Incidents in the Rue Laugier Read Online Free PDF Page B

and had wanted to clip his wings—was too awful to contemplate. Yet contemplate it he did.
    Time was the problem, he decided, as he sat at the roll-top desk on that rainy July afternoon, time which would changehim from an eager, unknowing and hedonistic boy into the resigned figure, who, if he did not take immense and immediate pains, would spend his life in this shop, which he would inevitably (he knew this somehow) transform into something profitable. And yet he still dreamed of his now remote childhood, when all who surrounded him were kind, kinder than he was ever likely to be. Perhaps he had fallen from grace, into this dull room, this poor adumbration of a disappointing future. He knew himself to be disastrously unqualified for any other career; his only positive thoughts were of evasion. His Cambridge degree was undistinguished. He had no ambitions, save those of flight. His parents would be massively disappointed if he turned his back on what they considered to be in the nature of an endowment, one which they could not have provided themselves, one, moreover, which left them relatively free. Once Bibi had left university she could live at home, until she married. The house was long paid for; they were relatively comfortable, now more than ever. The boy, in their view, was taken care of. And indeed he felt most disagreeably taken care of, as one might be taken care of in an institution.
    That lost interval, as he thought of it, that Empty Quarter that remained unvisited, stayed with him like the tormenting fragment of a dream which his inopportune waking had disturbed. The essence of the condition was dreamlike, since the adventure had not taken place, but might have taken place. He was robust enough to know that his childhood was immutable, and could no longer be recaptured; nor could it yield more than it already had done. Yet what he retained of it was the idea of happiness, plenitude, and it was this that he made it his plan to recapture. For he had no doubt that he could recapture it, somewhere along the way, and to be deprived of the chance to do so was like the door to the future being shut in his face.His surroundings he thought of as a temporary aberration, from which, in time, he would stealthily depart. He would not die in England, he thought, although he loved the country in a brooding, almost shamefaced way, loved it for the very boredom which delayed him on this rainy afternoon. As he sat at Mr Sheed’s desk he could hear a lorry discharging beer barrels into the cellar of the pub on the corner, and a blast of music when the door of the neighbouring hairdresser’s swung open. He was surrounded by commercial transactions of a humble nature; the district was humble, and he did not despise it. He felt a mild frustrated love for the people in the street, all unknowing and, it seemed to him, innocent. At the same time he remembered the blind man and his guide dog whom he had passed outside Victoria station: the man cautious, questing, his sightless head turning from side to side, the dog obedient but straining, full of power, arching to fulfil his destiny as an animal. The sight had chilled him, its symbolism too apparent.
    In the course of one tormenting afternoon he had become resistant to anything that suggested confinement, and this extended to the bars on the back window and the sight of scaffolding on the building opposite. He thought uneasily of the sheet of plastic that had detached itself from that same building and had bowled along the road, waiting to trap him by the ankles. Even the memory, the image, caused alarm. It was as if he had to keep his life inconclusive, until such time as his real life should be ready to unfold. This real life, as it continued to beckon from an ever more distant future, had to do with the feeling of plenitude which he knew from his dreams and which he knew to be the essence of his authentic, his desired reality. Not to know that reality would be an impossibility,