twenty-six

“Determined to do everything myself, I turned independence into a weapon. I thought of it as a strength, but it was a faultline along which I fractured. I resisted taking other things too – love, advice, knowledge – even if it was good for me, even if I wanted it. Like my troubled relationship with food, which always felt like too little or too much, this refusal – a fear that merging with another would result in the loss of my hard-won self – was old and it ran deep.

II: River Esk, North Yorkshire, 1920

“Lost, along with the privacies that form the real biography, never recorded or known; then countless inner adjustments we make to be in the world, to accommodate our loneliness, our ache for reunion.

III: River Westbourne, London, 1951

“What was the city to me? It was rain, narrow streets with lovers hiding in dark bedrooms opening their clothes to each other for the first time, the warmth, the shock, the gratitude. It was snow on the black roofs, the blush of light as it fades, lamps coming on across the square. The chairs carried out to the garden, the table too small for dinner, plates balanced on laps and left in the grass.

IV: River Orwell, Suffolk, 1984

“At the back of the shop, Peter sat at a large table, the Anglepoise leaning over him, as if searching for errors in his work. He heard the front door open, with its bell on a hinge, and a voice call out:

‘On Amsterdam Island, it’s 4:01 p.m.; in Perth, it’s 11:01 p.m.; in Alert, it’s 10:01 a.m.!’

He looked up. Thank God. She was home.

For, essentially, it is love that we are talking about here; love for the better life that could be real for all the people; love for the greater possibilities of the future that are being murdered in the present by short-sighted leaders; love for the greater way, a higher justice that

sits in the land like a wise and invisible god; love for better breathing in the beggar and the basket-weaver; love for women who bear all the suffering and wend their ways to deserted marketplaces and who create such small miracles of survival out of the bitter dust of the dying age; love for the children who grow up under a generous sun and who do not know just how distorted and blood-ridden are the futures they will inherit, who play in the streets and at their games while poison and despair gather about them and hover over their heads like the angels of death; love for the regeneration of a people who deserve so much better and who never seem to get any justice or many good days or much hope on this round earth which glows like a miraculous dream in space to the astonished gaze of astronauts.