The Truth About Love by Josephine Hart Read Free Book Online

its position, carelessly, casually, not paying due attention to what it is you have in your hand, and it falls and smashes! That’s how I feel. Careless. We were careless. We didn’t look after it, I mean him, properly. We weren’t vigilant. Sorry. I’m struggling …”
    “It’s understandable, Mr. O’Hara.”
    “Do you … do you just struggle along yourself with life Mr. Middlehoff?”
    “We all do.”
    “The bishop would tell you of the Risen Christ. The Great Survivor. No good to you, I suppose?”
    “I’m not familiar with that particular … incarnation.”
    “Well, ask Bishop Fullerton. He’ll give you a lecture on it. You play chess with him every month they say. We don’t have much call for chess here. Bishop Fullerton went to Trinity, you know—Protestant university—unusual for a Catholic boy—had to get special permission—but not unheard of. And his was a late, well late-ish, vocation. He moved around with the English. His sister married an English peer though he rarely refers to it. Naturally. Anyway, I must go now. Thank you for talking to me. It’s the act of a gentleman. Will you think about the gate?”
    “I will.”
    “And will you think about a price?”
    “No. As I said, it can only be a gift Mr. O’Hara. Otherwise I will not part with it. But if I decide to give it to you then you must organise the removal.”
    “Saving my pride are you?”
    “I admire you Mr. O’Hara, and though I am very sad at what has happened I am not acting out of pity.”
    “Pity? What’s wrong with pity? ‘A pity beyond all telling is hid in the heart of love.’ Do you know that line?”
    “No.”
    “Yeats. And he’s right: at the heart of deep love you’ll find a kind of pity. I can see you don’t agree.”
    “No. But I will consider the idea.”
    “There’s a lot to consider in that little idea. And thank you about the gate. Considering it, at least. Like I said, you’ve been a gentleman to me. I won’t forget.”
    “You’re Irish, Mr. O’Hara. Forgetfulness is not possible.”
    “And you’re German, Mr. Middlehoff. No doubt memory is a burden.”
    A sudden word-wound? No. A simple statement of fact. We say goodbye. I wait in the courtyard as he walks to his car and watch as with some difficulty he manoeuvres himself back into the driver’s seat as though he were again assuming a crouched position in a cage. His hands grip the wheel with an intensity that suggests he is more likely to pull it free from the dashboard than guide it through the various movements necessary to its journey through the main gates which, with a kind of perverse confidence, I keep open during the day. And once through those gates he must turn left towards the home where his past is waiting for him.

        THREE
    She is here. Harriet Calder is here. Mostly she is not. It is thus that I define my life, in major and in minor matters. I am. She is not. I drive carefully, for example. She does not. She drives, as she does most things, recklessly. She trusts her luck perhaps. In this we are very different. When she is not with me she is yet with me. She is my shadow-self, which I can neither catch nor detach myself from. She is the darker side of me.
    Harriet Calder is here! I breathe the same air as she. She is not my type. She is thin and what in youth seemed a pleasing coltishness now, in early middle age, seems like a disconcerting lack of femininity. Her height does not help. I am a tall man and though she is not as tall as I her habit of wearing her hair loosely pulled and piled and pinned on top of her head makes her appear closer to my height than is the fact.
    She is wearing a red jacket. It is, as I know, an old hunting jacket. Her legs are encased in narrow black slacks and, swinging from her shoulders, a rain cape, which resembles one of Bridget’s rain capes. What on Bridget looks merely useful, on Harriet looks daring. Harriet is a challenge and despite her slightly androgynous appearance