Out of This World Read Free Page B

Paul. My poor dear darlings.
    We should turn round now? Stroll back? It’s nearly four o’clock. Hey, if we’re lucky we’ll catch the chimes and the dancing animals on the Delacorte Clock.
    And you know what scares me more than anything? That it won’t make any difference, that it won’t have any effect. Look at them, watching the TV, while I watch them, a bringer of bad news, poised in the doorway. Cookies and milk. My angels. They’re sipping in the pictures. Lapping up the universe. Who needs a mother any more?
    You know, when Mum died I just didn’t believe it. Can you remember what it was like (okay, so
I’m
asking questions) before you really knew about death? I was five years old. She went off one day and didn’t come back. But I always thought she would have to come back some day. I don’t know how long it was before I really understood she was never coming back. And, you know, when Harry started going off for months on end, when he left me and Grandad and went off to do his thing with the world, to be where it was happening, I used to think that what he was doing was looking for Mum. And I used to blame him – have you got this, are you writing this down? – because he never found her.

Harry
 
    I was born on March 27th, 1918, and I never knew my mother, because on that same day (can it have been so long ago?), at the very same hour, she died.
    They say that if there has to be a choice, it is the doctor’s duty to save the child before the mother. In certain situations life is tradeable, expendable. It is the field surgeon’s duty to repair the lightly wounded before the probable fatalities. Had the choice been my father’s, I know, without doubt, how he would have chosen. He would have wanted my mother to live. I don’t blame him. The choice would have been only natural. He would never have known or even seen me, but he would have seen my mother again. But at the time of my birth my father was not in a position to choose. He was far away, in another country and, as it happened, in another of those situations where life was expendable.
    He made, all the same, another choice. (He made two choices, though half a century went by before I knew about that other, big choice, that failed.) He might have loved me with a double, a compound love. He chose instead to blame me, to see me as the instrument of his wife’s death. And had I known this as a small boy, had I known it even as an ignorant baby, I think Iwould have gladly affirmed that I wished I could have made that very first choice in my mother’s favour, and so restored her to him. A great many things would then have been different (though I would have known nothing about them). But I was not in a position of choice.
    On my birthday he would hand over some present and I would receive it like an emblem of guilt. In this way he once gave me a camera. Then he would disappear for the rest of the day.
    It took me years to work all this out. But I never worked off the blame. I never thought, though I learned to scorn him just as he scorned me, that I deserved anything other than a father who, if he inspired esteem and even ondness in others, was as tender to me as a statue. Even when he held Sophie for the very first time – we had been father and son then for
thirty
years – and I saw him smile and his eyes moisten, I didn’t think: You old bastard, so now you can afford to relent, to be reconciled, to let it all come out. I thought: Thank God, I have made Dad melt. I have paid my debt.
    And I truly believe he was glad when Anna died. Because it was only then that we started, really, to be friends. As if I hadn’t paid the debt, not till then. Oh no, not in full.
    You too, Harry. Now you know what it’s like.
    I can see them now, sitting on the wicker chairs on the lawn at Hyfield. He is making her laugh and she is making him laugh. She used to call him the ‘perfect gentleman’. She used to call him in Greek her ‘
palikári
’. It is,