Somewhere Beyond Reproach (16 page)

I struggle to understand the cruellest paradox; for I must understand it. It is my final hope. Only by complete
destruction
of the figure I made you in my mind can I ever learn to know you from the beginning. You have been in my brain so long that I have been deceived, deceived like the man who meets a television commentator in the street and asks him how he is. When we were lovers I imagined I had said things when I had not. We seemed to be in perpetual
conversation
. As our eyes absorbed the same scenes I felt that we shared the same thoughts. I added up the incidents, the places, words and times that made my picture of you. Yet I have been wrong. Nobody can piece together the mystery of a person by collecting the details. The picture has too many dimensions and inter-relations to explain it in terms of its component parts.

Perhaps this is very obvious, and yet my rediscovery of its truth makes final judgements seem ridiculous and
unnecessary
. An excuse it may be. A way to solve the problem of my helplessness, to kill the time that is to come, the winters and the summers, the miles that are to be travelled. A way to end my fear of crowds, to feel that my life has a place. I do not believe in destiny but have come to recognise necessity. If I have been deprived of the early years of fatherhood, perhaps there is time to be made up. Prams give way to bicycles, model cars to model planes. I shall say after Dinah that we are what we are now and not what we have been. I shall hope. If I manage to banish my wounded pride and my wish for revenge, we may be happy. Even if I do not forgive entirely I shall remember the moments when with
eyes closed I lay in your arms and sensed time die as we breathed. For our future will hold days with a this-ness as real as days in the past, when we saw a flock of birds together, as they broke from a group of trees, or the sun catch for a moment on the windscreen of a distant car.