Geraldine woke out of busy dreams into the calms and shallows of old age. There were two skylights in her attic bedroom, and when she opened her eyes she saw clouds floating past, slow and stately against a pale sky; the angular under-shape of a gull’s flight was printed for a moment, soundless beyond the glass. She was alone in the absolutely quiet house: she was used to this and it mostly felt like freedom, after the long years of her marriage. In her dreams, however, she had been plunged back into the thick of things—noisy crowds of people, children, movement, a train journey, talk, pleasure, sociable effort. She’d dreamed that Mattie Szymanski came to visit her on a bicycle and was still young, with his curly brown hair and a thick beard, which wasn’t attractive now but used to be. She’d known in her dream that in reality Mattie was long dead—he’d died in his forties, by which time he’d lost most of his hair—but she wasn’t sure whether he knew it, and this made their encounter especially numinous and poignant. He had called in at some house that must have been her house, and wanted to show her a novel he’d written, a typed carbon copy on thin paper. She was trying to put this novel back into its manila folder but the pages kept slipping and getting out of order, she couldn’t keep them together. As far as she knew, in real life Mattie had never written a novel or anything much, apart from his unfinished thesis on Hardy’s tragic heroes.
There was a time when, if Mattie Szymanski came into a room, everyone looked at him. The men wanted to be his rivals or his disciples and the women were in love with him—at least Geraldine was, and so was her best friend, Jane. They were undergraduates then, in the early seventies, and Mattie was a graduate student; they were in awe of him because he had read everything, knew everything. It seemed to Geraldine and Jane in those days that women were fatally flawed. Men were capable of being absorbed in thought and ideas purely, for their own sake, whereas women were always inauthentic, always conscious of themselves thinking. They couldn’t help viewing their ideas as an adjunct to their looks or their personality. While the men were holding forth to one another on Thomas Mann or Molière or Schopenhauer, the women were drowning in their awareness of the particulars of the scene in all its detail: the lighting and the mood, their own bodies and their clothes, the strands of power and connection flowing around the room. They were absorbed in the mystique of the men’s physical selves, of which the men themselves seemed unaware: a tightened crease beside a mouth, a shadow in a cheek’s hollow, eyes dropped to the papers and lump of resin and rolling tobacco on an LP cover, thick, sensitive, nicotine-stained fingers. Men had this easy, unconscious grandeur, because they didn’t know themselves. The girls longed to divert some of that rapt serious attention their way, to channel it and feel its force.
Mattie was tall and burly with a craggy face and an appealing awkward diffidence, bashful long lashes, a sweet quick grin, a slightly ponderous sense of humor; he was opinionated and original and eager, an enthusiast. Also he was Polish, or his parents were; they had got out in ’51, when Mattie was just a baby, so he had no memory of the place. Nonetheless, some romance of Poland stuck to him and made him seem cut out on a larger scale than the rest of them. His father had been in the Communist Party before the war and then turned against it because, in addition to all the obvious things, it was narrow and tedious. So Mattie was skeptical about Marxism at a time when it still had a lot of glamour for some of his fellow-students, even if they weren’t mad about the Soviet system. He was wary of their keenness for some kind of revolutionary sweeping away of the decadence and corruptions of the West. His world view seemed larger than theirs, less parochial; this was one of the reasons that he never quite fitted in at the university. He laughed at the place and was impatient with its stuffiness, yet made himself happily at home there. He was good at being happy, and his hearty appetites made the other students’ rebelliousness seem jejune and callow. There were so many things to learn from him.
Geraldine phoned Jane, to tell her about the dream. They lived, in their seventies, only a few streets away from each other in Bristol—where Geraldine had spent most of her adult life—and they often talked and visited. When Jane retired and she and her husband sold their London house, in order to give money to their children, Bristol had seemed as sensible a place to move to as anywhere.
“Was his novel any good?” Jane asked.
“I’ve no idea. You can’t read things in dreams. And surely can’t make critical judgments. I mean, when you’re effectively unconscious . . .”
“I’m always reading things in dreams and thinking they’re rubbish.”
“I was too busy fumbling with the pages anyway, trying to put it back in its folder. And I wasn’t really interested in the novel. The whole encounter was too amazing. I was so overwhelmed at being with Mattie again, after all these years. I’d forgotten him really, and then suddenly he was back, as if he’d never gone. He radiated this heat of life—it was intoxicating.”
