Recovery and the Return of Ethan Hart by Stephen Benatar Read Free Book Online

guy like me.”
    â€œWhy do you add that?”
    â€œOh, I don’t know. Wasn’t thinking, I guess.” He picks a blade of grass and starts to chew on it, lying back and leaning on one elbow. “I guess I used to see myself as being pretty weak.”
    â€œWeak!” The surprise is genuine.
    â€œThank you for that—but, yes, I often used to think so. Before my brother died, before I realized that Marjorie could ever view me as any kind of…well, as any kind of a replacement. And in a way that’s why this stint in England has been so good for me. I know that sounds selfish but it’s shown me I can cope. That I can cope the same as anyone.”
    â€œBut what on earth made you think that you were weak?”
    He rolls onto his back, throws away the blade of grass. “Well, for one thing, I suppose, I find my father a bit formidable. My mother’s also got a very forceful personality. I’m fond of them both and missed them like hell when I first got to England but—” He laughs. “That’s another thing, of course. Homesickness is hardly a great sign of strength.”
    â€œWhat an idiotic remark…for a highbrow.”
    â€œI’ve no idea,” he says, “why I’m telling you all this. Well, actually, yes I have. From the start I’ve found you remarkably easy to talk to.”
    â€œI’m glad.” I wish I could have met him earlier, during that period when he missed his home.
    But suddenly I get a consolation prize (and almost wonder if he might be telepathic).
    â€œYou know, Rosalind,” he says, “I really found you at the right moment. I’d been feeling fairly low, what with Roosevelt’s death; the discoveries at Buchenwald… Well, of course, everybody had. I’m not claiming any special sort of sensibility; don’t get me wrong. But that Jack o’ the Clock was the first thing to make me smile in days. I had nearly told Walt to find someone else to go with him to Southwold. In fact I did but he was surprisingly insistent.”
    â€œGood old Walt. And you did more than smile. You really laughed.”
    â€œI know. It was a true liberation.”
    I lie back, feeling happy.
    â€œAnd then, too, see how you’ve taken me out of myself today! John Winthrop, Maria Marten, Meg Taylor, Lord Byron. Though I give you my solemn word,” he says hastily—albeit with a touch of mischief, “I am not making light of Maria Marten!”
    We decide to take a punt to Grantchester. Yes, at first he gets the pole caught but then he quickly grows proficient and his movements become a joy to watch.
    â€œOh! there the chestnuts, summer through,
    Beside the river make for you
    A tunnel of green gloom…”
    Also he recites the whole of ‘The Soldier’—at Dartmouth he majored in English—and gets it word-perfect. It’s a memorable experience: drifting along a lovely river on a fine spring evening (the sky has at last got rid of the remnants of its cloud) and listening to a moving poem well spoken against the very setting which inspired it.
    We tie up the punt and for a wonderfully enchanted hour we ourselves roam England’s ways and love her flowers and feel we have hearts very much at peace under an English heaven. Is war still raging in the Pacific? Bloodshed, pain, bereavement? Even boredom, muddle, apathy? We poke our heads round the gateway of the Old Vicarage and try to put the clock back forty years to when the poet would have been eighteen, try to picture him running across the lawn, sitting on that wrought-iron seat, standing on the very spot where we ourselves now stand. 1905. It’s easy to imagine—in such a place, on such an afternoon—that we have turned into time travellers who have stumbled upon a secret door into that sunlit, safe, Edwardian world; at least, Matt cautiously amends, sunlit and safe for those who had a good income. We admire