Lacrimae rerum. Oh yes, indeed, thinks Oliver. Admittedly, run-of-the-mill distress such as he has in mind is hardly on a par with the fall of Troy, but nevertheless the language seems apt, and a curious kind of solace. He allows the words to float, and one afternoon he lets them fill his monitor also, in many different colors and fonts—red, purple, yellow, green, bold, italic, Symbol, Tahoma, Times New Roman, you name it. He shuffles them up and moves them around.
Sandra, crossing the room at one point and glancing over his shoulder, says, “What on earth are you up to?”
“Doodling,” says Oliver. He clears the screen. “Right. Now, am I doing the Rotary Club job or are you?”
That photograph is back in the landing cupboard. Glyn does not wish or intend to look at it again. He might as well destroy it, but the destruction of archival material offends his deepest instinct. Let it lie there.
Glyn works, amid this tide of paper—books, periodicals, offprints, maps. He reads and writes, he marshals information, he interprets and reinterprets. Even when he takes a break he is pondering the route of a canal, the advance of a railway; as he makes a cup of coffee, river systems are imposed upon the kitchen counter; as he walks to the shop to buy a newspaper he is considering connections and survivals.
But every now and then this detachment fails him. He is flung inexorably into contemplation of other things. That day, above all. The day he returned in the evening to this empty house. He moves through the day again and again, and at the end he sees what he saw then. The sight is the same as ever it was, except that it is informed by new wisdoms, and he looks differently.
Glyn knows now that he has to find a new way of living with Kath, or rather a way of living with a new Kath. And of living without her, in a fresh, sharp deprivation.
Penelope Lively, The Photograph
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