The New Confessions Read Online Free PDF Page A

sense that? How do children intuit these things? I have no idea. But I remind you I was no ordinary child. Already in those days my mind was working in distinctly personal ways. I cannot explain why this conclusion presented itself to me with such particular force, but as I flicked through the pages, contemplating this pretty young stranger who had given birth to me the day she died, I felt myself brimful of a new liberating certainty. I had divined something; I possessed my first adult secret. I nourished it and let it grow inside me, warm and exquisite.
    This realization allowed me to cope with my father’s strange coldness towards me, of which I became more aware as I grew older. He was never unkind or cruel. His attitude towards me was one of irritated bafflement rather than antagonism. He saw his second son, somewhat small of stature to be sure, but fit, personable, polite, the thick black hair now neatly parted on the left, the face, before the imminent ravages of adolescence, agreeable, open, apparently intelligent and, from some angles, distressingly reminiscent of his dead wife’s. Yet this boy’s intellectual development seemed insuperably retarded. By age thirteen I could read and write, though my spelling was vile, but I appeared incapable of making any real progress with my other school subjects. “Bad,” “lazy,” “stubborn,” “plain stupid,” were the epithets that figured on my school reports. Except for one: arithmetic.
    “It says ‘excellent’ here,” my father addressed me across the dining table. “Why?”
    “I don’t know. I just find it easy.”
    “Well, why don’t you find anything else easy, for heaven’s sake!”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Latin: ‘no progress.’ Compositions: ‘unsatisfactory, makes no effort.’ Then I read ‘excellent.’ What am I meant to think?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “
Stop saying, ‘I don’t know,’ idiot child!
”
    “Sorry. But—”
    “You’re clearly not an imbecile. An imbecile wouldn’t get an ‘excellent’ for arithmetic.” He looked at me. “Spell ‘simpleton.’ ”
    Ah. This I knew was a trick.
    “
C, i—
”
    “
No!
” His eyes thinned above his cheek tufts. He looked at me with what I can only describe as despair.
    “If you don’t improve, John, I shall have to take steps to see that you do. I’ll not allow a boy of your age to bamboozle me.”
    These “steps” had been referred to with increasing regularity over the last two years. I was not sure what he had in mind; I feared a private tutor or some sort of crammer. I hung my head with a suitable display of filial humbleness and left the room. I was not as perturbed as I looked. Since my discovery of Donald’s love for my mother, other complications had suggested themselves to me that made my father’s ire and hostility more comprehensible. What if Donald’s love had been reciprocated? In terms of attractiveness there was no comparison between the two men. I hugged my secret to me like a hot-water bottle. It protected me; it set a distance between me and my father. Donald Verulam and Emmeline Todd … it seemed entirely natural and likely.
    Fancifully, I contemplated my face in the mirror. My mother’s eyes, her brows. In the looking glass I thought I began to see traces of Donald’s high forehead. I stretched my neck and swallowed, trying to make my Adam’s apple bob like his. Could there have been something more?
    I tried to elicit more information from Oonagh.
    “Oonagh, did my mother have many friends?”
    “Aye, surely. She was a very popular woman. Much loved.”
    “By who, exactly?”
    “All sorts. Everyone. Family—brothers, cousins—always busy, always visiting, out and about.”
    “Did my father go with her on these visits?”
    “Well, he’s a busy man, ye ken.”
    “I see.”
    She was giving away nothing. But her reticence convinced me she knew or suspected more.
    My father was still a busy man. His work at the infirmary kept him