RETURN
'Il
n'y a rien comme le desire pour empêcher les choses
qu'on dit d'avoir aucune resemblancess avec ce qu'on a
dans la pensée.'
Anon.
"Well, why don't you try to get in touch with
your old girlfriend in Germany?"
Bags was leaning forward to look at the rain from
our bed, and then she added, as if the question was not all that important:
"It's really pissing down now outside."
So do the Fates direct us. Mags is the nicest, kindest,
most uncritical, and is certainly one of the most intelligent, people
I know. If there is any gap at all in her understanding - apart, of
course, from steadfast refusal to accept the nearly universal rule that
screws unscrew against the clock and otherwise will tighten - it is
that she does not admit to passion. She warned me of this early on.
"I have a deep affection for you," she told me, " but
I cannot promise to love you passionately."
This was unfortunate, for quite naturally, I was disappointed.
I wanted very much to be loved passionately, to be adored passionately;
and although the warning was honest and fair, it checked my affection
for her; and this lasted a long time. Fortunately for me, her affection
lasted even longer.
It was always different with Dali, but Dali was always
different. She would not recoil at being called intelligent. She would
rise high in her profession, and she spoke at least four European languages,
either passably or very well indeed, but she would still make a mockery
of anything she felt to be too in-tell-eck-too-oll - drawling the word
as if to prove its lack of Englishness. I admired her greatly for her
energy and spirit. I admired her family. Her father, still alive, was
a Londoner born and bred. He had mysteriously been posted to a Highland
regiment, and with the Highlanders had fought across North Africa, up
half of Italy, and had even entered Germany by the end of the war. He
and his wife, who also had a ludicrous nickname in their family, were
the same salt of the Earth that is found in every country: level-headed,
able, generous, and honest to the bone. They may have regarded me with
some suspicion, since, at least to them, I was notably posh, but their
acceptance of me dipped slight once when they were invited to look through
a pile of holiday photos and found one that Dali had given me of herself
topless.
Whereas Mags was taller than me, and, despite her
wonderful physique, was almost as heavy, Dali was so slim and slight
that I could pick her up and twirl her about if not with one hand with
one arm, which she always enjoyed greatly. She was formidably efficient
at enjoying herself, in fact she was formidably efficient at practically
everything she set herself to do. She was also tremendous fun. We had
the same kind of slightly anarchic, self-mocking, dopey sense of humour,
and so we spent far more of our time together laughing than trying to
out-perform the Kama Sutra.
What Dali wanted from me, however, was not just to
be amused. Her main interest was entirely physical. There was plenty
of passion, and affection too, but she never consented or admitted to
anything more. I soon had a very sincere affection for her, not just
because she did so much to help restore my balance, both emotional and
social, not just because we shared this experience of a very recent,
bitter, and even still hurting divorce, but because I believed we had
a real friendship too, a friendship that would not easily broken.
As a consequence of this I would quite often tell
her that I loved her. "Oh, I'm glad," was all that she would
respond, even at the height of her pleasure. On the other hand, she
could still shock me by being totally open about her own desires. "What
is it that you would like?" I once asked her rather foolishly.
We were both completely undressed. My shirt was tangled somewhere downstairs
with her skirt whilst the rest of our clothes lay abandoned behind us,
scattered over the stairs. She grinned up at me gleefully: "I'm
already holding what I like!" she told me and squeezed me so hard
that I yelped, and then she squeaked herself as I picked her up.
So, she was wonderfully funny, a joyous mistress,
and for an important period of my life, she was another constant friend,.
She taught me to be just as open with her about my desires, and she
would never disappoint me. Once, when Mags was away in France for over
a fortnight and we had spent a much longer time together than was usual,
I apologized for the frequency that I needed to be relieved of disappointment.
She propped her head in the crook of my arm with her short curly hair
tickling my chin, and mopped my overheated brow with her free hand:
"But you started pretty late," she told me cheerfully. "You
have a lot of catching up to do." She had been married in her teens.