“This is Mattie Szymanski we’re talking about? Mattie who fucked up and never did anything?”
“But it wasn’t the man he became later. It was the one we loved then, in the old days, don’t you remember?”
They hadn’t spoken about Mattie or even thought about him much for a long time, probably not for years; now Jane seemed to be distancing herself from their shared memories of him. Recently, she’d taken to shamelessly denying things from the past which they both knew were true. It wasn’t senility: Geraldine knew that Jane was perfectly aware of what had actually happened—or at least as aware as anyone could be, when it came to penetrating the opaque past. It was more like a game that Jane played to entertain herself, Geraldine thought, because she was bored now that she was retired. No doubt Jane felt that shedding some of the things you’d been and done and believed was one of the conveniences of growing older. She’d gaze at Geraldine frankly, to challenge her, her blue eyes still large and forthright: it was funny, Jane’s deadpan stare. Nothing happened at that party with the Persians in the hills above Florence. I don’t even remember a party.
Jane Rawlings, née Piggott, was handsome and big-boned, with a broad, benign, wholesome face and a thick swatch of gray-white hair pinned up behind; she looked patrician, which had been useful at university, although her mother was a school dinner lady and her dad an electrician in a colliery. Her tall hauteur was piquant in combination with her soft Derbyshire accent. Jane and Geraldine had knocked around Europe together for a while after they finished their degrees, sleeping on beaches or in convent hostels, soaking up other shapes of life, looking at art, learning that how they’d been brought up was not the only way, drinking real coffee for the first time, feeling that anything was possible. In those days, Jane was skinny and leggy and teasing and fearless, with the same quizzical open gaze as now, her straw-blond hair cut short. Geraldine, whose parents were both schoolteachers, was smaller and plumper and less obviously English, more sardonic. In photos from that time—there were only two or three, saved from the past by accident—they’re Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and Sancho’s eyes are black as pits, painted thickly with mascara and kohl. They’d lived for a few months near Nice, in a caravan with two men who sold drugs and forged the signatures on stolen travellers’ checks. Then they came back to England and both eventually got married. Jane joined the Civil Service, ended up in a senior position in the Cabinet Office. Geraldine’s career had been more haphazard; she’d knocked around doing all kinds of jobs and ended up teaching adult literacy.
During the time of their youthful adventures, and although they proclaimed themselves feminists, they still more or less thought all those things about the inauthenticity of women. They didn’t so much think them with their conscious minds: the sensation of secondariness was built into the very texture of their imagination and their desires. They supplied to every adventure some invisible observer, male, to fulfill it and make it real. And yet the girls also took for granted, with contemptuous confidence, their right to travel alone and wear shorts and sleeveless tops if they wanted to, while girls their age in Italy and Greece were kept chastely at home. They learned how to say foul things in other languages, in order to put off the boys and men in those countries who followed them and propositioned them, pleading with them so insistently and cravenly—“like dogs,” Jane said. They saw the recoil and disgust on the boys’ faces, at hearing those words from a girl’s mouth.
They had both been in love with Mattie when they left England, though they might easily have fallen for someone else among the other travellers they met, if Mattie hadn’t come to join them at the end of the summer. Arrangements in those days, before mobile phones, were more precarious and therefore more significant. They’d called him at his parents’ house, and it had seemed so improbable, as they dialled from a noisy public pay phone in one of those Italian post offices built with creamy marble to look like palaces, that they could ever be connected, across such long and winding distances, to somewhere in Clapham. But they were, first to Mattie’s mother’s thick, intolerant accent and then to genial Mattie himself, who made it sound as if agreeing to meet them on a certain day at a certain campsite outside Naples were the easiest thing in the world. Neither of them had slept with him at that point; they had just been hangers-on in Mattie’s crowd, insignificant among the more glamorous girls. And although, before they left, he’d spoken vaguely about joining them, they’d never truly imagined that he would come; they hardly dared to imagine he’d even remember them.
Everything was less frightening with Mattie there. They hadn’t known how frightened they were until he relieved them of so many burdens, with his grownup competence and worldly know-how and sheer manly bulk: helping them with their packs, scaring off predators, reassuring shopkeepers and ticket inspectors. He knew his way around everywhere; he knew the necessary words in all the languages; he knew how to interpret things and what to think; he knew all about the artists whose names they were only beginning to learn; he showed them how to look. This was real: in front of the Tintorettos in San Rocco in Venice he spoke in such a way that paintings of the Crucifixion and the Nativity and the lonely Magdalen came to life, seemed urgent and magnificent and contemporary. They never forgot this.
