Undue Influence

One thing was certain: I was not destined for the happiness of a settled life, whether or not I longed for it: I was not one of the elect.

For I knew myself to be at fault. The intolerance I had manifested towards my father had left a stain, which was why I was such a solitary person. A solitary person with a longing for wholeness, an experience which would cancel all the others. A baptism, if you like.

In order to gain total possession of such a man it would be necessary to remove him from his work, from those loyalties to dead writers which few could share. A woman like Cynthia, all instinct, would have known this. The daily presence of young people, all so much younger than herself, would have been a preoccupation. She had retaliated by annexin

I did not particularly want to be involved in a parade of sentimentality. In any event I am allergic to weddings, having attended too many. But Wiggy is a nicer person, more generous, less judgmental.

I had spent that morbid Sunday wondering if simple happiness were available to all and had come to the conclusion that it was not. One had to make a determined bid for it, and I did not quite know how this was done. Friends of mine who had married young had revealed that they were no strangers to triumphal calculations and this had puzzled me. I wa

Somehow I must arrange affairs so that these dreadful days and evenings were not to be repeated. I was uncertain how this was to be achieved, but I thought, or rather hoped, that serendipity would play a part. It had not so far let me down.

The food which I had bought, and which I should have to buy, again and again, seemed insubstantial, the plastic carrier bag pathetic. I placed the contents on the kitchen table: a grapefruit, butter, a tin of coffee. This was not a meal. In the last days of her life my mother had subsisted on tea and biscuits: I now did the same, shamefully. I seem

In her wedding dress she looked different, older, and for the first time in my life I became aware of separation. It affected me deeply. Cathy and her husband moved away, and the evenings were never the same again. It struck me at the time that in any event I would be excluded.

It must be a terrible thing to die alone, an even worse one to know that you will have to do so. Soldiers in battle have each other, but who will provide comfort in the stretches of the night for one who has had to make a virtue of self-sufficiency? Wiggy and I were entirely preoccupied with this matter. And Eileen had been the acme of common sense