I was almost ten years older and she was just the best and nicest thing
to happen to me in twenty years. She helped me to do an awful lot of
catching up in those two weeks.
Like Mags, Dali never made me feel indispensable to
her life. Both made me feel that I was valued. We often dined together,
either at her house out in the country or in Oxford in Mags' miniature
apartment, and with them both I always felt that I had two loyal comrades
on whom I could rely just as they could rely on me. They had separate
lives into which I did not enter at all so that, for a somewhat indefinite
period we were, in an odd sense, just on loan to one another. It was
never formally discussed just exactly how long this loan would last,
or the precise nature of its terms. As it typically feminine - but I
only learnt how typical this is later - neither of my comrades ever
thought the arrangement might be permanent. As may be typically male,
it never occurred to me that it would ever end. I will never say a word
against multiple marriage. It seems to me the most natural, satisfying
- and so long as it is based on honest affection - the healthiest arrangement
for sane and emotionally balanced adults that can be possibly be imagined.
For the time as it was, for almost three years in
fact, when Mags went away, and if Dali was free, I would stay with Dali.
When Mags came back, and before Dali's girls returned from their father
or their grandparents in London or Spain, I would be warmly kissed and
hugged by Dali and return to Mags. It was simple and uncomplicated.
It hurt no-one. It was friendship.
Mags is a Silesian German. Normally this would mean
that she would have to have been born in the bucolic countryside of
Silesia, now inside Poland, but in her case the attachment is sentimental.
Her parents were born there. If they had stayed, they might have died
there either in the massacres of Germans - particularly of women and
children -by the Poles at the end of the war, or just the women by mass
rape by the Russians, or by hunger and cold during the mass expulsion
of millions from Silesia and East Prussia in the winter of '46. Very
few of these wretched people thought it wise to go East. They would
have been worked to death as slaves if they had. Most of the women with
their children just walked all the way to the West over hundreds of
miles of frozen fields and roads. Right up to the war's end the paths
of these survivors must have crossed or used the same roads being travelled
by the stumbling columns of prisoners evicted from the labour camps
and death camps and sent anywhere: marched about within the ever shrinking
borders of the Reich, not towards the beginning of any new life, only
towards an end.
Hundreds died on their feet every day, were kicked
into ditches, or left on the road, or remained as huddled heaps wherever
the columns were told to halt for the night and they froze to death.
It was, as one old lady told me who had made this journey to the West
herself, pointless to learn any names because "Wir waren alle schon
fast tot", 'we were all nearly dead already.' It is a simple but
terrible epitaph to that awful period in which, as one historian terribly
remarked: Now people began to die like insects. Listening to her story
years later in her simple little kitchen I was reminded once again that
this was the calamity of mankind that I had promised once that I would
find a way to stop. All that I needed - I was still sure of it - was
time.
Mags' father had been one of the vital men in Germany's
industry, and her family had escaped all this because was one who knew
how to make the most prosaic component of every aircraft, vehicle, tank,
every U-boat and every ship - and even of every gun predictor, the earliest
computers. These were electrical condensers, the stores of powerful
electrical discharges that ranged from tiny little thimbles to massive
spools.
Reserved from military service, Herr Mags moved his
family to Berlin, and so Mags was born there and lived there until she
was six. By this time much of Berlin was smoking ruins. Marshall Zhukov's
artillery could be heard rumbling in the East. His workers were always
nearly all women, their nimble fingers as precise as machines, and successively
they had been German, then Jews, then Poles, and finally were from the
Ukraine, each older group being displaced by younger, cheaper workers
as the Wehrmacht swept East. The Jews had all been Berliners. They lived
close by and took their meals - such as they were: Jews being forbidden
to buy meat - at home. One they were all streaming back into the factory
for the afternoon shift when a very brave young man pedalled out like
a madman to warn them urgently: "Don't go in; don't go in: its
a Judenaktion"" The majority, either because they were too
bewildered or frightened, carried on; and next morning the foremen had
to instruct a whole new workforce how to make the damned condensers.
