Black Dogs Read Online Free PDF

flowers; the hut with gardening tools in the orchard of almonds and olives, and near that, the henhouse that looked like a miniature dovecote – all this boiled down, stripped away, to one free-standing bookcase, a tallboy of clothes she never wore, a steamer trunk no one was allowed to look inside, and a tiny fridge.
    While I unwrapped the fruit and washed it at the handbasin and put it with the chocolate in the fridge and found a place, the place, for the coffee, I conveyed messages from Jenny, love from the children. She askedafter Bernard, but I had not seen him since my last visit. She arranged her hair with her fingers and settled the pillows around her. When I returned to the chair by her bed I found myself looking once more at the framed photograph on the locker. I too could have fallen in love with that round-faced beauty with the overtrained hair, the delighted, jaunty smile grazing the biceps of her loved one. It was the innocence that was so appealing, not only of the girl, or the couple, but of the time itself; even the blurred shoulder and head of a suited passer-by had a naïve, unknowing quality, as did a frog-eyed saloon car parked in a street of pre-modern emptiness. The innocent time! Tens of millions dead, Europe in ruins, the extermination camps still a news story, not yet our universal reference point of human depravity. It is photography itself that creates the illusion of innocence. Its ironies of frozen narrative lend to its subjects an apparent unawareness that they will change or die. It is the future they are innocent of. Fifty years on we look at them with the godly knowledge of how they turned out after all – who they married, the date of their death – with no thought for who will one day be holding photographs of us.
    June was following my gaze. I felt self-conscious, fraudulent, as I reached for my notebook and ballpoint. We had agreed that I would write about her life. Reasonably enough, she had in mind a biography, and that was what I had originally intended. But once I had made a start it began to take on another form; not a biography, not even a memoir really, more a divagation; she would be central, but it would not only be about her.
    Last time, the snapshot had been a useful point of departure. She was watching me, waiting to begin, as Ilooked at it. Her elbow was propped on her midriff, and her forefinger rested on the long curve of her chin. The question I really wanted to ask was, How did you get from that face to this, how did you end up looking so extraordinary – was it the life? My, how you’ve changed!
    Instead I said, keeping my eyes on the photograph, ‘Bernard’s life seems to have been a steady progression, building on what he has, whereas yours seems to have been a long transformation ...’
    Unfortunately, June took this to be a question about Bernard. ‘Do you know what he wanted to talk about when he came last month? Euro-communism! He’d met some Italian delegation the week before. Fat villains in suits banqueting at other people’s expense. He said he felt optimistic!’ She nodded at the photograph. ‘Jeremy, he was actually excited! Just as we were back then. Progression is too kind. Stasis, I’d say. Stagnation.’
    She knew this was inaccurate. Bernard had left the Party years ago, he had been a Labour MP, he was an Establishment man, a member of its liberal rump, with service on government committees on broadcasting, the environment, pornography. What June really objected to in Bernard was his rationalism. But I did not want to go into that now. I wanted my question answered, the one I had not spoken aloud. I pretended to agree.
    ‘Yes, it’s hard to imagine you excited by something like that now.’
    She tilted her head back and closed her eyes, her posture for delving at length. We had been over this more than once before, how and why June changed her life. Each time it came out a little differently.
    ‘Are we ready? I spent all the summer of 1938