Mac would like me to give up work and settle down with him here in the country, but I’m not ready yet. So we keep on our flat in the city, I stay there two or three nights a week when I’m working (I’m still at the Gatehouse). But Ester’s at school down here, Mac drives her back and forth every day and on the way he tests her on her homework — French and poetry and maths and science. I worry that this puts too much pressure on her but she loves it, she nags him to ask her questions; she seems to learn easily, picking things up as a pure pleasure. She learns poems by Herbert and Marvell and Yeats off by heart (‘Love Bade Me Welcome’, ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’), and she and Mac recite them in unison. I thought Mac would be bored at home but I understand now that he addresses himself to whatever room of his life he happens to be in with the same kind of serious absorption that doesn’t fail him.
When I’ve taken his breakfast upstairs I sit reading my book at the kitchen table with my legs tucked under me, refilling my mug with tea from the pot keeping warm in its cosy. The book is about the idea of Nature as it was imagined in classical philosophy and then as it developed under the Romantics; I’m reading a section on the Eleusinian mysteries. The last time I was in the British Museum, I saw a Greek red-figure vase which depicts an element of Eleusinian rituaclass="underline" the demigod Triptolemos sits in his winged chariot with a sheaf of corn in his hand, preparing to descend and bestow it upon mankind. I’m searching all the time, in books and films and paintings, for signs of transcendent meaning like this that I can puzzle over. They excite me and elude me, escape ahead of me as I try to grasp them. And all the time that I’m reading, I’m watching the clock — at quarter past seven I’ll get Ester up and Mac can make her breakfast and then I’ll drive to the station to catch the ten to eight train. It’s unusual to have this interval of reading and abstract thought on a work day. Perhaps I’ll pay for it later and be tired: but for now my mind is racing, leaping from sentence to sentence. Everything’s momentous as if I’m looking through a magnifying lens in my mind, seeing through the words to the whole, to their core; sometimes I’m actually breathless and my heart is racing, in pursuit of the meaning emerging so close within my reach.
I needn’t go to work, we don’t need the money, I could stay here and read and think all day, every day. This house is the first home I’ve ever actually chosen for myself: a Georgian frontage, all light and air, tacked on to a much older farmhouse behind, with walls two foot thick and squint-eyed windows to keep the weather out. For a year after we bought it I devoted myself to doing the house up and buying furniture for it, trying to fulfil the soul I felt it had: subtle with its shadowy corners, poignantly haunted by its past. And then when the house was finished I couldn’t quite bear it: I felt as if I’d made it for someone else to live in and not me. Or it seemed like a bargain I’d made with middle age and the bargain sickened me; I was ashamed of all the money I’d spent, contriving an effect of spontaneity and accidental charm as if the place had been in my family for a hundred years. I thought that I’d bargained my youth away with this house, giving it away in return for a shell, the sordid trick of material things. (But of course youth was over anyway, whether I bargained or not.)
That was a silly fuss, it didn’t last. I’m very happy here now, I know how lucky I am. Though I’m not quite ready yet, to move in finally. I’m holding that day off. When I jump on the train at the last minute on work mornings, I still feel sometimes as if I’m running away, escaping from something coming up behind me.
In the evening after work I have dinner in the city with Madeleine: she’s home from London visiting her mother. We meet in a lively place I like which was the old river police station when the harbour was still for commerce and not just for leisure; the restaurant is all glass on the river side so that you can watch the boats and the swans passing, the water in its metamorphosis (through gold, mercury, steel) as the light goes. Madeleine is there first and finds a good place by the window; when I arrive and don’t see her for a moment she half stands up, tottering on high heels, calling and waving to me eagerly: blonde hair pinned up untidily, protuberant blue eyes, plump chest rounded as a pigeon’s, hot colour of tiny broken capillaries in her cheeks. She’s wearing a tight skirt and big earrings and she’s ordered cocktails already. Madeleine and I don’t meet often, but whenever we do we fall easily into our old companionableness. I talk to her more intimately than I ever talk to Mac, I can tell her anything and she tells me everything too, we spill over to each other eagerly. It’s better without the men (though she likes Mac and I like Donald, her partner). Madeleine doesn’t read and she doesn’t think about abstract things, but she takes in what she sees, without defensive judgement.
She’s Ester’s godmother (Mac insisted that Ester was christened, though the boys aren’t). She doesn’t have children but Donald has teenagers who live with them at weekends and she likes them and is kind to them and comically doleful about her relations with them. (— I think you have to be broken in first by babies, she says. — The teenage craziness comes as too much of a shock otherwise — just as you’ve settled down yourself, into being sensible.) Her job these days is something deep inside the intangibles of management: in public relations, for a company selling software to other companies for managing their systems — she’s not even conducting the public relations, just overseeing the process through which they’re conducted. When I ask her what fills up her day she says it’s too boring to talk about, but I don’t believe she hates it, I suspect she’s happy enough in keeping her fragment of the machinery turning over effectively. I think that I couldn’t bear to do something so null, but then I’m sorry for thinking it: what right have I to criticise? And in its different way that’s what my job is too, just making tiny adjustments to individual lives swept along in the flow. I don’t have all the ambitious ideas about OT I used to have, believing it was a lever for changing things. Mostly it’s just organising badminton or art classes for the service users, or trips to Butlin’s or the ice rink (we did go to Paris once). Madeleine loves my story of the young man in one of our Gatehouse flats who is autistic spectrum and not coping with venturing out anywhere; I’ve taken photographs of his bedroom, bathroom, hallway and kitchen, and laminated them for him, because he feels safer if he can look at them while he’s away from them.