don’t know a bent solicitor. Mine’s so unbent he’s rigid.”
“There aren’t any unbent solicitors. Only some less bent than others.”
Sitting opposite Rick Tucker, who now had snow and stars behind him, it came over me in a breathtaking swirl of astonishment. More than thirty years before I had indeed gone by long and devious ways to a bent solicitor. I had given him money. I had made myself an accessory after the act for nothing, for less than nothing. When, standing in my flat by the fire that was intended to consume my own disgusting and pitiable letters, I opened the manila envelope I stood dumb for whole minutes. The letters were tied up with pink ribbon. I surfaced then from what must have been months of drunken misconception. They weren’t my letters at all. They were her husband’s, turgid, inarticulate offerings from that stupid house agent; but she loved him and they were preserved like relics. Mine—in a skyhigh pride I had never dreamed that anyone could destroy my letters (mad, mad, mad) but she had done just that—charitably too, since she could have turned them over to the law—she had burnt the obscene things as they came. Or worse—had she kept them indeed? Were they now afloat in the world, the wrong world? If so, their disappearance together with the disappearance of her husband’s letters would be a clear lead, I was never free, should never be free from the surfacing of that possibility—
“I hope to God he broke the place up.”
Someone was looking at me—staring.
“Wilf?”
I pulled my eyes away from his, allowed them to track down, his nose, a little broad, the bridge slightly sunken, his long upper lip, the lower one dropped a fraction from it. His napkin came into view, patted his mouth, disappeared again. He was wearing a shirt with white and brown stripes, very broad. We’d have thought them so vulgar when I was his age.
“Is anything wrong?”
I burnt her husband’s letters, of course. I couldn’t even send them back.
I lived in a state of dreadful sanity and apprehension. I took off for South America as if the police were already after me. The thing surfaced for years, disguised in nightmares or strange half-waking dreams, until it had become a faint far-off thing only to be recalled when, as now, my mind was forced to walk backwards.
Odd to think that nothing would have happened without Lucinda. She was the sort of person who ends with hard drugs and charitable people saying she was her own worst enemy, hurting no one but herself. Little they knew or understood the adamantine chain that bound the lesser crime to the greater, led on to it step by step unless you turned and faced the fact instead of running from it. How wrong they would be about Lucinda! We are all members one of another. Ha et cetera.
“Can’t I share the joke?”
“I suppose it’s a joke. On a large scale. I’m drunk. Had too much brandy.”
“Wilf, there’s a strain of, call it diffidence, in you that won’t allow you to see the interest in a biography—”
Amused by the bank clerk, ruefully, jeeringly accepting the follies of Lucinda’s lover—(title for a romance in single syllables)—but the letters, Margaret, my crime—
“Just a note—and of course at this moment in time hopefully we should do no more than agree the parameters—”
Running. Always running, a wing three running in panic lest I should be grabbed by some enormous oaf from the scrum—
“Just a note, Wilf, signed by you and empowering me, particularly in the event of your passing on, I am after all a generation younger—”
Well. He was an enormous oaf from the scrum.
“Rick. You do me the honour of including me among kings, presidents, multiple murderers, telly personalities—”
He caught on in what for him was a flash.
“Also Thomas Wolfe, Hemingway, Hawthorne and—” here his voice sank in a kind of awe, “White Melville!”
“I’m not American. A defect, of course. However, Elizabeth
“There aren’t any unbent solicitors. Only some less bent than others.”
Sitting opposite Rick Tucker, who now had snow and stars behind him, it came over me in a breathtaking swirl of astonishment. More than thirty years before I had indeed gone by long and devious ways to a bent solicitor. I had given him money. I had made myself an accessory after the act for nothing, for less than nothing. When, standing in my flat by the fire that was intended to consume my own disgusting and pitiable letters, I opened the manila envelope I stood dumb for whole minutes. The letters were tied up with pink ribbon. I surfaced then from what must have been months of drunken misconception. They weren’t my letters at all. They were her husband’s, turgid, inarticulate offerings from that stupid house agent; but she loved him and they were preserved like relics. Mine—in a skyhigh pride I had never dreamed that anyone could destroy my letters (mad, mad, mad) but she had done just that—charitably too, since she could have turned them over to the law—she had burnt the obscene things as they came. Or worse—had she kept them indeed? Were they now afloat in the world, the wrong world? If so, their disappearance together with the disappearance of her husband’s letters would be a clear lead, I was never free, should never be free from the surfacing of that possibility—
“I hope to God he broke the place up.”
Someone was looking at me—staring.
“Wilf?”
I pulled my eyes away from his, allowed them to track down, his nose, a little broad, the bridge slightly sunken, his long upper lip, the lower one dropped a fraction from it. His napkin came into view, patted his mouth, disappeared again. He was wearing a shirt with white and brown stripes, very broad. We’d have thought them so vulgar when I was his age.
“Is anything wrong?”
I burnt her husband’s letters, of course. I couldn’t even send them back.
I lived in a state of dreadful sanity and apprehension. I took off for South America as if the police were already after me. The thing surfaced for years, disguised in nightmares or strange half-waking dreams, until it had become a faint far-off thing only to be recalled when, as now, my mind was forced to walk backwards.
Odd to think that nothing would have happened without Lucinda. She was the sort of person who ends with hard drugs and charitable people saying she was her own worst enemy, hurting no one but herself. Little they knew or understood the adamantine chain that bound the lesser crime to the greater, led on to it step by step unless you turned and faced the fact instead of running from it. How wrong they would be about Lucinda! We are all members one of another. Ha et cetera.
“Can’t I share the joke?”
“I suppose it’s a joke. On a large scale. I’m drunk. Had too much brandy.”
“Wilf, there’s a strain of, call it diffidence, in you that won’t allow you to see the interest in a biography—”
Amused by the bank clerk, ruefully, jeeringly accepting the follies of Lucinda’s lover—(title for a romance in single syllables)—but the letters, Margaret, my crime—
“Just a note—and of course at this moment in time hopefully we should do no more than agree the parameters—”
Running. Always running, a wing three running in panic lest I should be grabbed by some enormous oaf from the scrum—
“Just a note, Wilf, signed by you and empowering me, particularly in the event of your passing on, I am after all a generation younger—”
Well. He was an enormous oaf from the scrum.
“Rick. You do me the honour of including me among kings, presidents, multiple murderers, telly personalities—”
He caught on in what for him was a flash.
“Also Thomas Wolfe, Hemingway, Hawthorne and—” here his voice sank in a kind of awe, “White Melville!”
“I’m not American. A defect, of course. However, Elizabeth
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