A Landing on the Sun by Michael Frayn & 9780571249275

Author:Michael Frayn & 9780571249275 [Michael Frayn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571249275
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2023-01-22T00:00:00+00:00

– 16 –

I shift this extraordinary document across to the stack of papers I have read, then get up and walk about the room. I am rather shaken, I have to confess.

An audience. That’s all he needed for everything to come pouring out. All those words he had hoarded for so long and released so grudgingly. An audience he couldn’t see, like the priest beyond the grille, the analyst behind your head. Even Summerchild, in all his discretion.

She has put little red ticks at intervals down the margin, has this unseen audience, as if it were an undergraduate essay. ‘Good!’ she has written, next to Summerchild’s claim to be happily married. ‘Yes!’ she agrees eagerly, beside his conclusion that the issue needs to be settled by a policy decision. He has offered madness in the form of a minute; she has accepted it in the form of an examination answer.

Outside the window, down in the reasonable world below, the light among the trees in the Park is becoming golden. The week’s work is over. People are walking towards their leisure arrangements; taking each other’s hands; sitting on the hard, dry grass; beginning the evening together. They are being happy. Being happy and not knowing it yet. Being alive and never quite realizing.

What Summerchild is doing, now he has someone to do it for, is living the last dozen years of his life, which have gone by without his quite taking them in. He’s being retrospectively happy. He wasn’t anything much at the time. He was depressed – I saw him coming slowly up the lane, I heard the reluctance of his words to face the world. And now he realizes that his slowness was a pause for savouring, that his silence was full of unfelt feeling. He makes another leap, now he’s started, and sees three particular candle-flames, three particular shadows, all charged with particular feeling. But I know what he saw at the time – three mere candle-flames and three mere shadows. He ate his dinner and said nothing, played his violin and felt nothing, worked when the lights came on again and went to bed without another thought.

And now it all comes bursting out. Happiness. Because I don’t take his manoeuvre at the end seriously – his request for guidance. This is afterwards, when he has got up from the couch, when he’s making a date for the next appointment and putting on his overcoat in the hall, returning to his ordinary guarded self before he walks out on to the street. Anyway, we’ve all written minutes offering our masters a choice of options when we and they both know perfectly well there’s only one.

Oh yes, he’s happy, all right. Now. I suddenly find all those years of dragging footsteps and dragging monosyllables a tiresome indulgence, given the circumstances of his life. He’s like a country gentleman who insultingly dissimulates his wealth beneath ragged pullovers and patched elbows, while the rest of us are struggling to conceal our penury beneath well-cut suits we can’t afford.

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