by Tim Jeal
I struggle to understand the cruellest paradox; for I must understand it. It is my final hope. Only by complete destruction of the figure I made you in my mind can I ever learn to know you from the beginning. You have been in my brain so long that I have been deceived, deceived like the man who meets a television commentator in the street and asks him how he is. When we were lovers I imagined I had said things when I had not. We seemed to be in perpetual conversation. As our eyes absorbed the same scenes I felt that we shared the same thoughts. I added up the incidents, the places, words and times that made my picture of you. Yet I have been wrong. Nobody can piece together the mystery of a person by collecting the details. The picture has too many dimensions and inter-relations to explain it in terms of its component parts.
Perhaps this is very obvious, and yet my rediscovery of its truth makes final judgements seem ridiculous and unnecessary. An excuse it may be. A way to solve the problem of my helplessness, to kill the time that is to come, the winters and the summers, the miles that are to be travelled. A way to end my fear of crowds, to feel that my life has a place. I do not believe in destiny but have come to recognise necessity. If I have been deprived of the early years of fatherhood, perhaps there is time to be made up. Prams give way to bicycles, model cars to model planes. I shall say after Dinah that we are what we are now and not what we have been. I shall hope. If I manage to banish my wounded pride and my wish for revenge, we may be happy. Even if I do not forgive entirely I shall remember the moments when with eyes closed I lay in your arms and sensed time die as we breathed. For our future will hold days with a this-ness as real as days in the past, when we saw a flock of birds together, as they broke from a group of trees, or the sun catch for a moment on the windscreen of a distant car.
Copyright
This ebook edition first published in 2013
by Faber and Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
All rights reserved
© Tim Jeal, 1968
Preface © Tim Jeal, 2013
The right of Tim Jeal to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–30390–8