Eventually her father's factory was destroyed, and
he was ordered to the Black Forest, which was still out of reach of
major bombing, to build another factory. But there was nothing with
which to build, and no workers either. He took his family with him and
somewhere in Bavaria he ignore the orders that followed from Berlin.
The Americans, in the gleaming, glittering Flying
Fortresses, still preferred bombing by day; the RAF, bombed by night.
In the air the losses by both were horrendous. On the ground they created
hell both day and night. The Royal Airforce used Pathfinder aircraft
which dropped festoons of coloured flares to mark their targets. As
they slowly floated down above their cities these were so pretty that
the Germans used to call them Christmas trees. What followed had nothing
to do with Christmas, and when I hung a model of the most famous British
bomber, the four engine Avro Lancaster, on wires from the ceiling of
my study - its underside is painted black in the hope of being missed
by the Luftwaffe's deadly night-fighters and the probing searchlight
beams, she sighed. "Well, I always wondered what they looked like.
We never saw them, you know; we only heard them. We were always underground."
They were living then in Wedding, one of the working
class districts near the centre of the city. Underground with all the
other mothers, their children and the old people of their house, a very
heavy bomb must have exploded close by, and she remembers that the walls
of the cellar were 'waving to-and-fro, just like curtains. Their greatest
fear, she told me, was not for the house to be hit directly, death then
would be almost instantaneous; nor was it even to be suffocated by smoke
if the houses above were all burning; nor to be asphyxiated by the lack
of oxygen as firestorms consumed whole districts. Burning itself they
saw often. One of Mags' other memories is to see the entire family of
the house next door pulled out and piled up in the street like burnt
sticks. It was rather to be slowly drowned in their cellars if the water
tanks in the roofs were burst by the bombs, and the tons of water in
them were to cascade down through the floors.
She is forty now, and has a beautiful body, a long,
lithe dancer's body, the curve of her hips is superb. Even though she
spends half the year teaching maths and physics, she spends the rest
walking the Pyrenees from West to East, or the Alps from South to North.
I am not a part of this half of her life. I run my hand up and down
the long curve of her back, the gentle bumps of her vertebrae gliding
under my fingers, her skin still warm from our bed, and under her arms,
hugging her knees as she still examines the sky, is the smooth plump
underside of one breast just in reach of my fingers. I stretch just
a little more to reach it. Soon I must get up and make our coffee, but
this is still the time of day when I feel safest: a time when the telephone
will not ring; or, if it does ring, for no matter how long it rings,
it can be ignored.
I know that I am often stupid. It is a fact I have
accepted. But how stupid I must have been to imagine that my divorce
- like any divorce that one half wants and the other resists - could
calmly pass from one reasonably argued stage to another - and so on
to the settled end. What pain we have both caused - are causing - the
other. In the past two years there were times when I felt flayed, as
if every nerve was exposed and raw and I was blind with the pain. I
could not sleep. I ate little. My clothes became too big. I abandoned
cigarettes, they made me even more nervous. I had been sure that I could
manage stress. Now just a slammed door or a colleague's frown would
launch me into a panic attack, my heart hammering so hard and so fast
that I thought that others must hear it.
"You are going to go through hell," my good,
kind Quaker headmaster had told sadly when I explained what was about
to happen. I had no idea what he meant. But he knew. When I lost my
first lodging and next morning had to tell him that I could not teach,
it was he who took me into his own house, straight up to a spare bedroom
to avoid meeting his family, for I taught his daughters; who dressed
my cuts and told me I must sleep. The next morning it was he who took
me to a magistrates' court to stop this from ever happening again. And
then it was he who insisted I go straight back to work. And when a few
weeks later I had to tell him that I hardly knew what I was doing with
my classes, he only shook his head: "I have had no bad report of
you," he told me. "Until I do, I shall go on believing that
you are doing your best. For what you are going through, there is no
better medicine than work." He helped me avoid murder - or manslaughter,
probably - for another attack like that I could not have borne. I would
have struck back.
