I hear from Sally regularly. Wilbur died. Not, after all, from a heart attack, but in an automobile accident. It was Edward who died from heart failure, within a year of Martyn’s death. I thought … I feared that might happen.
Ingrid has remarried, a captain of industry, who has just received a knighthood. Sally hasn’t married yet. She and Jonathan are still together. ‘It’s not’, she wrote to me some time ago, ‘that I don’t trust love. It’s that I no longer know what it is.’
I am never lonely. My favourite place in the world, my world, is the long narrow corridor to the bathroom. There I sit sometimes in the evening, gazing at the life-size photograph of Martyn. I change the position of the chair, so the perspective changes all the time.
Once I simply stood in front of his image with my arms touching the sides of the frame. For hours and hours I tried to search for the knowledge in his eyes that his life would not be as he had hoped. But caught for ever by the camera in a moment of laughter, power, and beauty, his face seems to burst from its trap of technology and glass with triumphant, defiant life.
Sometimes I gaze at Anna … at a photograph taken during her engagement weekend at Hartley. I took it from the study as I left Hartley for the last time. Quizzically, she gazes back at me. The movement of her dark feathered hair in the breeze is at odds with the steady, unsmiling eyes and solemn face. I remember how rarely she laughed. When I search her face from all perspectives I can find in it only a passive power that seems to say ‘I am not caught, for I do not move.’
Her years of silence are presaged in that face.
Desire rarely troubles me. Once (and since then I have ceased to drink) I laid her picture on the floor. Stretching out on it, in what I thought was a rage of grief, I found myself instead lost in a storm of the body’s desperation. As I cried out in agony there came semen and tears.
And I remembered what she had written of the night Aston had come to her bed: ‘Semen and tears are the symbols of the night.’
FORTY-ONE
I WEAR CASUAL clothes now, and often dark glasses. I find all colour offends me.
I pack very little for my short holiday. Germany this year.
The airport is hideous, crowded, colourful, and noisy. I turn a corner. All becomes quiet. It seems to me that other people are in sudden slow motion.
Anna appears before me. She moves towards me. She takes my dark glasses from me. She looks into and beyond me as though gathering herself from me for ever. Silently, she wrestles for the part of her I still keep. She is all-powerful. It is an act of repossession. My body seems to fall in on itself, to become a song or a scream, a sound so high, so thin, that it shatters bone and tears muscle.
I know my heart has been ripped. It is disintegrating. I fall to my knees. It is an act of worship and defeat. My lips brush the cotton of her dress. Its summer garden colours of green and yellow are acid in my eyes. Someone rushes to help me. Anna simply walks on.
‘Do you need a doctor?’ The young man helps me to my feet.
‘No. No, I’m fine. I am a doctor.’
I rush back in the direction she has taken. I see her join a man holding a small child by the hand. He turns slightly towards her and Peter Calderon’s lips brush her hair. From this perspective, I see that the slight disarray of her skirt is due to pregnancy.
I find a taxi. As it speeds back to the flat I doubt now I will ever leave, I wonder how long my body will survive. Not long, not long, I hope.
Final thoughts come to me. With a sigh I close the door.
Dying, possibly years before the idiotic mechanism of my body finally surrenders, I whisper to myself and to the silent faces in the hall, ‘At least I am certain of the truth now.’
For those of you who doubt it — this is a love story.
It is over.
Others may be luckier.
I wish them well.
A BIOGRAPHY OF JOSEPHINE HART
Josephine Hart is the international bestselling author of six novels and two poetry anthologies. Her novels, which include Damage (1991), Sin (1992), and Oblivion (1995), are notable for their spare prose and themes of lust, betrayal, and obsessive love, and have been translated into twenty-seven languages.
Hart was born and raised in Mullingar, Ireland, and later moved to London to pursue careers in publishing, theater, and then writing. In the mid-1980s, she founded the Gallery Poets and West End Poetry Hour, an event that grew from her desire to make poetry a powerful force in people’s lives. While working as a director at Haymarket Publishing, Hart poured herself into Gallery Poets and ultimately went on to produce a number of West End plays, including Iris Murdoch’s “The Black Prince.” Shortly after marrying Maurice Saatchi, an advertising executive and former Chairman of the Conservative Party of Great Britain, Hart began creating the characters for her first three books but resisted the urge to commit them to paper. It wasn’t until Murdoch and Saatchi encouraged her to write a book that she finally decided to do so. Her first novel, Damage, about a British politician’s affair with his son’s fiancè, was a critical and commercial triumph, selling more than one million copies worldwide. Damage was made into the Oscar-nominated film of the same name starring Jeremy Irons and Juliette Binoche.
Hart’s subsequent novels have also received wide acclaim and success, and in 2007 The Reconstructionist was filmed by Italian director Roberto Ando. Her latest novel, The Truth About Love, was published in 2009 by Knopf and will be published in paperback in the U.S. in August 2010. She continues to support poetry, saying that it “gives voice to experience in a way no other literary art form can. It has never let me down.” The Josephine Hart Poetry Hour, a monthly poetry reading at London’s British Library, has attracted such readers as Bono, Bob Geldof, and Ralph Fiennes, among many others, since its inception in 2004, and the anthologies Catching Life by the Throat (2006) and Words that Burn (2008) are accompanied by CDs based on these readings.
Hart and Saatchi have two sons and divide their time between homes in England and France.
Hart during her first Communion at age seven in her hometown of Mullingar, Ireland.
A twelve-year-old Hart riding a pony during a visit to the Dublin Zoo.
Hart’s school picture, taken in Ireland during the 1960s. She is sitting on the nun’s immediate left. Hart moved to London later in the decade.
Hart in Dublin, Ireland, where she was judging the 1992 Irish Times International Fiction Prize. The winner that year was Mating by Norman Rush.
Maurice Saatchi and Hart at the Lyric Theatre Hammersmith in London in the early 1990s. Saatchi is the co-founder of Saatchi and Saatchi and MC Saatchi, two of the world’s largest advertising firms.
Ian McDiarmid, Hart, and Jonathan Kent on the stage of the Almeida Theatre in London.
Hart and Iris Murdoch.
From left: Charles Dance, Rupert Evans, Josephine Hart, and Jeremy Irons at her Poetry Hour at the British Library celebrating Robert Browning in 2009.
Josephine Hart in her garden in London in spring 2010.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1991 by Josephine Hart
ISBN: 978-1-4532-0006-3
This edition published in 2010 by Open Road Integrated Media
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