And at night they managed somehow to sleep all three in Jane’s little tent, with their sleeping bags zipped together. The girls had assumed that Mattie would bring his own tent; when they saw that he hadn’t they were breathless with excitement and anxiety. How would they arrange things? Mattie dealt with it all very calmly; he simply took it for granted that he would make love to both of them, each one in turn or both at the same time.
Geraldine and Jane met for coffee the day after Geraldine’s dream, at a place they liked at the end of Jane’s road. It was busy but they found a table for two by a steamed-up window, enjoying the ritual of unpeeling coats and scarves, stowing bags, settling in for an expansive talk. Each was pleased with the other for still looking capable and smart and interesting, not showing any signs yet of dottiness or disintegration. Jane ordered a black coffee, Geraldine a turmeric latte with oat milk; she always felt, when she was with Jane, that her preferences were an unnecessary fuss. “You’re so up-to-the-minute,” Jane commented. “I suppose all the young people are drinking that.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I just like it.”
Jane peered at the cup dubiously. “Are you sure?”
They discussed their children and grandchildren for some time, with intense interest. For years, the two families had gone on holiday together, and their children were like cousins; each tribe had its critique, too, of the other. There were problems with Jane’s eldest daughter, who was struggling with her babies, and with Geraldine’s middle son, who was getting divorced: their talk wound sympathetically and more or less tactfully around these issues, delving deep into the children’s characters and situations. It was impossible to tell who was the more powerful in the friendship. Jane was naturally bossy, and her pointed irony and economical phrasing were the habits of a lifetime. But Geraldine had never wholly submitted to her friend’s forceful influence, which was probably why they’d stayed close across so many decades. Geraldine had guarded her interior life fiercely, even through her years of mothering and a difficult marriage. She couldn’t have given herself over to a life like Jane’s, in the bright blunting light of public affairs.
“So you dreamed about old Mattie,” Jane said. “I never think about him.”
“He was important in our lives, though.”
“We had a crush on him,” Jane said. “You were an awful flirt in those days. From my perspective now it all seems so remote—I can hardly remember him. I can hardly remember the past. Only a few things stand out.”
“I don’t believe you.”
Geraldine thought that Jane liked to protect herself, pretending to be invulnerable.
“When you’re having those experiences,” Jane said, “you think it’ll all matter so much later on, when you’re older. You imagine yourself reading old letters, looking at photographs, reminiscing with wistful tears, that sort of thing. But the truth is that you leave most of it behind you. The present is paramount. It’s always everything.”
“Isn’t there some tragic kind of brain damage where you can only live in the present moment?”
“Obviously I don’t mean that. But those old stories diminish and don’t matter anymore. It’s shocking, really. We believe we can keep everything and make it all add up.”
Geraldine considered this carefully. “Some of the stories matter to me.”
“You have too much time to think. You need distraction.”
“Things from the past, which I thought were tidied away, swell into new significance in old age.”
“You talk as if we’re ancient. We’re not that far gone yet.”
“I see things in their right proportions, now that they’re so far in the past. They’ve become grand and moving. Mythic.”
“You’ll have to come to dinner. I’ll get Felix to cook his fish soup.”
Jane’s husband was a gardener and an amateur cellist. Everyone liked Felix, a subtle, gentle man. He’d been the children’s primary carer, back in the days when that was radical.
“Felix is pleased with the new viola player in his quartet.” Jane reflected. “Perhaps I’ll invite him, too. His wife died.”
“Stop trying to pair me off,” Geraldine complained.
But she didn’t really mind. She thought it was funny—they both did.
Sex in that tent with Mattie, in the nineteen-seventies, wasn’t altogether satisfactory, confined inside a wedge of orange canvas, which was either brilliantly luminous or invisible, baking or soaking, depending on the time of day and the weather. If it was soaking you tried not to brush against it, because that made the rain run in. Sometimes the heat of other bodies was almost intolerable, and they were slick with sweat; sometimes they were grateful for it, snuggling up for warmth. At night in the dark, in the midst of their shifting, murmuring, groaning, and mostly wordless rearrangements of limbs and positions, they were sometimes unsure whose body it was, whose leg, the pressure of whose weight. Of course Mattie was more hairy, and the girls were softer. There was a lot of exquisite touching, which often painfully didn’t come to anything—at least not for the girls. Although they had both slept with quite a few people by then, they weren’t very skilled at it yet, not confident at getting what they wanted. Perhaps Jane was more so than Geraldine. The intimacy with Mattie ought to have been an extraordinary fulfillment, but that hung somewhere just out of reach; mysteries that should have been unveiled stayed hidden. The object of their longing was pressed as close to them—to both of them—as was humanly possible, and yet the secret of him slipped away. They’d imagined that, in such intimate exchanges with Mattie, they would possess part of him. Or they’d imagined that they’d be seen by him, finally, and explained to themselves. Instead, Geraldine lay in the tent all day once, weeping, while the other two went off to see the Masaccios in the Brancacci Chapel.
