This Is All Read Free Page A

that em. And now it’s too late. Sent. Gone. Delivered. And he’ll tell everybody and they’ll all laugh at me for being so gauche as to think even for one nanosecond that he , the coveted William Blacklin, would pick up such an obvious pass from me , the local dodo.
    As for thinking I could get him to – urrrrrrrrgggg .
    I hate myself. I loathe myself with the deepest direst loathing. I am in hell. I’m going to the garden to eat worms.
    Lordy! He’s emmed back already!
    ok ck. name day time place. c u. will b
    It’s a YES! I don’t believe it!!!
    will b, will b, will u b mine?
    say yes, will b, and I will b thine!!!
    As you see, I wasn’t so hot as a poet, then, except on the use of exclamations.
    Searing rain
    But now, my as yet unborn child, I’m tired. I ache with the swell of you. I shall explode. There are times during pregnancy when you feel like a hot-air balloon with a lead weight inside it. No hope of floating.
    Anyway, I don’t like stories that go on and on in the same fashion page after page, with no variation, no changes of pace, of mind, of music, no pauses to catch my mental and emotional breath. I like stories that are like the English weather and the English landscape with its hills and wolds and valleys and plains and woods and forests and hedged fields and open moors and wide downs and mini-mountains and silent ponds and lonely lakes and trilling rills andsurging streams and curling rivers and haphazard skies and shifting reaches of the sea. A place where nothing is anything for long or is ever too much.
    And you can be in love with a place, can’t you? Have you discovered that yet? Which is your place, I wonder, which is your land, your natural home? Even though I don’t feel I belong anywhere or that anywhere belongs to me, I do feel at peace in England and love it as nowhere else. This I’ve learned from trips to foreign lands, one benefit of having a father who is a travel agent.
    (If you ask me where my own home is, the only answer I can give is that it’s not a place but words. I live in words and words are where I belong.)
    It is night. Your father’s working away from home this week. A sweaty storm rampages outside. A few minutes ago there was an almighty crash of thunder and lightning, which made you jump inside me. I’m getting to know you by your shifts and shimmies. And at the moment you’re as edgy as I am. These days I cry about nothing. I saw an old man trip and fall down in the street today and I started to blub like a fountain. Couldn’t stop. Had to get in the car and drive away.
    Tonight we feel alone, you and I.
    We long for the touch of your father.
    First date
    Precisely at the appointed hour William Blacklin arrived, a little black oboe case tucked under his black-leathered arm.
    I’d picked an evening when I was house-sitting for my Aunt Doris. She was away on one of her monthly jaunts to London’s theatreland, plays and music being her passions.
    Doris . I love Doris dearly. Since my mother’s death when I was five, she’s been my second mother. And she, unmarriedand childless, loves me as her surrogate daughter. At that time, when I was fifteen, I trusted her completely. She was the only one who knew everything about me that I knew about myself.
    One of her biggest regrets is that she hadn’t the courage of her desire to be an actress, rather than training to be an accountant and spending the rest of her life as a well-paid calculator. All her father’s fault. He was opposed to any daughter of his going on the stage, an insecure and dissolute occupation according to him, though he was happy enough, in fact only too keen, to ogle any dishabille actress who turned up on the telly, preferably so dishabille she was stripped to the nethers. (As you’ll guess, I never liked him and didn’t cry when he died. Let’s not dwell on the other reasons why.) Always a good little girl, Doris was dutiful and foolish enough to listen and obey. She rebelled later, as