The Memory of Love Read Online Free PDF Page A

metal, names being called, footsteps: smart and fast; the shuffle and bump of a person on crutches.
    The piece of paper in front of him he has already headed with his patient’s name. Next to the words Reason for Referral , Adrian has written Self . For several minutes he writes down everything he has been told in the last two hours, as he remembers it. He writes swiftly, unhesitatingly. The smooth nib of the pen moves across the paper inaudibly, tracing in black lines the story of the man in the private room.
    A fly is trapped, one moment frenziedly hitting the window, the next hurtling across the room above Adrian’s head. He swats at it and misses. Now his concentration is broken and so he sets down his pen, crosses to the window and prises it open. Beyond the high walls he hears water running, the hollow knock of empty buckets, women’s voices arguing, he thinks. He is not sure. He thinks how quiet affluence is: people living in private spaces, arguments in the shape of silences and closed doors. Compares it to the rowdy unselfconsciousness of poverty. The swooping laughter of children, though, is the same anywhere in the world.
    That morning, after he woke from the dream, he pushed the sheets back and lay staring at the blank ceiling and listening to the noises of the morning. Perhaps because of the dream, he thought of his father and his mother.
    Of his father, sitting opposite him in the parlour. Outside the trees gradually turning black against a silver sky, each possessed of its own lucent aura. Adrian watching his father’s hands: the black hairs against the pale skin, the bony wrists, grey-veined, emerging from the cuff of his checked weekend shirt. His father’s fingers fumbling with pieces of an Airfix plane.
    For years Adrian assumed the idea for the afternoon’s project must have belonged to one of his parents, most likely his mother. For Adrian had no interest in model aircraft, could never see the point in gluing together pieces of moulded plastic. But now when he turns the notion around, he considers the possibility the idea may have been his: the trip to the shop to choose the aircraft, the drive home clutching the paper-wrapped box, spreading the pieces out upon the polished rosewood table all hint at a child’s lack of imagination and eagerness to please. His mother seated at her desk answering correspondence, watching them both through averted eyes.
    The model, though, is a Lancaster BIII. Adrian’s own choice would have been more predictable. A Spitfire, say. His father tells him these planes raided German dams two years before the end of the war. Adrian watches his father fumble, knowing he must not help. There are occasions when an intervention might be disguised as filial duty: clearing his father’s breakfast plates, fastening a tricky cufflink. But times when his father was bent over his shoelaces, Adrian saw no choice but to watch the knot slip over and over through his fingers. Sometimes Adrian’s mother went to help. Adrian noticed how, as soon as she was through, his father levered himself up from the chair in stiff silence and left the room.
    And so he sits silently, watching his father’s hands. While his father in turn appears to have forgotten the presence of his son, fights to hold on to the pieces in fingers that tremble and flutter like a moth’s wings. Another memory superimposes itself on the first. Of walking through woods with his father searching for ley lines, or was it underground streams? Each holding on to a forked stick. His delight when the stick in his father’s hands began to tremble.
    Since the first days of his arrival in the new country, without the order of his previous life, time had taken on a kind of shapelessness. In the early days he had risen, full of interest in his new surroundings. Every action, however small, held its own place in the day. Showering beneath the thin trickle of water that barely wet his shoulders. The sound of his own footsteps