At least the girls were on the pill. Mattie had assured himself of that before he began, responsible and sensible. He was almost too responsible and sensible. Although he loved D. H. Lawrence as much as they did, his cheerful enjoyment of their arrangement in the tent wasn’t quite what the girls wanted. It seemed too casual, or absent-minded, as if sex were just a part of the ordinary huge pleasure he took in everything: in a plate of spaghetti or a bottle of wine or the frescoes in an old church.
Jane wore a silk scarf and a black velvet jacket to their book group, very retired civil servant; Geraldine had slimmed down with age and went for a more boho style, with beads and drapey tops. Jane could have looked dull but instead was somehow weighty and impressive, a crisp critical awareness alert in her big bland face; she was merciless when it came to discussing the books. Geraldine was sure she’d never seen the black jacket before. Since she retired, Jane seemed to be spending an extravagant amount on clothes, although she denied it flatly. I’ve had this old thing for years. She and Felix had plenty of money, anyhow: he’d inherited from wealthy parents. And he’d have encouraged his wife to treat herself—although probably she fibbed to him, too, out of sheer perversity.
The book group had degenerated somewhat, Jane and Geraldine both thought, into a kind of dining club, each member feeling obligated to put on a spread of delicious Ottolenghi-type dishes when it was their turn to host. Discussion of the books was too perfunctory; the two friends’ ideal would have been more like a seminar. They brought their books marked up and bristling with torn slips of paper, and were disappointed when they were hardly opened. Both of them devoured fiction: Jane, a history graduate, was susceptible to a serious theme and anything in translation, whereas Geraldine, who’d done English literature, insisted she cared only about the sentences. Life was hard, she said. Thank God for sentences.
After the book-group meal, the two of them slipped into the garden in the dark, so that Jane could indulge another of her vices, smoking her little rollies in black licorice paper: she claimed improbably that Felix knew nothing about these. It was October and had just rained; the lawn was sodden underfoot, and their sleeves were soaked from brushing the evergreens strung with raindrops. Rank smells flooded from the vegetation, and the clean dry smoke of the rollie curled around them pleasantly. It was somehow moving to observe, through the lit windows of the room behind them, the animated company they’d left: five women and two men around the table, with its despoiled and emptied dishes, crumpled colored napkins, half-drunk glasses. By now, the talk was off the book and onto politics, faces were sad and serious; these were good people. One of the women worked for the Refugee Council; one was a Green activist.
“Ever since I had that dream,” Geraldine said, “Mattie Szymanski’s haunted me. His actual aura, as if he were present close by. I can smell his sort of woolly smell—wood smoke and tobacco and wet jumper. So comforting: as if he’d put his arms around me.”
She was risking something by confessing this, and she sensed Jane wanting to say, For goodness sake, but refraining. Which meant that she felt sorry for Geraldine, who was pitifully single and susceptible. But Geraldine wasn’t really pitiful, and didn’t care as much as she used to what anyone thought of her, or if they saw through to her susceptibilities. What was the point of keeping all those secrets? Wasn’t your story wasted if nobody knew it?
“Don’t you think,” she went on, “that in the old days men were, in some sense, what we made them? They became heroically intellectual because we thought they were. Just as women became the dreamy spiritual creatures that men wanted them to be. To some extent. I know that irony undercuts all that, exposes the reality. But, to some extent, those characters became reality because we imagined them.”
Turning her head to blow out smoke, Jane seemed to reflect on this, a pinpoint of thought in her face, pale in the reflected light from the windows. “Did you know I saw him once in a shoe shop?”
Geraldine felt a familiar mild annoyance at her friend’s evasion, how she deflected earnestness. “I suppose that even heroes have to buy shoes.”