"Yes." I replied idly, happily finding that
I was now just able to reach my target. "Yes, I did, once. But
I have no idea where she is now. I don't even know if she is still alive."
Within another two hours we should both be at school,
and in separate classrooms, but right now we were sharing her old sofa
bed: dark brown corduroy, brought all the way from Luxembourg - and
she looking up at the sky from her new French windows that she had installed
that winter. She always used this nasty Army vulgarity with great satisfaction.
She had learnt it from me. She could certainly afford to use it now,
for it was indeed raining hard again from a dull, heavy sky.
Soon the Thames would begin to overflow. First it
would flood the great expanse of common grazing meadows to the North
of the city. Called by some its most valuable possession, this is Port
Meadow, unploughed from the Iron Age. It would become a vast shallow
lake and this in turn the home of enormous gabbling, flapping, and squawking
throngs of migrating geese and swans, flying straight in from the north-east
in long straggling V-formations, landing, taking off, filling the air
all around and all day with endless choruses of excitement and complaint.
Then, having filled Port Meadow, it would begin to flood the allotments
near the railway station and along the canal - the old bathing place
is there, where I dropped my car-keys from the bridge and had to jump
in fully clothed - and then, having filled up all the uninhabited space,
it would start flooding the poorer end of town - which, as it happened,
was where we lived.
Actually, it was where Mags lived. I was at first
only a hedge-creeping vagrant, a bus-stop hobo, a secret tenant, war-orphan,
refugee. We had only just become lovers in the past year. We had been
colleagues for three years before this, then friends. It had been in
this time that she had tried to warn my wife: "He can't stand the
violence." It was a somewhat pathetic declaration on my behalf,
but it was true. Whatever others might claim to detect of my famous
killer instinct, it was not at all suited to the unending attrition
of domestic politics. I could not stand hysteria. I could not stand
the silences. I could not stand being made to feel constantly that I
had committed some terrible unadmitted, inadmissible sin. This was what
she meant by the violence. And of course I retaliated in my own way:
unkindly, nastily, uncaringly. And so, what had begun, and I speak here
for my part only, as a fair attempt to escape from solitude, and to
find affection, became a war. It was a truly horrible time.
When she first took me in as a refugee, we had to
share her bed. I remember it was bloody cold that night. It was before
the new windows; it was that or the study floor and the floor was icy.
British homes really are like this. And so, although few may believe
it - although sometimes, off and on, I did sleep on the floor for almost
a year, we shared her fairly narrow couch like a pair of uninstructed
virgins. Yet even uninstructed virgins have instincts - and in at least
one there were soon all these hormones raging on the bomb-line, revved-up
and ready to go. The consequence was still not inevitable. Mags, unlike
Dali, customarily lay down to rest in neck to ankle Mother Hubbard.
It not inexcusable. One quiet warm afternoon we had lay down together
as colleagues - and got up again a few hours later, very hungry, no
longer only colleagues.
Although this time I had been lead pilot - I just
waggled my wings, you might say, and dropped through the clouds - and
although this time I was certainly not promised unknown delights, I
was a tiny bit puzzled that this had become a natural event.
Afterwards I thought that perhaps the catalyst may
have been Dali, for she had already made her interests very clear. I
certainly found it strange that neither of these remarkably independent
women seemed to feel or evinced the least jealousy for the other, nor
that either felt any reason to be critical of me: but, then, these were
just two of the many reasons why they were remarkable - whilst I, quite
naturally, was most unlikely to demand that they change. I do not boast
about it, but I knew perfectly well then and now how lucky I was.
