A Closed Eye Read Free Page A

imperviously, held her on this earth.
    ‘Have you no one left?’ he ventured.
    ‘Why, yes. My parents are still alive, incredibly enough. I don’t know why I say that, but they always strike me as too young to be old. They are in their late seventies now, but still very active. They’ve always been popular, sociable. They used to love dancing. Well, those days are past, perhaps. They have aged, recently. Since my daughter died,’ she said steadily.
    There was a silence.
‘Ma pauvre amie,’
he said finally, stretching out a mottled hand to her. But she got up, took the bottle, and poured him another glass of wine.
    ‘I do not like the past, Joseph,’ she said. ‘I am not like you. Nothing in my story appeals to me. And yet, as a girl, I was happy. Happy in a very simple sense. It goes with youth, or it did in my case. Not in yours,’ she smiled at him. ‘Now that I look back I see a sort of progressive darkening. Paradise lost. And yet it was a very humble paradise. I was a good but sillygirl,’ she said. ‘And I have been a good and excessively foolish woman.’
    ‘You are still young,’ he protested.
    ‘Young? I am fifty-three. And I feel very old.’
    Her tone frightened him. He did not know how to counter such bleakness, having always to hand the consolation of easy tears. Seeing this, she smiled at him.
    ‘But I haven’t told you my news!’ she said. ‘I may be having a young friend to stay. I have known her since she was a child; she is my goddaughter, or as good as. Her mother always said that I was to be her godmother, but in fact she had so much on her mind that matters got a little confused. But I have always thought of myself as … Well, I have tried to be close. Such a talented girl. Perhaps we could come with you on one of your days in Geneva or Lausanne. She may find it dull here; I hadn’t thought of that. I shall rely on you, Joseph. You always have such good ideas.’
    His face brightened. It usually did, she reflected, plumping up cushions after he had gone. Mention a treat, an outing, a festivity, however modest, and he was a child again. But she wished he would not always talk of the past. The past to him was his golden treasure, all love, all happiness. Fortunate man to possess such capital! In comparison, her own past—she meant the past
before
, the pre-historic past—had been drab but dreamy, the sort of past that someone with no ascertainable history or parentage has, someone in whom the illusions of childhood outwit circumstance. With parents like children, frail, demanding, fearful, restless, as if some pleasure were being withheld from them. Only recently she had begun to think of them as adults, feeling pity for lives so haphazard, feeling gratitude that at last they were happy, that their old age was in some miraculous way their youth restored, that they no longer thought much of her, she who had interrupted their idyll so many years ago, and had more recently dealtthem a terrible blow, just when they were beginning to think that life had been merciful with them, that at last—at last—they might make some concession to reality and admit that they were perhaps growing older, not old, not yet, but able in good conscience, and with due deference to their legendary youth, to relax, and with little more than a backward glance, to settle down.

U NLIKE Monsieur Papineau, her only friend in this curious aftermath to a life, she could not recall her childhood with anything like the quality of affection which he lavished on the past. And yet she had been quite happy, although always aware that her advent in the lives of her parents had not been entirely welcome. But parents like hers were not destined to become parents, had been too young, too feckless, too irresistible to each other to bestow themselves on a child, particularly the kind of child she had turned out to be, so, as they said when they contemplated her, unlike themselves.
    What she knew of those parents she had