The Drowning People Read Free

separation from my family at university I was encouraged by those I knew and the books I read to cultivate a certain detachment from home life and its aspirations for me, a detachment which made me critical during term time and superior in the holidays. It was then that I turned with real determination to my secret love, the violin; and it was then, comparatively late but in time enough, that I had the leisure and the teaching to discover that I might be really good; good; enough to matter. Good enough, certainly, to use my music as the basis for my first serious confrontation with my parents, one that raged the whole of the summer following my graduation and which centered around my stubborn insistence that I was going to be a musician.
    But I digress in my attempt to make my twenty-two-year-old self more real to me now, an attempt in which I have been only partly successful. I remember once more what he looks like, that is true; I see his half smile and rosy cheeks and the hair tumbling over his forehead into his eyes. But I know him no longer; I have no empathy with his tastes and only a little with his enthusiasms, surprisingly few of which have remained. I struggle to remember the people with whom he filled his life, the friendships he made: curiously intense, for he was a young man of extremes, inclined to manic sociability and profound gloom by turns. Of course a few stand distinct from the tableau. People like Camilla Boardman, the girl my mother always hoped I would marry: pretty; bubbly; well connected; more substantial than she liked to seem. But I was insular at twenty-two. Indiscriminately friendly, I shared myself intimately with great discrimination; I still do. Perhaps I had little to share; certainly my life up to that point contained nothing very remarkable. I had made the progression from preparatory school to public school to Oxford with as few jolts as possible; I had not forced myself to think much or to examine the world. Life was as it was, and I accepted it on its own terms, much in the way I would later accept my marriage to Sarah: with a sort of dogged determination which I would not admit to myself.
    Unthinking, unseeing, unknowing, I drifted through life until I met Ella. It was she who baptized me; it was she who threw me into the sea of life. And she did it quite unthinkingly, little caring or even knowing how much good or how much harm she might do. It was in her nature, that wild abandonment, that driving need for experience and explanation. It was she who made me swim, she who pushed me from the safety of the shallows; it was she with whom I floundered, out of my depth. It is to her, and to my memories of her, that I must turn now in seeking to explain what I have done.
    In memory she is a small, slight girl, my age, with tousled blond hair and green eyes that sparkle back at me complicitly, even now. She is in a park, Hyde Park; it is an early morning in mid-June: birds sing; keepers in green overalls are setting up deck chairs; the air is sweet with the scent of newly mown grass. I can hear myself panting.
    I had been running, up early and out of the house to escape the frosty conversation that had become habitual since my acceptance to the Guildhall. My father had strict views on the desirability of merchant banking; my mother, usually a useful ally (for my own happiness figured more in her plans for me than it did in my father’s) had sided with him, saying that no grandchildren of hers would grow up in Hounslow because their father was an impoverished musician. I had begun, in vain, by telling them that musicians weren’t necessarily impoverished; later I had openly called them snobs and sworn privately that nothing could be said to deter me from my course. The atmosphere at home had not yet recovered from the latest scene (unusually venomous on the parts of all concerned) staged two days previously. I had no wish for another meal of silent recrimination.
    So I went running in the park.