In Certain Circles by Elizabeth Harrower Page B

Or did I say that before?’
    Lily gave the entranced face a severe look. ‘You’ve said it ten times. Considering that your life needn’t have been in danger…We were down at the beach. Do you think Russell would let you drown?’
    Zoe turned away. ‘It was a sign,’ she said childishly, into the pillow, and two childish tears came to her eyes. She felt irrational, and right. It was not the first time she had accepted what was thrown in her path as a sign from the universe, but this most momentous acceptance erased all the others.
    Russell came to the door. ‘Dr Todd said he’s given her an injection. She’ll be out to it in five minutes.’
    Lying very still to hear what else might be imparted, she heard Lily say in a low voice, ‘I hope she’s back to normal in the morning.’
    â€˜Knowing Zo’s normal…’
    She smiled, and slept.

    Dear Joseph,
Darling Joseph,
My dear Joseph,
    Dear God! If she couldn’t even decide what to call him!
    Dear Joseph,
    Thank you for your letters, and thank you for arranging to have everything packed and shipped over. I’m sorry not to have written sooner. How much did it cost?
    Or, how I won golden opinions for tact, charm and graciousness. Thank you, like a business letter, then money, as if she’d hired him to do a job. If you can take the trouble to remember someone deeply, you can write human letters, otherwise you write form letters that could go to anyone, and read like a draught from a refrigerator.
    Dear Joseph,
    You ask for news. We’ve been married for five months, as you know from my other note. We’re living in the house I inherited from my mother, at the end of that little beach I’ve described to you. Russell and Lily (whom you’ll remember after that famous visit) and their two small daughters have the old house. My father went to South Africa some time ago, and is giving lectures there. He is so outspoken he’ll end up in prison.
    Russell has turned renegade now that they’re back here—that is, Lily wanted him to winkle himself into one of the universities here, after winkling him out of the university there to bring the children home to her parents. He was working on some project in London, but has developed anti-sociological scruples for reasons I haven’t been able to plumb. Lily is having seizures. When I tell Russell he is too vain to look at people in the light of other men’s theories, he agrees with me.
    So, after the sadness and turmoil of my mother’s illness and death, and after they had moved into our old place, he was prevailed on by a friend who wanted to sell a Dickensian printery. (The machines are the best, but the building has little wooden staircases running all over it.) He (and I) then persuaded Stephen to resign from his uncongenial work, and they are now partners in this eccentric printery-cum-publishing thing that they know very little about.
    Because Lily couldn’t face leaving the children with a housekeeper, she has been translating various pieces at home—German. She asked me to help her, then we had to ask other friends if they could take on extra work, and now we have an office in town. We have a woman there to answer the phone. Most of the time, Lily and I work at home.
    Apart from this, Stephen and I had the house brought nearer the heart’s desire, by a team of Italian builders and painters, then furnished it, and I’m marvellously happy. It should be illegal to be so happy, and possibly is.
    What piffle! Zoe thought, looking back at the letter. What a very false tone! Because he wouldn’t want to hear all this about Russell and Stephen and domestic details. And it all amounted to an elaborate padding in which she could insert the vital news, the only news, I am marvellously happy . She felt a tremendous need to say it, and an equally deep, quite opposite need to be secret and private.
    Vacantly she gazed