The Bay of Angels Read Online Free PDF

when I mentioned the little children in the garden, as was Simon. ‘And how was Honoré today?’ he would ask, and I had no trouble entertaining them in a way they found entirely acceptable.
    My mother seemed unchanged to me, or perhaps I merely wanted to see her that way. She was quiet, but she had always been quiet: she said little but watched Simon tenderly as he took his pills. Both seemed in excellent health. I believe she settled down cautiously into married life, although I found it difficult to believe her entirely comfortable in that light, a light that searched out imperfections, the wrinkle of a collapsed neck, a slightly drooping mouth, both of which were visible in her husband. If she had hoped for a more romantic lover she gave no sign of disappointment, though I think she feared turning into Mme Thibaudet, who acted as a nurse and guardian to her own husband, and who had indeed once been a nurse in the clinic in Nice of which he was the director. The only thing I noticed about my mother that gave me pause was that she too liked to be out of the house. As my afternoons were spent some distance away I was for a time unaware that she sometimes went off on her own, much as I did. I assumed that she spent her time in a famous garden near by, sitting quietly, as she had always done. But as she was always there when I returned I did not see anything untoward in this. She had always preferred her own company—and mine, of course—to that of women friends. Whatever the age difference between Simon and herself, I think she was grateful to him just for being a man.
    That first summer was the happiest time of my life. As well as the familiarity of my mother’s presence I enjoyed a form of social acceptance, even popularity, that I had never known before. At home I was used mainly as a confidante by more adventurous friends. In France I was learning the attractions of carelessness, of frankness. I was something of a success with the young men who joined the girls and myself for an apéritif before we made our way home. Everyone was, or seemed to be, intelligent, purposeful. I was at ease, whether chatting to Mme Delgado in the kitchen or soothing Honoré through one of his frequent crises of disenchantment. Nice still seemed to me a blatant charmless sort of place, but I was part of a group, persuaded that love and friendship were common currency and that one need never be without either. The cars still streamed past the café where we met for our
apéro
but I had got so used to the noise that I hardly noticed it. I took it for granted that everyone moved quickly: no wayfarers here. Somehow I had put all those fantasies behind me; they remained in London, in Edith Grove. Here I was driven out of my earlier self by the power of the light. Even when I made my way back to the house in the early evening I retained an after-image of the blaze. By the time I was due to go home, alone this time, for Simon and my mother were staying on, I saw that I should never forget that first summer, and that I would return, was indeed expected to return, until, with all my meagre experience and my new-found enthusiasm, I was accepted as part of the landscape.
    4
    I hesitate, even now, to assign to the gods of antiquity full responsibility for the mismanagement of human affairs, or for human misapprehension. Such fatalism goes against my earlier belief in a more benign mythological providence, which, if fallacious, or at least misleading, is no more misleading than other mythologies, which promise much, but deliver little.
    I took a last walk down Edith Grove very early one dark Sunday morning in February. In truth it was to be a walk I had taken a year earlier when the lease on our flat had expired. I had managed to negotiate a further year’s grace by dint of paying an increased rent, but clearly I could not continue to do this. The estate agent had proved surprisingly conciliatory, especially when I told him that I could move out at