As Near as I Can Get Read Free Page B

oblivious for her importunity to be embarrassing. Smugly virile, I clasped my hands behind my neck, inspecting the terracing of her narrow, ridged back as she twisted herself out of her négligé, the flowing, fair hair, the angular face and hollow cheeks which, as she turned once more towards me, developed a coy, childish smile.
    â€˜Hello,’ she whispered, laying this same thin face on my chest, ‘what are you thinking of?’
    â€˜Seals.’ I answered untruthfully, or rather deceitfully, having only determined upon the reply, and evoked the appropriate marine connotations, after her idle question.
    â€˜You know Cranston, don’t you? Is it Cranston? Oh, sometimes I can’t think properly.’
    She pouted for a moment, rebuking her vagrant memory, but, behind the flirtatious expression, lay authentic distress at the proximity of chaos.
    â€˜You don’t think I’m too thin?’ she gasped hurriedly. ‘I eat a lot, honestly. Well, I don’t really. I can cook anything on that ring.’
    â€˜Shall I tell you about seals?’ I offered, allowing charged fragments of my thoughts to collect again, as they had done frequently over the past few weeks, around the terminal of a poignant phrase, ‘the wave-borne seals’, to which I appended: grey sea-rovers, fish gulpers, sliding, muzzles raised, past blue, towering icebergs, flipping miles of green water behind them, coasting Canada. The lash of poetry, flailing the feeble and unaspiring imagination, the sluggish bearer, on to far horizons. Another cut and the stung brain struggles exhausted to the summit and liespanting both from effort and from awe at the prospect revealed. ‘Here, here!’ it gasps, ‘I will rest. True, there is a further range but may there not be others beyond that? I am content with this airy space to dwell upon.’ Until the crisp lash speaks again.
    â€˜Do you like that?’ asked Milly.
    This thing, this crucial moment in the affairs of evolution, when two units of intelligent life knit physically to generate another, is still magic, still unsecularized by the heroic attempts of some, and the less disinterested ones of many, mind-scientists of our century. We may not describe it lest we disperse it, and release the precious energy that builds the machines which change the world which changes us, conveying us in our car powered by erotic combustion—where? Into the future, into a million, million years of human evolution, into the heart of a star, somewhere.
    â€˜Very much.’
    â€˜Have you ever done it like this?’
    â€˜No,’ I answered studiously, ‘I don’t think I have.’ Wishing for total abandon, for the completely unselfconscious participation which alone would disperse my awareness of the growing absurdity of our acrobatics, and finding instead only greater and greater detachment.
    Later Milly slept restlessly, turning from side to side and even sitting up occasionally with a muffled gasp as if freeing herself from some oppressive force. Feigning sleep, I saw her from the corner of my eye. I heard a car draw up further down the street and a burst of low, acquiescent laughter and a front door slam. I heard the swelling drone of the night flight to Paris or Rome or Karachi and I thought of India and its white cows and of the sprung shrimp beneath the careless, abandoned waters and of the familiar seals at play. And then I dozed.
    â€˜Don’t fall over the rocks,’ urged my mother. ‘Take Edna’s hand. Ah, here is Mr Billings. Mr Billings looks cross.’
    And I had to strive with Mr Billings, the village stationer,now inexplicably endowed with flashing eye and wrathful countenance, on some fearsome, eagle-haunted precipice, while Edna, horribly forgetting our attachment, dragged at my heavy limbs and mother watched critically as they toppled me over. And with despair at betrayal sharpening my terror of falling I had plunged