The Autumn of the Ace by Louis de Bernières

Author:Louis de Bernières [de Bernières, Louis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473565036
Publisher: Random House

34

Daniel to Rosie

127 Ellis Street

Penticton BC

Canada

17 November 1957

Dear Rosie,

Many thanks for your letter and your gift of the Motoring Annual, which I did indeed find extremely interesting. It is a fine book for browsing when one is supposed to be doing something else. Everything changes so quickly these days that it is difficult to keep up with all the developments, but I do know that I will hate it if all cars eventually drive themselves! I don’t know why, but I do love motoring. Perhaps it’s because it is so much fun to be able to proceed faster than one could ever hope to run.

I am indeed sorry to hear that Bertie is turning out to be a poor father and husband. If you can’t deal with it yourself, perhaps you should ask Fairhead or Ottilie to have a frank talk with him, but all the same I think it is down to you as the one parent with whom he has a relationship to set him straight. I know this kind of thing takes great courage, but courage is one thing, dear Rosie, that you have never lacked.

You ask me if my foot is all right. Well, I still get stabs of pain from the bases of my hacked off toes, and I will always have a limp. To be honest, the worst thing is the recurrent nightmares I have to suffer. I had one in particular for years after the Great War, which was of an endless procession of the dead, and now I have new ones from the last. I wake up suddenly just as the chisel cracks through the bones. I dream about what happened to Odette and poor Violette as well, and there is another one about a time when I was caught in a ferocious tempest whilst flying my Lysander over France.

It is clear that you are not contented with the path that your life has taken, and you ask me if I am contented with mine. No, I am not. I am not contented by my past, glorious and exciting as that has sometimes been. I am not contented with what happened to us, and nor am I happy with the fallout from it. However, I only have a few years left to me now, and I am learning to draw the maximum pleasure and interest from what little remains. I don’t like to be on my own, because I become melancholy, but when I have company I am as vivacious and good-humoured as I ever was. Wavey Davey and his wife often have me round to their extraordinary cabin, which is in the middle of an orchard, and made of vertical lodge poles, and Wragge and Millicent often have me round to theirs, which used to be a house of ill repute, it is said.

I have no theories about the meaning of life or God’s purpose, or whatever. I live for the love between friends, and for the interesting things I find to do, that’s all.

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