the play’s terms, isn’t really there, his son, Edgar, to support the delusion, describes the dizzy heights his father imagines he stands on the verge of: The crows and choughs that wing the midway air/ Show scarce so gross as beetles… But could Shakespeare, living only in London and Warwickshire, ever have seen the sea? Bridget wondered, her ankles bending against the steepness of the descent. Her grandfather, who swore the playwright had been to Ireland and back, would have said so. And when you heard how Shakespeare wrote about the sea, it seemed incredible if he had never seen it. Was it possible that, like the cliff where the supposed choughs are sighted, Shakespeare’s ‘sea’ was merely spun from his imagination? But then so was everything else he wrote ‘spun’: Hamlet, Lear, Gertrude, Cordelia—like the choughs, you could hardly say they didn’t exist, they were realer than most people. What kind of existence did a character in a play have? Did Shakespeare’s characters ‘exist’ in another world, in your mind, the way that a memory did—or a dead person, as Peter now seemed to…? But where, or what, was Peter’s world now? Was what she had seen real, or was it just in her mind…?
But then she herself, she had often speculated, was no more than a dramatic construction, made up of fleeting feelings, idle introspections, vain wonderings—glimpses in the ‘glass of fashion’, she thought, taking hold of the sweep’s hard hand as he helped her down the drop to the uneven, many-pebbled shore.
21
Although Frances had now met his sister, she had not seen Zahin since the day she called round with the Chinese bowl, when he had referred to her and Peter as sweethearts. The odd pronouncement—Peter’s own word for them—remained for her a conundrum. She had not mentioned it to Bridget for she was well aware that, despite their quirky acquaintance, Bridget retained an understandable hostility to the affair.
Lying in bed one morning, Frances wondered how the boy could have come by his knowledge of her and Peter, and was suddenly overcome by remembrance.
What she was recalling, in particular, was the summer after they had first met at Mickey’s, when she had gone regularly to the open-air baths to swim. The purpose of the exercise had been to trim the body which Peter seemed so to like, but the swims had evolved into a ritual through which, mad as it seemed even to herself, she sought to keep him.
‘If I swim another seven lengths,’ she used to incant, ‘he will ring me tonight.’ The seven would be followedby another seven—and so on. When, returning home exhausted, her hair damp and smelling of chlorine, she heard his voice on the answerphone, she tasted triumph.
It has been suggested that what we want and pursue with a whole heart we can always have. Who can tell the validity of this proposition—yet there are people whose conviction is strong enough to steer fate. It may be that without Frances’s propitiating swims—or what lay behind them—Peter’s interest in her might have waned. Certainly, at the simplest level, he responded to her need of him—as a man who has been abandoned always will.
The belief that we are worth loving is a blessing granted to very few and with that one blessing all others become redundant. To Peter Hansome, the idea that he might be the object of another’s desire was inherently unbelievable. And yet there had been Veronica…
Peter was too untried at the time to perceive that the uncomplicated merging of body and emotion he had known in Malaya was one of those gifts which, through its very simplicity, gives an illusion of being commonplace. He had taken the whole experience simply, very much in the manner with which he had caught up the gold-skinned girl’s body in his arms and threatened, amid squeals of delight, to ‘crush it to death’. That mix of amorous sadism and erotic masochism was too fine-blent—in those days, too far below the surface
But then she herself, she had often speculated, was no more than a dramatic construction, made up of fleeting feelings, idle introspections, vain wonderings—glimpses in the ‘glass of fashion’, she thought, taking hold of the sweep’s hard hand as he helped her down the drop to the uneven, many-pebbled shore.
21
Although Frances had now met his sister, she had not seen Zahin since the day she called round with the Chinese bowl, when he had referred to her and Peter as sweethearts. The odd pronouncement—Peter’s own word for them—remained for her a conundrum. She had not mentioned it to Bridget for she was well aware that, despite their quirky acquaintance, Bridget retained an understandable hostility to the affair.
Lying in bed one morning, Frances wondered how the boy could have come by his knowledge of her and Peter, and was suddenly overcome by remembrance.
What she was recalling, in particular, was the summer after they had first met at Mickey’s, when she had gone regularly to the open-air baths to swim. The purpose of the exercise had been to trim the body which Peter seemed so to like, but the swims had evolved into a ritual through which, mad as it seemed even to herself, she sought to keep him.
‘If I swim another seven lengths,’ she used to incant, ‘he will ring me tonight.’ The seven would be followedby another seven—and so on. When, returning home exhausted, her hair damp and smelling of chlorine, she heard his voice on the answerphone, she tasted triumph.
It has been suggested that what we want and pursue with a whole heart we can always have. Who can tell the validity of this proposition—yet there are people whose conviction is strong enough to steer fate. It may be that without Frances’s propitiating swims—or what lay behind them—Peter’s interest in her might have waned. Certainly, at the simplest level, he responded to her need of him—as a man who has been abandoned always will.
The belief that we are worth loving is a blessing granted to very few and with that one blessing all others become redundant. To Peter Hansome, the idea that he might be the object of another’s desire was inherently unbelievable. And yet there had been Veronica…
Peter was too untried at the time to perceive that the uncomplicated merging of body and emotion he had known in Malaya was one of those gifts which, through its very simplicity, gives an illusion of being commonplace. He had taken the whole experience simply, very much in the manner with which he had caught up the gold-skinned girl’s body in his arms and threatened, amid squeals of delight, to ‘crush it to death’. That mix of amorous sadism and erotic masochism was too fine-blent—in those days, too far below the surface
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