Absolution by Patrick Flanery Read Free Book Online

turns the page of the notebook and continues.
    ‘This kind of knowledge requires missteps and bad bruising, even broken limbs. Some are not so quick to adapt, or refuse to do so, and when the battering becomes too severe’–she pauses for a moment, makes a change with her pen, then continues – ‘when their lives (or in the case of these writers, the life of their work ) is placed in mortal jeopardy, then they must flee, go to a shelter, hide themselves away, take on an assumed identity, travel under false papers. I adapted. I came to know my molester as intimately as I knew my husband – perhaps more so. I chose to adapt, to keep my children and myself alive. At least that was the rationalization on which I built my career very specifically as a writer in this country in that historic moment.’
    ‘Just before the old government was overthrown, you published “Black Tongue”, an essay about censorship.’
    ‘I think I am too tired to continue today. You will come back tomorrow at the same time?’ She looks up from the notebook, her face somewhere else.
    ‘Yes, if you wish.’
    ‘I do not wish. But I fear that now this has started, I cannot stop you.’
    Marie appears from another room. She’s been listening and leads me to the front door. She opens the gate at the end of the drive, waits until I’ve reversed the car into the street, and closes it again.
When I arrive back at Greg’s, I find an email waiting for me:
Dear Dr Leroux,
Further to your previous message, I do entirely understand that my mother has, quite unwisely, given her consent for you to write her official biography. I do not know whether this was her idea or yours or her publisher’s, but that is irrelevant anyway. Why you in particular have been contracted to carry out this ill-conceived project is my real concern. Perhaps I know more of your reputation for exaggeration and character assassination than my mother or her representatives do.
I can do nothing to stop you telling the story of her life so long as she cooperates, but I counsel you in the strongest possible terms to attempt no depiction of my father, my sister or myself. I speak in an official capacity for my father, Professor William Wald, and can only assume to speak for what my sister Laura would wish. My mother is a duplicitous and self-serving woman who says whatever she thinks will make her appear in the best light. She is vain of person and vainer still of reputation. Her statements about her children – myself in particular – are not to be trusted. I hope I make myself clear.
I categorically deny you permission to publish this letter in any form or to forward it to any third party.
Yours sincerely,
    Mark Wald
*
Next day. Every time that I’ve arrived at Clare’s house, Marie has said nothing to me. Today, however, she makes a sound, a grunt of irritation, and leads me down the corridor past the reception room where the first interviews were conducted to a door at the back of the house. There isn’t anything remarkable about the rooms we pass. They don’t suggest the daily haunts of a writer. Everything is antiseptically clean. It looks too uncluttered to be the home of a mind as complicated as Clare’s. I was expecting random collections of books and ornaments, stacks of newspapers and ephemera, as in the over-stuffed apartments of bohemian academics I’ve known in New York. Instead, this house looks like it came to life out of a design magazine.
Marie knocks twice. She looks at her watch. Thirty seconds pass, and then she opens the door to a bright room. Two of the walls are glass. They meet in the corner opposite the door, giving views of the garden, and the high rocky slopes rising precipitously behind the house. The other walls are lined with bookshelves, the volumes all flush in a line. Marie gestures towards a couch where I sit as she leaves, closing the door behind her. I’m tempted to examine the bookshelves, but guess that this – being left alone in what