Now slept together almost every night in our bumpy
little bed, and this was a weekday morning just like many others - except
that we were now also just a month or two away from the brief winter
holiday which usually divides the school terms in October and November.
She would take some of it to visit France. Dali would also be away.
I would be alone. This was the reason behind her question.
I shrugged, still absorbed in my game. "Yes,
of course." I had told her everything of that love affair of long
ago. "I have not seen her, or even spoken to her - ." I tried
to work out for how long: "It must be nearly twenty years. I don't
know where she lives; just at the moment I can't even remember her married
name."
Privately I was thinking of something far less flattering.
In my mind appeared an image long forgotten: slim, slight, square shouldered,
black brows, black hair, green eyes, a heart-stopping smile. Most of
all I now remembered her grace. But most of the German ladies I knew,
if they had married and had children, had soon begun to gain pounds.
The slim, slight figure with the square shoulders and green eyes was
already becoming clearer and more solid in my imagination, but also
swelling into a far more rounded, maternal, matronly form. I was not
sure that I would not prefer the memory.
Two weeks later the train from the city slowed to
a halt at the little country station. It was never very big and the
platform at which it was stopping may have been at the same from which
I had left it for the last time all those years before. German trains
are much bigger, the carriages longer and wider than in Britain, and
I could stand back to survey most of the platform as we arrived. There
were only a few people waiting. At the corner of the station building
one was standing apart from the rest. She was slim, square-shouldered,
wearing a long dark blue coat, her shoulder-length hair was cut now
in a slightly fuller style, but it was just as inky-black.
I had already the sensation of sliding around that
Möbius band again. This was the first time: a sensation of slipping
smoothly from one time and space to another, impossibly connected, nothing
in between. It is necessary that I must have lifted my case onto the
platform. Then we must have said "Hello, how nice to see you."
Shaken hands. We must have done a number of those very ordinary things
that old friends do on meeting after twenty years. Later she told me
it was nineteen: just over. She knew the time to the month.
I watched her in silence, feeling my own actions as
if in a dream. If I stopped, if I shouted, would all of this disappear?
I was utterly bewildered. None of this should be happening. It was not
right. None of it could fit. Nineteen years had disappeared. It felt
exactly as if I had just been away for a month: maybe two - not more;
and this would be why it was now entirely natural to be walking beside
her towards her car. I was terrified.
It was Mags who had found out everything. An English
voice asking for personal details on the telephone of a respectable
married woman, well-known and even much admired, in her small town would
have met with a refusal of any information at all. But in her gentle
and unalarming way Mags had discovered everything. The village was still
the same, only now it really could be called almost a town. The post-war
had brought such an influx, of so many millions to be rehoused and found
work, that very few of the old villages and towns had not doubled in
size. 'But no, they had not moved - well, not moved away; moved house,
of course; the new address: by all means the new address; no, no - both
her parents dead of course; but yes, everyone knows the lady - and her
husband, and their children.' And even their ages: the eldest nine;
the youngest four, the same age exactly as my son.
And so, urged by Mags, I had written my letter, and
received almost immediately a pleased reply, together with a photograph
of the house to which I was now invited, even showing the bedroom which
would be mine. Ominously, I had thought at the time conclusively, there
was no photo of her, or the husband, or the children.
The truth was, I had been extremely reluctant to visit
at all. I felt nothing but polite interest. I had also first another
invitation to attend to: to visit another friend in Aachen on the Belgian
border. I had spent almost the whole of my holiday there. This visit
I had deliberately kept to the last. I knew I was going to be disappointed.
This being so, I wanted it to be as short as possible.
Later she confessed that her own plan had been much
the same. She had been standing at the corner of the building by design:
"I decided that if I did not like what I saw, I would not know
you and would just walk away."
Instead of which it was the same for her as for me.
We walked together through the station building, familiar again; but
she contrived to keep a little ahead of me with her head down, hiding
her expression from me. And there was her car: she pointed. By this
time I was in the grip of such confusion: shock, exultation, terror,
joy, that I said: "Oh, you have a new car."
