She told stories, gave them news, went errands in the town, and on the sly lent the big girls some novel, that she always carried in the pockets of her apron, and of which the good lady herself swallowed long chapters in the intervals of her work. They were all love, lovers, sweethearts, persecuted ladies fainting in lonely pavilions, postilions killed at every stage, horses ridden to death on every page, sombre forests, heartaches, vows, sobs, tears and kisses, little skiffs by moonlight, nightingales in shady groves, “gentlemen” brave as lions, gentle as lambs, virtuous as no one ever was, always well dressed, and weeping like fountains. For six months, then, Emma, at fifteen years of age, made her hands dirty with books from old lending libraries.
He is my favorite smell, my favorite sound, my favorite sight. He will never know how much I love him because he does not remember the day Darrow and I conceived him, or the months I carried him inside me, or the minute he came into the world, the moment he said his first word or took his first step, or made me laugh for the first time. I remember all those things, and all the things about them. Where the sun lay in the sky, how his father’s eyes sparkled, what I feared in those moments, what I hoped for his life to be. That season of life is a haze to him, but when I die and reflect on my life, I know I will still believe that season was the meaning of mine.
If I figured anything out in these last six years, it is this: human beings are unknowable.
You can never know a single person fully, not even yourself. Even if you think you know yourself in your safe glass castle, you don’t know yourself in the dirt. Even if you hustle and make it in the rough, you have no idea if you would thrive or die in the light of real riches, if your cleverness would outlive your desperation.
If I could have ceased what pendulums swung, or wheels turned, or water clocks emptied, then, in order to keep the Fates from marching in time, I would have, for though it is what a boy naturally wishes when he fears change will come upon what he loves and take it away, a man remembers it, too, and in his heart wishes the same when all around him he feels only loss, loss that has been his companion for some time, and promises to remain at his side.
“No, Plymouth would suit me well enough,” I said, grinning at his understandable misperception.
“The air is fresher, for one. A view of the sea would suit me, but not too near a view.”
The picture unfolded itself still further. “A modest white-painted cottage, a little orchard, perhaps even a wife, if she tolerates my day-dreaming. I should call it Hilltop Cottage. There would be vines and honeysuckle, and perhaps some fine oaks about.
I should like enough patients to balance my books, and sufficient that I may be of some service to the townsfolk, but not so many that they interfere with my writing. Does that seem unreasonable?”
“I think you are better suited to the sea than you realise.”
“And I am content that this will be my first and last voyage. I have not been truly happy at any time since we set sail. If I am not seasick, I am cold. If I am not cold, I am exhausted. When I am none of those things, I am frightened. Yet if there is one part of it that I shall not regret, it is our acquaintance.”
“It is not every friend that drills into another friend’s head.”
“Human affairs would be curious indeed, if that were the custom.”
His marriage was a maze nobody had ever mapped. An infinity of habit and hurt and betrayal, down which Ina and he wandered separately, meeting occasionally in the children.
Were you in love with her?
The question is in a way meaningless, she knows, but one must ask. Love in such situations is rarely real. Sex is the engine, exalting and ruining people, sex and frustration. Love is what people believe is worth the path of devastation.
During the first part of your life, you only become aware of happiness once you have lost it. Then an age comes, a second one, in which you already know, at the moment when you begin to experience true happiness, that you are, at the end of the day, going to lose it. When I met Belle, I understood that I had just entered this second age. I also understood that I hadn’t reached the third age, in which anticipation of the loss of happiness prevents you from living.
Your only chance of survival, if you are sincerely smitten, lies in hiding this fact from the woman you love, of feigning a casual detachment under all circumstances. What sadness there is in this simple observation! What an accusation against man! However, it had never occurred to me to contest this law, nor to imagine disobeying it: love makes you weak, and the weaker of the two is oppressed, tortured and finally killed by the other, who in his or her turn oppresses, tortures and kills without having evil intentions, without even getting pleasure from it, with complete indifference; that’s what men, normally, call love.
‘They look so fine, and young, and wrapped up in each other. Love is so fresh and clean at that age. Don’t you think?’
‘Margareta! I’m surprised at you! We both know there’s no such thing as love!’
‘What do you call it?’
Tatyana snuffed our her cigarette. That sly smile. ‘Mutations of wanting.’
‘You’re not serious.’
‘I am quite serious. Look at those kids. The boys want to get the girls into bed so they can have their corks popped off their bottles and forth. When a man blows his nose you don’t call it love. Why get all misty-eyed when a man blows another part of his anatomy? As for the girls, they’re either going along for the ride because they can get the things they want from the boys, or else maybe they enjoy being in bed too. Thought I doubt it. I never knew an eighteen-year-old boy who didn’t drop the egg off his spoon at the first fence.’
‘But that’s list! You’re talking about lust, not love.’
‘Lust is the hard sell. Love is the soft sell. The profit margin is the same.’
‘But love’s the opposite of self-interest. True, tender, love is pure and selfless.’
‘No. True, tender love is self-interest so sinewy that it only looks selfless.’