Chapters (19)
She’d marry some booze-sodden producer who would keep her in the manner to which she was not accustomed. My modest allowance, or separation-thing, would be a pittance in comparison. I’d have the children to keep, of course, had to face up to a responsibility at least once.
But what was there left? Apart from my work, which was still all right – better than all right, really – but there was nothing else. The kids, sure.
And the key.
James. What the hell did his letter mean? Suicide? Or just, as Helen had said, gone gypsies ’off with the gypsies’? He could do anything, end up in darkest Africa feeding the starving (with what? I wondered), or drift to America and join in the Lost Brigade, dope, drink, anything you want. Total disappearance.
The typical drop-out, join the huddled masses wrapped in cardboard, sleeping in the subway entrances on winter nights. People get mislaid like that easily. But, somehow, not James. I don’t think it would have been James’s way. He’d never get to America anyway; never get a visa, wouldn’t know how. All his life, as far as I was aware, he’d had someone to take care of him, arrange things, set him up when he fell.
Of course, it was quite possible that he got married. Improbable but not impossible. He’d got the fey looks which some women go for: the lost little boy, the helpless child with the trembling smile. And with his painting, which some people pretended to understand, he might have hit it off with some rich American lady touring Provence, or the Var, or wherever it was. Maybe she got him: overwhelmed by his mystery (what mystery? – plain silence and indolence in reality), she’d carted him to America like a package of goodies from Fortnum’s or Fauchon.
I looked at his letter again, read it carefully, and knew that this was no letter of farewell-I’m-off-to-America. This was just, farewell. Full stop.
… don’t come looking for me… not about any longer… drifted into the blue … leaving no trace … the road to sweet oblivion …’
Surely that was farewell? And three years to go on a rented house in a lost village miles away.
Where? Why? Everything ‘seems to turn to dross, my work, my love, my life’… certainly a farewell.
The intercom buzzed. Helen said she was leaving, be back about four, to remember liquids for Giles, and that Annie was going over to the Merrows for tea so not to worry about her.
I sat and stared out of the window over slate roofs, tilting chimneys, a wispy poplar bending in the early spring wind.
A filtered London sun struck through the dusty glass, glittered on the key before me.