I remembered her old blue Beetle which she had always
driven with such alarming elan. I had tried to buy her seat-belts for
it: that's how long ago it was. But this was a smart little town-car,
black, her initials were in gold on the driver's door. Since then she
and her husband had had several others; she had wrecked her father's
Mercedes by crashing it into a sand-truck, the Merc's solidity saving
her life; she had been pregnant four times, had had two miscarriages;
she had born two daughters; she had a husband, who loved her, of course,
dearly: a husband in at least a dozen ways absurdly like me. By now
I had been teaching maths and science for five years. By this time he
had been doing exactly the same for over twenty years. He was mechanically
omnicompetent; so was I. He was, everyone said, the nicest, kindest
man. Some said the same of me. He was older by just a few years. Later
she told me that this had made a difference. "You see, I was not
sure that I could trust you."
All of this, all of these people: they were all total
strangers in another life. But now she was back in mine. And she had
not changed at all. Nothing had changed at all. What ever were we to
do?
There was very little that we could do. There was
no time. I had allowed no time. Her husband was friendly, pleasant and
polite: but clearly I made him anxious. He had always known that I existed.
In the first years of their marriage, she told me, he had had to reproach
her gently for looking into every British Army vehicle as they passed
to see if I might be in it. Their home was modern, enormous to my eyes:
it was bought for both them and her parents, on two levels; then the
parents had died. It was full of antiques, painting, furniture, so many
things I remembered from the old house down in the centre of the village.
And her daughters were delightful too: the older already very pretty;
the younger bubbling with fun.
Next day I was taken on a tour of the centre of the
town: and all of this I still remembered. There was the massive tower,
its most famous landmark, the massive church full of massive monuments
to massively cod-pieced lords and their wimpled wives. There was the
big square awkward half-timbered house in which she had lived before
they sold it and had this new house built.
And here was the town hall: very ugly I always thought
it with its oddly Italianate style, painted pink, and the wide stone
steps in the front on which her father - it was her brother who told
me this story - stood in his full SS colonel's uniform to harangue the
few remaining men to barricade the streets against the Americans, to
defend their town to the death.
The few remaining men had listened, shrugged, turned
their backs and went home to their families and wives. Less than a month
before the next biggest town ten miles away, the town of the station
where she had found me yesterday, of no strategic importance at all
but everywhere else had been bombed, had received a visit by the Flying
Fortresses and in twenty minutes had been so completely destroyed that
not even their target-hungry operations chiefs felt the need to bomb
it again. The Colonel had himself had gone home, took off his SS uniform,
put on a business suit, and had become a lawyer again.
The Americans arrested him eventually, naturally;
and he spent a longish time in one of their interrogation centres on
a starvation diet, for the Yanks by now had seen too much by this time
to treat any German POWs kindly, and the consequences of this, his family
was sure, hastened his early death.
I knew nothing at all of this on our first acquaintance.
I did not discover more - and even then perhaps a tenth of the whole
- for many years. I have said already that I liked him, and I did. He
was a big, hearty, intelligent, humorous man; "But like a child
compared to my mother," was his youngest daughter's verdict; and
she loved him, just as she was his favourite child. She would plump
herself down on his lap behind his big desk and pull his chin, and wheedle
favours from him, and he would laugh, and give them to her as her right.
One of my great regrets is that when he was alive,
I spoke German so badly, and understood even less, that when he would
insist on taking me for long walks in the woods after his hours in his
office together with his dog, Felix - a huge, black, ferocious and true
German Pudel, about as similar to the miniatures of that name as a tiger
is to a lapdog - I retained very little of his long, lawyer's explanations
of what the war - and also Hitler's aims and his - had all been about:
except that it was really all against the Bolshevismus.
