«Yes.»
Julian said, «Bradley, I wonder if I could buy this off you?»
«What?»
«This little thing. I wonder if I could buy it? Would you sell it to me?»
Rachel said, «Julian, don't be so tiresome.»
Julian was holding in her hand one of the little Chinese bronzes, a piece which I had had for many years. A water buffalo with lowered head and exquisitely wrinkled neck bears upon his back an aristocratic lady of delicate loveliness with a many-folded dress and high elaborate hair.
«I wonder if-?»
Rachel said, «Julian, you can't ask people to sell you their belongings!»
«Keep it, keep it,» I said.
«Bradley, you mustn't let her-«No, I'll buy it-«
«Of course you can't buy it! Keep it!» I sat down. «Where's Arnold?»
«Oh thank you! Why, here's a letter addressed to Dad, and one for me. May I take them?»
«Yes, yes. Where's Arnold?»
«He's gone to the pub,» said Rachel, smiling a little more broadly.
«She felt it wasn't quite the moment,» said Julian.
«Who felt?»
«He's gone to the pub with Christian.»
«With Christian?»
«Your ex-wife arrived,» said Rachel, smiling. «Arnold explained that your sister had just attempted suicide. Your ex-wife felt it was not the moment for a reunion. She retired from the scene and Arnold escorted her. I don't know where to exactly. 'To the pub' were 1r his words.»
My mother was very important to me. I loved her, but always with a kind of anguish. I feared loss and death to an extent I think unusual in a child. Later I sensed with profound distress the hopeless lack of understanding which existed between my parents. They could not «see» each other at all. My father, with whom I increasingly identified myself, was nervous, timid, upright, conventional and quite without the grosser forms of vanity. He avoided crossing my mother, but he patently disapproved of her «worldliness» and detested the «social scene» into which she and Priscilla were constantly attempting to penetrate. His dislike of this «scene» was also compounded with a simple sense of inadequacy. He was afraid of making some undignified mistake, revelatory of lack of education, such as the mispronunciation of some well-known name. I shared, as I grew up, my father's disapproval and his anxiety. One reason perhaps why I so passionately desired education for myself was that I saw how unhappy the lack of it had made him. I felt for my misguided mother pain and shame which did not diminish but qualified my love. I was mortally afraid of anyone seeing her as absurd or pathetic, a defeated snob. And later still, after her death, I transferred many of these feelings to Priscilla.
It was the day after her exploit with the sleeping pills. The ambulance had taken her to the hospital from which she had been discharged on the same afternoon. She was brought back to my flat and went to bed. She was still in bed, in my bed, the time being about ten-thirty in the morning. The sun was shining. The Post Office Tower glittered with newly minted detail.
I had of course failed to find Arnold and Christian. Looking for someone is, as psychologists have observed,
