Reading Madame Bovary Read Free Page A

it.’
    Oh, no, I thought, oh, no, I shouldn’t have come. Not this.
    Next she’ll be talking about past lives.
    There was a silence and then she added, ‘You’ll see it one day.’
    â€˜You mean in the dream?’
    â€˜No, you’ll see the baby.’
    What baby? There was no real baby.
    â€˜You’ll see that baby again, just before you die.’
    Diana was speechless. And then she surprised me. ‘When am I going to die?’ she asked.
    Mrs. Cluny closed her eyes, and went on fingering the watchband. ‘I don’t see your death at all clear.’ She paused. ‘That’s the way it is. Sometimes I see it clear with people, sometimes I don’t. You’ve got a kind of cloud coming toward you. It could be your death, but it could be something else. In any case,’ she added, ‘it won’t be for a while yet.’
    Then she sat, very composed, with her hands on her lap. She put Diana’s watch down on the table beside her, a signal that the interview was over. She would ‘see’ no more that day.
    Diana fumbled in her purse until she located her cheque book.
    â€˜I only take cash,’ said Mrs. Cluny.
    On the drive home Diana was uncharacteristically quiet and a little unnerved.
    â€˜She didn’t really tell you anything much,’ I ventured.
    â€˜Hmmmm,’ she said, biting her lip and staring ahead at the white line. Every now and then her eyes would flutter in an odd way. ‘I should have asked her what she meant by a while ,’ she said. She was in a funk.
    Back in the city we went to The Malaya for a bowl of blinding hot laksa and then on to a Bette Midler movie to restore our morale. By the time we got back to Diana’s place she had snapped out of it.
    Despite her weakness for the consumerised supernatural (tarot festivals, crystal workshops, astrology on the net) and what Frank derides as a certain credulousness, Diana can be very funny. She, too, is absorbed in lists, though not of the kind that plague me. Hers are a diverting game of mapping the world through trivia, and often over coffee we compile them together or, rather, she goes off on a riff and I throw in the odd contribution. Here is the latest one, recalled from memory. Knowing me, I’ve probably forgotten the best bits: I’ll have to check with her later.
    The narcissist’s bedside table versus the non-narcissist’s bedside table
    THE NON-NARCISSIST:
    â€“ K-Y jelly
    â€“ toilet lanolin
    â€“ tissues
    â€“ anti-histamine tablets
    â€“ Body Shop moisturiser
    â€“ reading glasses
    â€“ detective novel or the Women’s Weekly
    â€“ contraceptive pills
    â€“ small asymmetrical plaster vase made by offspring in Grade Two art class
    â€“ twenty-dollar alarm clock with tinny beep
    â€“ bedside lamp: cheap Taiwanese knock-off of a Milanese design
    THE NARCISSIST:
    â€“ pink ceramic oil burner with ylang-ylang aromatic oil
    â€“ vibrator in purple velvet case with silver draw-string
    â€“ Almond and patchouli massage oil
    â€“ The I Ching or Liz Greene’s Astrology for Lovers , Stephen Coulter’s The Empathic Friend (and Where to Find Them) or Jack Kornfield’s A Path with Heart
    â€“ Magazines: Marie Claire, Vanity Fair and, if of a certain age, Vogue
    â€“ Estée Lauder night cream and eye gel
    â€“ buff stick for nails
    â€“ black silk eye mask for when partner is inconsiderately reading
    â€“ mobile phone for late-night calls when depressed
    â€“ bedside lamp: (under forty) cheap Taiwanese knock-off of a Milanese design or (over forty) Laura Ashley with pale-blue flowers on the base and a pleated shade in satin cream
    The beautiful object
    There is a joy in money, and we are all too refined to speak of it directly. We say, ‘What fine linen, what a lovely bowl, what nice shoes.’ I’m not materialistic, we tell ourselves, it’s just that I love beauty.
    Yesterday, I took an