allowed yourself to conceive of immortality you were no longer free.
An inane Strauss jingle brought her to the door. âBrian Seaton!â
The emphasis on his surname hid her pleasure. Well, he couldnât be sure about that, but he enjoyed hearing she would know him anywhere, though it didnât bring back the old shine in her eyes. He should have telephoned first, but wanted to surprise her. In London you never called on anyone without warning, but he had acted as if Jenny was inferior, or out of familiarity, in his usual off-hand way, an attitude which over the years had become a habit. I suppose thatâs how they live in London, she might tell herself, just dropping in without any notice at all. Even in the old days she often hadnât known heâd be where he said he would be.
âYour mam phoned, to tell me you were on your way.â
âAnd here I am. Itâs good to see you again.â He made up a script about a man knocking at the wrong door, then starting a conversation with the woman who answered. She asked him in for a cup of tea, which led to a new life for them that neither had thought possible when they had got out of bed that morning, but which made sense when it happened. The change in their existences was so passionate that when they went away together the relationship turned into a disaster.
He had made no such mistake with Jenny, for she had known all about him, gave him that special weighing up which now showed much of the old self in her features. Her shorter hair was a mix of grey and dark, curling around the head instead of a long and vigorous band of black, making the face seem smaller, fragile and more vulnerable. She was pale, almost sallow, lines scored for a woman in her fifties, perhaps more so than on women of similar age he met in London who hadnât been through half as much. She was slim and middling in height from what he used to think of as tallish and more robust, though she could hardly be shapely after having had seven kids. âI was passing, and thought Iâd call.â
âIâm glad you have. Come on in.â
Everything you did was wrong, even more so when you thought well and long before doing it, but she seemed happy at him standing before her, the only sign a tremble of hands as he followed her in. âAn old friendâs come to see us.â
George had been forewarned perhaps, so as to hide the importance of what they had been to each other, though he didnât see why she should be diffident about it. George must have known of her life before they met, since sheâd had a kid already, but the hint that they had been more than acquaintances made Brian smile. Maybe she thought that the old adolescent intensity might even now flame up between them. At least the lifetime of suffering under Georgeâs misfortune hadnât broken her.
They entered the brightly lit living room. âBrianâs an old friend. He used to know mam and dad.â
Large windows showed a well trimmed garden, an umbrageous laurel tree in the far corner beyond a newly creosoted tool shed. In the room blue and white plaster birds were fixed in attitudes of purposeful flight along the wall opposite the fireplace, on the wing to a place George might well mull on in his despairing hours, glazed eyes following the direction of their long necks. With such wings, and being heavier than air, they would fly neither far nor easily, kept from a real sky by the ceiling.
He looked away as they came into the room, the open book face down, on knees kept together by his all-tech wheelchair. A palish glow on his face suggested that movement was hard labour, as if eternally sitting with the useless lower part of himself sapped his energy, took far more of his attention than in the days when he had walked with his shovel from mould to mould around the foundry thinking of the ale he would put down in the pub after knocking-off time.
The shine of his intensely