The Wonder Lover by Malcolm Knox

Author:Malcolm Knox
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books
Published: 2015-03-27T00:00:00+00:00

15

Our father came home and went through his motions. He left us, and went to us. He pursued his regimen with increased vigour and diminished attentiveness. We could sense that the stories he told us were not holding his interest. We did not know why he was only able to impersonate himself. Our mothers told us he was no longer a young man, and we mustn’t expect too much of him. Sandy said it with absentminded pity—she, by corollary, was not a young woman either. The scarred woman said it with tender sympathy, and the foreboding that she might one day have to raise us on her own. Paulina, the second mother, spat it out with contempt. But it was the usual contempt. ‘He will be dead before you are grown!’ We thought she didn’t mean it.

Paulina had always been the most difficult of the three when it came to accommodating the arrangement, which was unexpected because it most suited Paulina to be living in parallel with him, Paulina who had demanded, from the start, that he maintain his base in his home city and not live with her. In a way, the whole arrangement (was it an arrangement? An accommodation? An evasion? A life-sized screw-up?) had been set in train by Paulina’s demands for parallelism, and yet it was Paulina who placed it under the most constant emotional strain.

Since those heady days when she had sold her first novel, Paulina’s career as a writer of fiction had not gone as she had hoped. Although she seldom talked about it, or not with him anyway, our father knew she was labouring under a burden of disappointment.

This was hardly due to a lack of success. Wonder of Wonders, which had prompted her first intimacies with our father, had achieved respectable sales and unqualified critical praise. With her second novel, she had graduated from ‘a writer to watch’ into ‘one of the distinctive voices of our time’. With her third novel, which won a number of prizes, she was ‘at the height of her powers’ and ‘one of the must-read writers today’. Her sales, while never those of the bestselling megafauna, were sufficient to license her to quit full-time journalism and tell lies for a living.

After nearly ten years as our father’s mistress, Paulina was the subject of the kind of profiles that she used to write. Of course there was no mention of him, though other lovers were implied or named. She was successful beyond her expectations, true, but success had failed to bring her what she thought it might, that is to say, peace of mind. Ambition and resentment had grooved such powerful habits in her, such driving forces, that literary success only intensified her focus on newer, higher objects of envy. Whereas ten years earlier she had fuelled herself with hatred for third-rate novelists getting published ahead of her, for her employers at the newspaper, and for certain people in her personal past against whom she would wreak revenge

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.