LITMIR.BIZ

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he said. ‘To love one’s work. Oh, I was no Einstein but I loved my work and I think I did good. You, what do you do?’

      Nothing, she thought, except to live where the lightning is, at the centre where the lightning is. At the disconnected places. At the place where our truth is to be found on the rainwashed blue bridges. At the place without hypocrisy. In the traffic. Where she would have to fight for everything including her husband, not knowing that at least this she could keep, as her mother had known. In the jungle.

      She stood up and said, ‘Goodbye, father.’

      Defiantly he said, ‘You refused your responsibility.’

      It was like standing on a platform waving to a stranger on a train. For a moment she couldn’t make up her mind whether he was leaving her or she leaving him.

      He relapsed into petulance. ‘I shouted for the nurse last night but she was too busy. She heard me right enough but she didn’t come.’

      She thought to herself: There is a time when one has to give up, when nothing more can be done. When the connection has to be cut. It is necessary, for not all things are retrievable.

      As she stood up she nearly fell, almost upsetting the carafe of water, herself full of water.

      He had closed his eyes again when she turned away and walked through the ward head down, as if fighting a strong wind. She paused outside the door in the blinding March light where the tulips were.

      The man she had seen before had finished polishing his car and was looking at it with adoration. She thought: The Adoration of the Mini, and smiled.

      The child stirred. The world spun and took its place, the place that it must have as long as she was what she was. She had decided on it. And what she was included her father. And she thought again of her child, loving and pitying it.

       At the Fair

      THE DAY WAS very hot as had been most of the days of that torrid summer and when they arrived at the park where the fair was being held she found that there was no space for her car: so she had to cruise around the town till she found one, cursing and sweating. It was at times like these, when she felt hot and prickly and obscurely aggressive, that she wished Hugh could drive, but he had tried a few times to do so and he couldn’t and that was that. It wasn’t a big car, it was only a Mini, but even so there didn’t seem to be any space for it anywhere, and policemen were everywhere waving drivers on and sometimes flagging them down to give them information. However after half an hour of circling and back-tracking, she did manage to find a place, a good bit away from the fair, and after she had locked the doors the three of them set off towards it. In the early days, before she had got married, she hadn’t bothered to lock the car at all. Even if a handle fell off a door, like the one for instance that wound down the window, she didn’t bother having it repaired, and the back seat used to be full of old newspapers and magazines which she had bought but never read. Now, however, it was tidy, as Hugh (though, or because, he didn’t drive) kept it so. He also polished it regularly every Sunday, since he didn’t do any writing on Sundays, finding that three hours a day for five days in the week satisfied whatever demon possessed him. She herself worked full-time in an office while he stayed at home writing and making sure that their little daughter who was not yet of school age didn’t burn herself or fall down the stairs or do anything that endangered her welfare.

      It was a Saturday afternoon and it was excessively hot, but in spite of the heat Hugh was wearing a jacket and this irritated her. Why couldn’t he be like other men and go about in his shirt sleeves; why must he always wear a jacket even when the sun was at its most glaring, and how could he in fact bear to do so? She herself was wearing a short yellow dress with short sleeves which showed her attractive round arms, and the little girl was wearing a white frilly dress with a locket bouncing at her breast. She looked down at her tanned arms and was surprised to see them so brown since she had been working all summer at her cards in the office catching up with work caused by Margaret’s long absence. But of course at weekends she and her husband and the little girl went out quite a lot. They drove to their own secret glen and sometimes sat and picknicked listening to the noise of the river, which was a deep black, muttering unintelligibly among the stones. The blackness and the noise reminded her for some strange reason of a telephone conversation which had somehow gone wrong, spoiling instead of creating communication. Sometimes they might take a walk up the hill among the stones and the fallen gnarled branches and very rarely they might catch a glimpse at the very top, high above them, of a deer standing questioningly among trees. She loved deer, their elegance and their containment, but her husband didn’t seem to bother much.

      The little girl Sheila was taking large steps to keep up with the two of them, now and again taking her mother’s hand and gazing gravely up into her face as if she were silently interrogating her, and then withdrawing her hand quickly and moving away. She talked hardly at all and was very serious and self-possessed. In fact it seemed to her mother that she was more like what she imagined a writer ought to be than Hugh was, for he didn’t seem to notice anything but wandered about absent-mindedly, never listening to anything she was saying and never calling her attention to any interesting sight in the world around him. His silence was profound. She had never seen anyone who paid so little attention to the world: she sometimes thought that if a woman with green hair and a green face walked past him he wouldn’t notice. That surely was not the way a writer ought to be.

      Anyway he wasn’t a very successful writer as far as sales went. He had had two small books of poetry published by printing presses no one had ever heard of except himself, and had sold one short story to an equally unknown magazine. She had long ago given up trying to understand his poetry. He himself wavered between thinking that he was a good poet as yet unrecognised and a black despair which made her impatient and often angry with him. In any case the people they lived among didn’t know about writing and certainly couldn’t have cared less about poetry: if you didn’t appear on TV you weren’t quoted. They lived in a council house in a noisy neighbourhood which seemed to have more than the average share of large dogs and small grubby children who stared at you as you went by.

      The fair was really immense and she looked down at her small daughter now and again to make sure that she hadn’t got lost. She sometimes worried about her daughter’s silences, thinking that perhaps they were a protection against the two of them.

      Hugh said to her, ‘We could spend a lot of money here, do you know that? There are so many things.’

      She was suddenly impatient. ‘Well, we only get out once in a while.’ She knew that Hugh worried about money because he himself hardly earned anything, and also because his nature was fundamentally less generous than her own. He had given up working two years before, just to give himself a chance to see if he could succeed as a writer. Before that he had worked in a library, but he complained that working in a library was too much like writing, and in any case he was bored by it and the ignorant people he met. As far as she could see nothing had in fact happened since he gave up writing, for when he wasn’t writing he was reading, and he hardly ever went out. He would sit at his typewriter in the morning but most of the time he didn’t write anything or if he did he threw it in the bucket. When she came home at five she would find the bucket full of small balls of paper. She herself knew very little about literature and couldn’t judge whether such work as he completed was of the slightest value. She sometimes wondered whether she was losing her respect for him: his writing she often thought was a device for avoiding the problems of the real world. On the other hand her own more passionate nature dominated his colder one. Before she met him she had gone out with other men but her resolute self-willed character had led to quarrels of such intensity and fierceness that she knew they would eventually sour any permanent relationship.

      As they walked through the fair, pushing their way among crowds of people, they arrived at a stall where one could throw three darts at three different dartboards, and if one got a bull each time would win a prize.

      ‘Would you like to try this?’ she asked him.

      ‘Not me. You try it.’

      ‘All

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