The Love Object Read Online Free PDF Page A

live.’
    You will think I am callous not to have taken the existence of my children into account. But, in fact, I did. Long before the affair began I had reached the conclusion that they had been parted from me irrevocably by being sent to boarding-school. If you like, I felt I had let them down years before. I thought – it was an unhysterical admission – that my being alive or my being dead made little difference to the course of their lives. I ought to say that I had not seen them for a month, and it is a shocking fact that although absence does not make love less it cools down our physical need for the ones we love. They were due home for their mid-term holiday that very day, but since it was their father’s turn to have them, I knew that I would only see them for a few hours one afternoon. And in my despondent state that seemed worse than not seeing them at all.
    Well of course when I went downstairs the plumber took one look at me and said, ‘You could do with a cup of tea.’ He actually had tea made. So I took it and stood there warming my child-sized hands around the barrel of the brown mug. Suddenly, swiftly, I remembered my lover measuring our hands when we were lying in bed and saying that mine were no bigger than his daughter’s. And then I had another and less edifying memory about hands. It was the time we met when he was visibly distressed because he’d caught those same daughter’s hands in a motor-car door. The fingers had not been broken but were badly bruised, and he felt awful about it and hoped his daughter would forgive him. Upon being told the story I bolted off into an anecdote about almost losing my fingers in the door of a new Jaguar I had bought. It was pointless, although a listener might infer from it that I was a boastful and heartless girl. I would have been sorry for any child whose fingers were caught in a motor-car door, but at that moment I was trying to recall him to the hidden world of him and me. Perhaps it was one of the things that made him like me less. Perhaps it was then he resolved to end the affair. I was about to say this to the plumber, to warn him about so-called love often hardening the heart, but like the violets it is something that can miss awfully, and when it does two people are mortally embarrassed. He’d put sugar in my tea and I found it sickly.
    ‘I want you to help me,’ I said.
    ‘Anything,’ he said. I ought to know that. We were friends. He would do the pipes tastefully. The pipes would be little works of art and the radiators painted to match the walls.
    ‘You may think I will paint these white, but in fact they will be light ivory,’ he said. The whitewash on the kitchen walls had yellowed a bit.
    ‘I want to do myself in,’ I said hurriedly.
    ‘Good God,’ he said, and then burst out laughing. He always knew I was dramatic. Then he looked at me and obviously my face was a revelation. For one thing I could not control my breathing. He put his arm around me and led me into the sitting-room and we had a drink. I knew he liked drink and thought, It’s an ill wind that doesn’t blow some good. The maddening thing was that I kept thinking a live person’s thoughts. He said I had so much to live for. ‘A young girl like you – people wanting your autograph, a lovely new car,’ he said.
    ‘It’s all …’ I groped for the word. I had meant to say ‘meaningless’ but ‘cruel’ was the word that came out.
    ‘And your boys,’ he said. ‘What about your boys?’ He had seen photographs of them, and once I’d read him a letter from one of them. The word ‘cruel’ seemed to be blazing in my head. It screamed at me from every corner of the room. To avoid his glance, I looked down at the sleeve of my angora jersey and methodically began picking off pieces of fluff and rolling them into a little ball.
    There was a moment’s pause.
    ‘This is an unlucky road. You’re the third,’ he said.
    ‘The third what?’ I said, industriously