Dream Children by A. N. Wilson

Author:A. N. Wilson [Wilson, A. N.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2013-07-10T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

Oliver also lay awake, but with the sleeping form of Bobs in his arms. He loved the smell of the child. There is a point in the physical development of any human being when the odours given off by its body become repugnant. This point perhaps would soon come to Bobs. There was a certain event of which he lived in dread; he feared that when it happened, he would be unable any longer to hold her in his bed as he did now, savouring the smell of her hair, and the hot, lithe body as it lay, clad in her pyjamas, in his arms. Dogs and cats and horses retained the sweetness of their own smells, as children did; even their farts were sweet by comparison with the rank odours produced by adults. As for grown-up sweat, and grown-up breath … How could any pair of adults wish to share a bed? (This was a matter which had never cropped up with his fiancée, and he hoped to deliver it, as he was able to deliver so many other injunctions to that obedient young woman, as a fait accompli. But all in good time.)

He kissed the sleeping head of Bobs, and the sweatiness of her brow and head, that fever which all young children have in sleep and which was not symptomatic of unhealthiness, made him tingle with physical love. It was extraordinary that a dream child, the dream child, who had been inside his head for upwards of twenty years, should have become incarnate for him. He knew no greater joy than he knew now, and no greater sorrow, for he had made up his mind, if his notebooks had indeed been read by another member of the household, that he would commit suicide.

Aware of the devastation which this would cause to his beloved, he was plunged into a tormented conundrum, unable yet to decide whether he should die in absolute solitude and selfishness, or whether the kindest thing would be to take Bobs with him, to kill her first, and then himself.

The logic of the position was inescapable. While the women were under the impression that he was engaged on a great philosophical tract, he had, for a number of years, been keeping a detailed journal of his love for Bobs. The notebooks must have run to at least half a million words, though not every page related directly to Bobs. He had typed up a hundred and fifty thousand words or so, and these versions he kept in a locked black metal deed box under his bed. It would have required a crowbar to open this box. Yet, while he kept this more polished version so tightly secured, he had, with a recklessness which he now regarded as insane, been accustomed to keep the written notebooks on his shelves, arranged by number, upright, together with his philosophical notebooks, offprints, scrapbooks and other academic jottings. It had seemed safer to hide them by not hiding them,

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