The Garrick Year by Margaret Drabble

Author:Margaret Drabble
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-09-11T16:00:00+00:00

8

I WOKE in the morning with a hangover: I had had three hours’ sleep, and as I stumbled out of bed to pick up hungry Joseph and give him the one feed a day which he was not yet taking from a bottle, I felt the weary debt for such a little flutter of vanity, for so mild an excursion onto forbidden ground. I looked down at my baby’s cheerful sucking face, and I smiled mechanically, and he dropped the nipple to smile back, and I thought, You fool, if you knew how little I meant to smile at you. The next few days I spent in a grey and yellow fog: nothing could waken me, I walked around as though I were asleep, with my head heavy and my arms hanging as though they were too great a weight for me to carry around with me. Looking back, it seems amazing that I should for so little reason have felt so much: such lifelessness, such long hours, such a fear of waking up, such boredom. I had felt bored before, but only occupationally. Now I felt bored with my life. I look back on that week, and on the first time I went out with Wyndham, with amazement: so much passion, it now seems, and so little cause. When I was a girl such an encounter, such an episode, would have meant nothing to me, I would have taken it in my stride, with gusto, with tears and enjoyment. But now, after more than three years of forbearance and patience, and after a strong diet of David, which must have in some way enlarged my capacity for serious emotion, I felt both far more and far less. I felt far more desire, with far less hope.

I look back on that first outing, and it has a strange pickled charm, like a fly in amber, or a sour black walnut, or a dead brown rose that I once saw trapped in a block of cut glass in an antique shop in Venice. Wyndham did not call for me at my house: he thought better of it, and picked me up at an anonymous meeting point by a post office. I liked his car: it was a maroon Jaguar, and it seemed to be made inside of solid polished wood. He took me to a restaurant somewhere in Wales. I had never in my life been in Wales before, and it was a satisfactory slap in the eye for David, to be there without him. We drank a lot and stared at each other over the food, and he told me many stories about his life: he told me about women, all sorts of women, and I liked him for the way that he seemed to have been ready to have a go at anything. His stories all had a hit-and-miss nature, and the naive and ready way that he rushed into them, willing to capture my attention by any extravagance,

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