On many days for many hours I walked with him through
the pine-needle forests that still stretched around their village, now
a town, for many miles. Later, hand in hand, I might travel much the
same paths with his daughter. Although later she told me that both he
and his wife liked me, and probably would have favoured our match, it
was he, I think, who was really the obstacle. She took that responsibility
for herself. But she must also have feared my eventual discovery of
what her beloved Papa had really been doing in the war. If the Jews
were ever mentioned - I do not remember that they ever were - the real
purpose of National Socialism, the real enemy that he had been obliged
to keep from his family, was to keep the Communists, both the German
and the Soviet, from winning Germany.
There was no doubt an exculpatory element in this
too. Later I learnt that he had fallen out in some way with the gang
in Berlin and had been posted to Riga, on the Baltic, to prove zeal.
Riga had had one of the largest Jewish populations in Europe, and although
there was some truth in his protests that it had really all been about
destroying Bolshelvismus, it was also about the destruction of the Jews,
the gypsies, the mentally handicapped, the insane, the homosexuals,
Jehovah's Witnesses, the trade unionists - as well as many brave priests
like Niemöller and Bonhoeffer: anyone, in fact, who looked even
likely to cause problems to the gang in Berlin. It is also true that
throughout the entire period in which Lenin and Trotsky, and later Stalin
and Beria and the rest were organizing the killing of over ten million
Russians whilst destroying every possibility of democracy in the empire,
the British intelligentsia were persuading themselves, with everyone
who would listen to them, that this was the only way to create a workers'
paradise. There was nothing unusual about his naiveté, or his
enthusiasm. Both were all too common. Still are. It has to be remembered
too that apostasy - Fahnflucht, literally abandoning the colours - was
an automatic death sentence for the military, not only for them but
their families too. Once they began, there was no going back.
The old Schloss was still where it had been twenty
years before, where it had been we went there for that evening concert;
when we sat, in solemn rows on little gilt rococo chairs; when she had
looked so astonishingly beautiful that I was afraid the young count
- he was also very rich - would decide to revive droit de seigneur.
I need not have worried. Having made a successful effort to provide
an heir, a few years later he decamped to Spain with his boyfriend of
the moment, and never returned.
It was actually more of a palace now than fortress.
Once it had been turreted, had a curtain wall and a moat. Now the fortifications
were all gone, pulled down two hundred years before, and what remained
of the moat was a big muddy lake in the Schlosspark, the river running
into on one side and, quite sensibly, out of the other. Around the back
were the old stables, now being converted into expensive apartments,
and in the courtyard I thought I could identify the stable in the corner
where her Papa took me once to admire the pig that a farmer had paid
him for his services in lieu of cash. He had scratched its back with
his walking stick, whilst I had pulled one leathery ear and the pig
snuffled in its trough.
Every corner of the town brought back memories like
this. Late on my last evening we went for our last walk. It was cold
and damp and around all the streetlights there were faint golden halo
when misty rain was caught the light. We would not have wanted to go
out at all, of course, but it was just the only way that we could be
for a short time alone. Since it was fully dark in the shadows we were
holding hands as we used to, her fingers interlaced with mine. I remember
thinking this one of the most remarkable discoveries ever made by mankind:
that two people can do this where they are in love.
As the house came closer, our footsteps slowed. The
shadows were even deeper her, in the shelter of a dark, dripping hedge.
Finally we stopped, and she turned towards me. I could smell her scent
but her face was just a pale oval in the dark. I could just see her
eyes
"May I kiss you?" I asked. It would not
have mattered much if she had refused. All of the damage was already
done.
"Oh, yes." she replied. "I was afraid you might not ask."
A first kiss: after nineteen years. And then another, and then another.
Oh, what joy, what wonderful anguish, what terrible joy. Then I pulled
her to me, and held her close, both our hearts were beating hard.
"Hexe," I whispered, with my lips now deep
in her hair, "Dies ware so dumm."
"I know," she replied.
