The Year of the End by Anne Theroux

The Year of the End by Anne Theroux

Author:Anne Theroux [Theroux, Anne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Icon Books Ltd
Published: 2021-09-15T00:00:00+00:00


Chapter 9

July

Sunday 1st July

Saw Lord of the Flies.

In this new film version, the shipwrecked schoolboys who become savages were played as American military cadets. It wasn’t as good as the black-and-white film Peter Brook made in the sixties, but it conjured up that question about human beings – are we intrinsically evil? – which blasted through my head like a vacuum cleaner, disposing for a while of the cobwebs of self-pity. Don’t worry, I have no intention of pursuing this one or even hinting at an answer, but by chance the month begins and ends with William Golding, who thought we were.

It was a hot summer. By July, the garden, pretty in May and early June, with the wisteria and clematis in flower, was parched and the white roses arching over the path had mildew. Normally at this time of the year I would be looking forward to Cape Cod, hunting for beach clothes in the summer sales, working long hours at my editing machine to earn the surge of liberation which comes when the jumbo jet breaks through the clouds and the drinks trolley clatters in the aisle. There was no flight booked to the States this year, though I hoped Paul might want me to visit him – or better still, might visit me. After all, the six months were up.

He was travelling again. Letters and postcards arrived regularly, from San Francisco, Australia, Tahiti, Fiji and Hawaii – but never from Los Angeles, where he had said the other woman lived. Perhaps she was no longer in the picture. He assured me that he loved me, missed me and wanted us to be together. I chose to believe him, deliberately not asking myself ‘Why doesn’t he do something about it?’ The answer was too frightening to contemplate.

Why didn’t I do something about it? I could have insisted on a meeting, said ‘I want to see you, I must see you.’ We would have met, hugged and laughed as we had done in April. Then he would have left again. And so the seesaw would continue – the elation of meeting and loving and then the thud of departure. Paul’s modus amandi.

Freud believed that love and work are the driving forces of our lives. I have found work more constant. More controllable too. Presumably Freud wasn’t thinking of a nine-to-five job in the office, but even that has its advantages. Getting a job had lifted my dejected spirits on two occasions in my life. The first was in Singapore when Marcel was small and I believed that I had blown my chances of success in the world for ever and become a downtrodden housewife like my mother. I was offered a job teaching English to Chinese students at Nanyang University. It was language teaching, not literature, but I was called a lecturer and immediately felt bigger and better. Three years later, back in England, after a few months of nappy-washing my self-esteem plummeted to drudge level. I applied for teaching jobs and was rejected.



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