“He wasn’t buying them,” Jane explained. “He was selling them. It was in a dreary shoe shop around the corner from where we lived in Fulham; he must have got a job there. I had the children by then and I used to take them in to get their feet measured, but on this occasion it was just me. I was in a hurry—I needed shoes for an interview for a promotion or something. And Mattie didn’t recognize me. I mean, really! But I suppose this was when he was back from travelling and in a bad way—his mind was wiped, his mother was looking after him. And there he was kneeling at my feet—where I’d always wanted him, in fact—and pulling these cheap black shoes out of the box, where they were wrapped in tissue paper in an effort to make them look like something special. He was an absolutely hopeless salesman, as you can imagine. He’d brought me the wrong size and was trying to force my foot into one of them, forgetting there was even a human being on the other end of it. So there I was, like one of the ugly sisters in Cinderella, feeling I ought to be cutting off my own toes, staring down into a bald patch in the middle of his curls. They’d made him tie his hair back in a ponytail for work. I wanted to say something tender and significant, like, ‘Mattie, don’t you remember the night of that full moon in Sorrento?’ But I didn’t really have the time, I needed to get out of there, I had my life to get on with. I told him the shoes weren’t quite what I had wanted. I don’t think he lasted long as a shoe salesman. The next time I went in he wasn’t there.”
“Perhaps he did recognize you and he was embarrassed.”
“We’ll never know.”
“I’d love to talk to him again, though,” Geraldine mused. “He had a big mind, and a big conception of life. He’d have some interesting way to look at the horrible things that are going on now.”
Mattie had fucked up. He’d stayed away too long. He and the girls had parted ways, for reasons they couldn’t clearly remember afterward; probably he found them too young and too clingy, and wanted to forge forward unencumbered. Geraldine’s weeping in the tent might have had something to do with it. Things weren’t always joyous, in that time they spent with Mattie; sometimes on a damp day, when he was tired of them, he was hangdog and glum and tetchy. After they parted, the girls got entangled with those bad men in the caravan, as if to prove that they weren’t afraid of getting into deeper water, although they should have been. Then they went home to look for jobs, and work out what they were going to be. But Mattie bummed around southern Europe for years. He decided that bringing in the grape harvest in France, or working on a fishing boat off the Greek islands, was more real than life in a university and his thesis on Hardy, and perhaps it was. Every so often he sent Jane or Geraldine a postcard. Then his father died suddenly, from a coronary, but Mattie stayed abroad, drinking too much. He had definitely always, when the girls thought about it, had a bit of a thing about his father. It was hard for any son to live up to a man who’d fought in the Warsaw Uprising.
When the postcards dried up, the girls had news of Mattie intermittently, from friends of friends: he’d got into drugs and into trouble, spent time in hospital and then in a Spanish prison. He came home eventually in quite a state, to be nursed more or less back to health by his mother, who resented it.
“Oh, well, it was a life,” Geraldine said. “We all fuck up in our different ways.”
It was odd that Jane hadn’t told her before, about the shoe shop. Geraldine had met up with Mattie, too, once or twice, after he got back—at a later date than the shoe shop presumably, because by then he had a perfectly decent job, working for the Central Office of Information in Waterloo, putting out warnings on television about food hygiene and “stranger danger.” He was nice after his return but definitely chastened and less ebullient: it wasn’t like the days when you used to believe, for as long as you were with him, that you were at the center of something. His studio flat was dingy and poky and too full with all his books, which his mother refused to keep for him any longer. Even so, Geraldine might have sought him out more often, because she was still a little bit in love with him, and because she was on and off at that time in her marriage. But then Mattie himself got married, to a meek, dumpy little woman who made it clear that she didn’t want Geraldine hanging about—unsurprisingly perhaps, if she knew what had gone on in the tent.
And then Mattie died, in a stupid accident that could have happened to anyone—falling off a ladder while he was fixing a TV aerial on a roof. Geraldine and Jane had both lost touch with him by the time this happened. He’d moved with his wife and their baby up north somewhere. The news took a while to get back to his friends from the old days.
