She Read to Us in the Late Afternoons by Kathleen Hill

Author:Kathleen Hill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Delphinium Books
Published: 2017-07-26T15:25:10+00:00

The unlived life was the shadow against which our actual lives trembled and shook, the shadow that revealed the color and shape of what we had. We’d been talking, Diana and I, of our own fear—and the fear of so many others—that we alone were incapable of love, that we alone were excluded from the feast of life. I remembered my own terror when I was still young that books would deprive me of ordinary joys and sorrows, that my incessant reading disguised a fear of striking out. But here I was, so many years later, and it was once again the book Diana and I were reading together that was bringing in the news. Looking back at the two of us from some imagined point in the future, I could see that it was these moments together that had themselves been what my dream had named the pearl of great price, the life we’d actually lived, the pages we’d turned together these many afternoons.

V

There were days when I would arrive and Diana would say she was a little tired, would I mind if she put her head down on the pillow of the sofa while I read. She would tell me that if she fell asleep I was to let her know. She would close her eyes, then, and after some time had gone by without any sound in the room except that of my own voice droning on, when I had just decided she had probably fallen asleep and was asking myself what I should do, suddenly there would be a splash, as with a whale rising from the deep, and she would exclaim that this was a remarkable passage, what he had to say about his mother’s refusal of a kiss and Albertine’s displeasure was absolutely accurate, they both drew from the same source. Or, instead, in a different mode, she might suddenly, vigorously, declare that she didn’t believe a word of it, that here he had taken a wrong turn.

But one afternoon, when she was feeling unwell enough to have remained in bed and I was sitting in a chair in her bedroom, a silence continued longer than I had ever remembered it. I was reading the passage in which the narrator hears Albertine’s window flung open in the middle of the night and, in a fit of anguish, paces up and down in the corridor outside her room, vainly hoping that the sound of his footsteps will attract her attention. I continued to read on, but this time Diana did not stir. Facing me, on the bureau, were photographs of Lionel and Jim. A Blake engraving hung on the wall nearby. Beyond the room stretched the long hallway lined with books and at one end the OED on its stand, which I had often consulted when we weren’t sure of a word. The apartment was moving from light to dark, and when my voice came to a tentative halt I knew I was sitting in the silence that surrounded Diana every night when she turned off the lights.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.