children were to leave for France.
‘Will you be alright?’
‘Of course I will.’
‘You will eat properly won’t you, I mean proper food, not canteen rubbish –’
‘It isn’t rubbish at all, it’s jolly good nosh.’
‘It isn’t fresh. There’s nothing raw.’
‘There’s salads.’
‘Well, do make sure you eat them then, not just that overcooked junk.’
‘It’s good, that canteen stuff.’
‘Sure, sure. And please don’t forget Mrs Brick’s wages, will you – I’ve left you a reminder on the bathroom mirror.’
‘Right, right.’
‘I think that’s all.’
‘Will you be alright?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Telephone me as soon as you get to Tours.’
‘Will do.’
‘And then when you get to the gîte.’
‘Obviously.’
‘You’re taking all this far too calmly for my liking. After all, we’ve never done this before, you going off alone with the car and the kids.’
‘Claire does it every year.’
‘That’s different.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, she and Alex don’t – you know –’
‘Whereas we do?’
‘Don’t we?’
‘Of course. Of course.’
‘Come here.’
Simon took Flora in his arms, sitting on the sofa, the television set still on but with the sound turned off. Flora leaned against him, her head on his shoulder, one arm loosely around his neck. After a while, ‘Isn’t life – but I can’t find the word,’ she said.
‘I think I know what you mean.’
Flora tilted her head and looked up at him. ‘What do I mean?’ she asked.
Simon pondered for a moment. ‘Transitory,’ he said. ‘You mean transitory.’
‘Oh.’
‘Don’t you?’
Flora considered the question. ‘Ye-e-es,’ she said. ‘I suppose that’s what I mean.’ But there was something other, something more, or something, even, less, that she meant – in that strange and tiny space in the mind where it is just possible to mean without having the word which conveys that meaning. And one could not have said whether it were fatigue or fear which prevented her from searching for, and finding, the right word. The reasonable word. The mot juste, as English-speakers say.
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.