‘Where are you now?’ she said, and then added, ‘No, don’t tell me, I know where you are, you’re at the house, aren’t you, you’re at your parents’, aren’t you?’
‘Where else,’ he said, ‘would I dare to run up such a phone bill?’
‘I like talking to you,’ she said, ‘in the middle of the night.’
‘It’s not so late,’ he said, ‘it’s only eleven.’
‘Good God,’ she said, ‘I thought it was nearly the morning. You will come, then, when it’s the morning, won’t you?’
‘I will come,’ he said.
‘Promise you will come,’ she said.
‘I promise,’ he said.
‘Will you find your way?’ she asked.
‘I suppose so.’
‘I won’t give you any instructions,’ she said. ‘I can never give people instructions. But come, you will come.’
‘I’ll get there,’ he said, ‘about midday.’
‘I have to go to the hospital,’ she said, ‘in the afternoon. But then I’ll be free.’
‘All right,’ he said.
‘Good night, then,’ she said.
And he too said good night, and she rang off. She went upstairs to bed again, and she lay on the bed, looking forward, all of it running into her head, all the years of future tender intrigue, a tender blurred world where Clelia and Gabriel and she herself in shifting and ideal conjunctions met and drifted and met once more like the constellations in the heavens; a bright and peopled world, thick with starry inhabitants, where there was no ending, no parting, but an eternal vast incessant rearrangement; and more close to her, more near to her, the drive in the car, the lengthy devious delicate explanations, the nostalgic connection more precious, more close, more intimate than any simple love, and the wide road itself, the lanes of traffic, the headlights, the speed and the movement, the glassy institutions where they would eat egg and chips and put coins in fruit machines and idly, gratuitously drink cups of nasty coffee, for the sake of it, for the sake of amusement, and all the lights in the surrounding dark. Her mother was dying, but she herself would survive it, she would survive even the guilt and convenience and grief of her mother’s death, she would survive because she had willed herself to survive, because she did not have it in her to die. Even the mercy and kindness of destiny she would survive; they would not get her that way, they would not get her at all.
PENGUIN CLASSICS
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
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First published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1967
Published in Penguin Classics 2011
Copyright © Margaret Drabble, 1967
Cover photograph © Hilary Walker/Millennium Images, UK.
Author photograph © Hulton Archive/Getty Images
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-196958-9
Jerusalem the Golden Page 24