Lessons from the Heart by John Clanchy Read Free Book Online

actually playing Do you remember? and talking about themselves and their own stupid arguments and making up, and it’s all right for them because they’re old and hardly have any feelings left at all, but for someone like me who’s still young –
    So I lock myself in my room for a whole day and won’t come out or unlock the door or talk to Mum, and instead just lie on my bed and decide to starve myself to death so then at least they’ll understand.
    And I don’t even blame Philip so much – my Philip, I mean -and I even still like him and that, but I think he should have been more honest and owned up and told me, and he said it was only because he couldn’t, because he knew how much it would hurt me but that’s fake because he already was – hurting me, I mean.
    Deep down I knew something was wrong and I kept making excuses to myself and saying he was just too busy and that’s why he couldn’t write so much or didn’t have anything to tell me on the phone like about the college and his friends there that I’d met and who were so funny and exciting and always doing crazy things and falling in love and having arguments and splitting up all the first year and I couldn’t wait to get there and be at uni myself, but those last two months he’d just tell me silly things like who won the cricket cup and what the Master said at the Commencement Dinner and I didn’t want to hear any of that. I wanted to know who he went to the dinner with and who was at his table because they really dress up and have candles and wine and a dance afterwards, and I had to drag it out of him, and he said this one and that one, and I knew he was holding something back and I kept saying, ‘Who else?’ and when he finally said, ‘Jenny,’ he said it in a funny way like he was really reluctant to say her name to me and it almost stuck in his mouth coming out, and I knew there was something wrong then. But it wasn’t till two weeks ago that he told me.
    Though he didn’t really have to, because I’d worked it out by then. I just showed him a poem by Philip Larkin who’s my favourite poet and I partly liked him in the first place because Larkin’s a Philip too and has a poem about everything – whatever you’re feeling you can find a poem about it by Larkin, and sometimes you think, wow, that’s really weird, it’s so true about what’s happening to you at that moment you think that he must know you or something even though he’s not an Australian at all but an English poet and dead. Anyway I just showed this poem to Philip when he came up for the weekend when he wasn’t supposed to but rang and said he had to, it was important, and the poem is called Talking in Bed and it’s about a relationship between two lovers that’s going wrong and they can’t talk or even be honest with one another any more and it starts:
    Talking in bed ought to be easiest,
    Lying together there goes back so far …
    And when Philip read it, he just said, ‘Yes.’ And I didn’t cry then. I was so calm because I couldn’t believe it was really happening. If anything I felt like laughing, it was so absurd, and I just said ‘Who?’ and he swallowed and said, ‘Jenny,’ and I found I knew that anyway.
    And Jenny’s pretty and that – because I met her a couple of times in Canberra – and she’s sophisticated and doing English and Philosophy and can quote lots of people I’ve never even heard of, and I realize now that that frightened me as soon as I set eyes on her, and I must have worked out even then she was keen on Philip because I’ve been reading and reading all the books on the courses at Sydney Uni including existentialists like Camus and de Beauvoir and Beckett and even some postmodernists like Calvino and Handke and I liked them even though I found most of them hard and I hated