The Love Object Read Online Free PDF Page B

since our morning’s drama. At tea-time I’d even left his tea on a tray out on the landing. Would he tell other people how I had asked him to be my murderer. Would he have recognized it as that? I gave him and his friends a drink, and they stood uncomfortably in the children’s bedroom and looked at the little boy’s flushed face and said he would soon be better. What else could they say!
    For the remainder of the evening the boys and I played the quiz game over and over again, and just before they went to sleep I read them an adventure story. In the morning they both had temperatures. I was busy nursing them for the next couple of weeks. I made beef tea a lot and broke bread into it and coaxed them to swallow those sops of savoury bread. They were constantly asking to be entertained. The only thing I could think of in the way of facts were particles of nature lore I had gleaned from one of my colleagues in the television canteen. Even with embellishing, it took not more than two minutes to tell my children: of a storm of butterflies in Venezuela, of animals called sloths who are so lazy they hang from trees and become covered with moss, and of how the sparrows in England sing differently to the sparrows in Paris.
    ‘More,’ they would say. ‘More, more.’ Then we would have to play that silly game again or embark upon another adventure story.
    At these times I did not allow my mind to wander, but in the evenings when their father came I used to withdraw to the sitting-room and have a drink. Well that was disastrous. The leisure enabled me to brood, also I have very weak bulbs in the lamps and the dimness gives the room a quality that induces reminiscence. I would be transported back. I enacted various kinds of reunion with my lover, but my favourite one was an unexpected meeting in one of those tiled, inhuman, pedestrian subways and running towards each other and finding ourselves at a stairway which said (one in London actually does say), ‘To central island only’, and laughing as we leaped up those stairs propelled by miraculous wings. In less indulgent phases, I regretted that we hadn’t seen more sunsets, or cigarette advertisements, or something, because in memory our numerous meetings became one long uninterrupted state of love-making without the ordinariness of things in between to fasten those peaks; The days, the nights with him, seemed to have been sandwiched into a long, beautiful but single night instead of being stretched to the seventeen occasions it actually was. Ah, vanished peaks. Once I was so sure that he had come into the room that I tore off a segment of an orange I had just peeled, and handed it to him.
    But from the other room I heard the low, assured voice of the children’s father delivering information with the self-importance of a man delivering dogmas, and I shuddered at the degree of poison that lay between us when we’d once professed to love. Plagued love. Then, some of the feeling I had for my husband transferred itself to my lover, and I reasoned with myself that the letter in which he had professed to love me was sham, that he had merely written it when he thought he was free of me, but finding himself saddled once again, he withdrew, and let me have the postcard. I was a stranger to myself. Hate was welling up. I wished multitudes of humiliation on him. I even plotted a dinner party that I would attend having made sure that he was invited and of snubbing him throughout. My thoughts teetered between hate and the hope of something final between us so that I would be certain of his feelings towards me. Even as I sat in a bus, an advertisement which caught my eye was immediately related to him. It said, ’DON’T PANIC WE MEND, WE ADAPT, WEA REMODEL.’ It was an advertisement for pearl-stringing. I would mend and with vengeance.
    I cannot say when it first began to happen, because that would be too drastic and anyhow I do not know. But the children were back at school, and