Spring by David Szalay Read Free Book Online

peculiarity of the old hillside house that the street entrance was on the top floor, so that what you would normally expect to find upstairs, you found downstairs.
    On his own, he wondered why he was there. Only out of habit, it seemed. He had spent so much time in that house. The memories merged together. Memories of school holidays. People from different epochs of his life mingled there as they never had in time. He listened to the sound of the rain intensifying on the olive trees, of thunder fraying like acoustic distortion down the valley. The house itself had little or no sense of memory. It was always the same. This dim ecclesiastical light in the stillness of the salon. No photographs on public display, except, as if they had been forgotten there, a few in an unlit whitewashed alcove where the hall turned, including one of his mother. It was a snapshot from the early Seventies in which she was flanked by Isabel and himself. Somehow the setting does not seem to be London. Paris? He does not think he properly understood, at the time, what was happening. She was ill. However, even that he did not understand—­it was just an explanation—­some words that he himself would offer in his husky voice to explain the situation—­he did not understand what they meant. He has no memories of the hospital, nothing like that. All there is is the thick ivory shagpile in the vestibule of the Wimbledon vicarage. In his own flat there are several framed photographs of her, this person of whom he has no actual memories, this utterly mysterious, utterly numinous person. What he finds painful now is imagining it all—­that is, those months in 1974—­from her point of view. Imagining himself from her point of view. Thus he sees himself as if from the outside, through her eyes. Thus he fumbles towards some estimate of what he might have lost. Well.
    The temper he had in the years that followed… They lived in a four-­storey house in Kensington. Today it would be a multi­millionaire’s house. Kensington was not the same in the late Seventies. Except for the light. The light was the same then—­the London light, flat and plain on London streets. The green electric typewriter muttering in the study on Sunday afternoons.
    In the seating plan, Isabel has put Ted between herself and Kevin Staedtler’s wife. Kevin is the senior partner at Quarles, Lingus, and he and his wife, being in their fifties, are nearest to Ted in age—­that was presumably the thinking there. James is down the other end, Steve’s end, where topics in the early part of the meal include the films of Pier Paolo Pasolini—­someone whose name James associates with Miriam. Yes, she once made him sit through The Canterbury Tales … Even so, he knows little or nothing about his films and does not feel able to participate. Nor does he particularly want to, though Miranda, who is sitting on his left, keeps making efforts to include him. He is touched by these efforts but he finds it hard to live up to them—­every time she asks him what he thinks, he just shrugs and says some variant of I don’t know.
    Eventually she tries a new line of approach. She turns to him and says, ‘So what are you up to these days?’
    The main course is just being served—­two waitresses are doing the serving. Isabel has pulled out all the stops for this one, he thinks. Probably to impress Ted, to show him how well she’s doing…
    ‘The last time I saw you,’ Miranda says, ‘you had a magazine. I even remember the name. Plush. ’
    ‘That’s right…’
    ‘Do you remember the last time I saw you?’
    He thinks. ‘No,’ he says finally, laughing. ‘No, I don’t. I’m sorry.’
    She hits him. ‘It was at the magazine launch party!’
    ‘At least I invited you to the launch party…’
    ‘No, you didn’t. I went with Izzy. I told you I thought Plush was a ludicrous name. You didn’t think that was very funny. Sorry if it upset you.’
    He has no memory of the