Geraldine walked over to Felix and Jane’s for fish soup, through long autumn shadows in the park, haze rising like smoke from the grass, illumined by the low sun. Their house, on an expensive, smart street, was surprisingly chaotic inside, with an ugly leather sofa pushed back against the fireplace and broken Venetian blinds across the windows. The dining table had been cleared of its papers and laptop and vase of dead greenery in murky water: all these were now on the floor. Jane was always too busy to bother with her surroundings, and Felix had his mind on higher things; their mess thrilled and exasperated Geraldine, whose own home was a succession of inviting arty spaces, lovingly tended and pristine. The soup and the wine were good, though, and Ivor, the viola player, was small and shy, with a shock of flossy white hair. He looked faintly panicked, but he knew a lot about music, thinking carefully before he spoke and making nuanced discriminations: this pianist rather than that one, the E-flat trio rather than the B-flat. Felix attended to him conscientiously.
“Jane and I have been friends forever,” Geraldine explained.
“Oh, yes, we literally met back in the Stone Age,” Jane confirmed. “We shared a tent when we went travelling.”
“In the Stone Age. It was woven out of animal hides or something.”
The women chattered away—book-club book, mortality, bumper harvest in the allotment, social media, America—and the men smiled at them, bemused or fond. It was a nice evening; they all enjoyed themselves. Geraldine felt tenderly toward their old ruined faces around the table, pouchy and sagging and blotched with experience; the viola player, with his fine black eyes and waxy thin skin, stretched over the bones of his face, made her think of some aged genius composer from the nineteenth century. And she liked going out to socialize on her own, without the worry of whether her husband was going to hate it, or offend somebody. Terry had been difficult, a Trotskyite would-be playwright, charismatic when he was young. She’d been besotted with him in the beginning, and had taken on all his opinions as her own. He and Jane used to have the most terrible arguments while Geraldine cried in the bathroom; he wanted to despise Jane as part of the bourgeois establishment, but her origins were as working class as his, and she was cleverer. Then, when Terry was ill, Jane was so kind to him, cheering him up with her boisterous camaraderie.
When Geraldine and Jane first got back from their time in Europe, and Jane was starting out on her career, they drifted apart for a few years. They didn’t want to be reminded, most likely, of their embarrassing mistakes—not so much Mattie but what went on in that caravan outside Nice. In any case, in the first heat of their serious adventures with men, female friends seemed dispensable. Geraldine met Terry, and Jane had a painful affair with someone married. Then she found Felix, and the two women bumped into each other by chance one afternoon at Paddington station, both obviously pregnant; Geraldine had moved to Bristol by this time. A snatched quick exchange of news, and phone numbers on scraps of paper, before they had to hurry away in opposite directions, wasn’t enough. They telephoned that evening and picked their friendship up as if they’d never put it down.
Geraldine woke to the sound of knocking, a few hard taps at first and then an insistent fierce battering, demanding her wakeful attention: rain on the skylights. She sat up in bed as abruptly as if someone had called her, in her nightdress in the gray dawn. After a while, the rain’s intensity lapsed and withdrew and became a softer pressure, enveloping the room in its cocoon. Earlier in the year they’d been afraid of a drought, and now this plenty, this too-much, night after night for a week. The garden would be happy—and she was excited, waking up to rain at first light. It was probably part of climate change, this extremity, first drought and then downpour, but you couldn’t always worry. Sometimes you just had to submit to what the sky brought. Old age wasn’t all calms and shallows; there were whirlpools and black water—the ordeal of her parents’ deaths, then the years of her husband’s illness and death. And because Geraldine had been thinking about Mattie Szymanski, she remembered him taking down a book from a shelf once, and opening it and reading out loud to her. She had no idea now what he’d read, or whether it was poetry or prose: something amazing, anyhow, that had liberated them both into the great terrain of the imagination.
This was in that studio flat of his, when he’d come back from abroad and settled down; his wife, who disapproved of books and of Geraldine, was preparing food in the kitchenette. Mattie wasn’t drinking but Geraldine was; she must have brought gin with her. She was enjoying every mouthful of a big gin-and-tonic, although her hosts had failed to come up with ice or lemon. The alcohol was sharpening her mind to a high pitch of awareness and longing.
And she wailed and complained because there wasn’t enough time to read everything. How lucky Mattie was, she exclaimed, with all his books! She would never know all the things he knew! She had her children by then and her days were full with caring for them and with domestic management, yet somehow she’d contrived to escape for an evening and get to London—and with a bottle of gin, too, which surely she couldn’t afford. What she remembered was Mattie in his hairy, woolly, smelly jumper saying that it didn’t matter about having time or finishing things. You could never read everything. Completion or mastery were beside the point. All that counted were those occasions when you picked up a book and opened it and its words attached themselves to that moment and transfigured it, and then the moment passed. ♦
