Any Human Heart Read Free Page B

an interesting and strenuous term’.
    This afternoon I played golf with Father, reluctantly, but he was unusually insistent that we go out and get some fresh air. The day was cold and blustery and we were practically alone on the second course. The greens were mossy and hairy — ‘The particular stringencies of winter greens,’ Father said, as I missed a 15-inch putt — and we were obliged to place all fairway balls. I hacked around erratically while father played his usual cautious and precise game, ‘playing for par’, and won comfortably, eight up and six to play. We walked in the last six holes, chatting inconsequentially — about the weather, about the possibility of a return trip to Uruguay, what colleges at Oxford I was thinking of applying for and so on. As we strolled up the side of the eighteenth fairway towards the clubhouse (I could see the small terrace on which Lucy and I had kissed), he stopped and touched my arm.
    ‘Logan,’ he said, ‘there’s something you must know.’
    I said nothing but I thought at once, for some reason, of financial ruin. I could see Oxford evanesce and melt as if it had been an ice-sculpture left outside in the blazing sun. But my father made no move to continue the conversation, merely stroked his moustache and looked solemn, and I realized he was waiting for the symbolic and rhetorical reply.
    So I dutifully said, ‘What is it, Father?’
    ‘I’m not well,’ he said. ‘It seems… It seems I may not live very long.’
    I was useless. What is one to say in these circumstances? I muttered something vaguely negative: surely not; how can you be; there must be some other — but I felt more shocked by my absence of shock: it was as if he had said we must get someone in to help with the gardening. As I think about it now I still can’t really believe it: that stark announcement of a future fact has a tenuous hold on the present moment — its potential reality seems virtually ungraspable. It’s as if someone had said to me, equally soberly, your hair will fall out before you’re thirty, or, you’ll never earn more than a thousand pounds a year. However alarming these prognostications are, they have no real impact as you stand there hearing them, they remain for ever, ineffably hypothetical. And this is how I felt, how I feel, about Father’s announcement of his impending death: it has no meaning. It has no meaning for me at all despite the fact that he went on at some length about his will, his small fortune, how Mother and I would be well provided for, all necessary provisions made. And, moreover, now I should be a support and a calming presence for my mother. I hung my head and nodded, but it was more dutiful than sincere. When he finished speaking, he offered his hand and I shook it. His hand was dry and smooth, his grip surprisingly strong. We walked back to the clubhouse in silence.
     
     
    This evening before dinner I kissed Lucy on the landing outside the airing cupboard. She did not resist. We used tongues and this time I put my arms around her and held her body against mine in a hug. She’s a big, solid girl. When I tried to touch her breasts she pushed me away easily, but I saw she was flushed and excited and her chest moved with the intensity of her breathing. I told her I was in love with her and she laughed. We’re first cousins, she said, it’s illegal, we’re committing incest. She goes back up north tomorrow — how will I live without her?
     
     
    At dinner tonight I looked across the table at my father as he sawed lumps of mutton off the slices of joint on his plate and popped them in his mouth, chewing vigorously — at least there seemed nothing wrong with his appetite. Perhaps it is too gloomy a prognosis? He’s a sober and cautious man, Father, and it would be entirely in his nature to read too much into a doctor’s professional circumlocutions. My mother, I noticed, seemed oblivious, chatting away to Lucy, showing her some new nacreous