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January 20 - February 12, 2025
One of the reasons that Olivia Keeling had made such a success of her career was that she had developed the ability to clear her mind, and so beam in her considerable intelligence on one set of problems at a time. She ran her life like a submarine, divided into watertight compartments, each impregnably sealed from the others.
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The days slipped by, cloudless, hot, long and idle, filled with only the most aimless of occupations. Swimming, sleeping, strolling down to the garden to feed the bantams or collect the eggs, or to do a little harmless weeding. She met Tomeu and Maria, who appeared quite unruffled by her arrival and greeted her each morning with broad smiles and much handshaking. And she learned a little kitchen Spanish and watched Maria make her massive paellas. Clothes ceased to matter. She spent her days with no make-up, slopping around, barefoot, in old jeans or a bikini. Sometimes they ambled up to the
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One day, she was alone. Cosmo had gone down to the town to collect the papers and his mail and to check up on his boat. Olivia lay on the terrace and watched two small, unknown birds flirting together in the branches of an olive tree. As she idly observed their capers, she became aware of a strange sense of vacuum. Analysing this, pinning it down, she discovered that she was bored. Not bored with Ca’n D’alt, nor with Cosmo, but bored with herself and her own emptied mind, standing bare and cheerless as an empty room. She considered this new set of circumstances at some length, and then got up
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They had gone. She had gone. Olivia, in her beautiful chestnut-brown coat, with the mink collar turned up around her ears, and the little bunch of aconites clutched in her hand. Like a child. Penelope was filled with sadness for her. Your children never stopped being children. Even when they were thirty-eight and successful career women. You could bear anything for yourself, but seeing your children hurt was unendurable. Her heart went with Olivia, heading back to London; but her body, tired now and weary from the day’s activities, took her slowly back indoors.
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Nancy, staring at the driving wheel, felt tears rush to her eyes. She bit her lip. ‘Of course I’m upset. Nothing is so upsetting as family rows.’ ‘Family rows are like car accidents. Every family thinks, “It couldn’t happen to us,” but it can happen to everybody. The only way to avoid them is to drive with the greatest care and have much consideration for others.’
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The wind had dropped to a fresh breeze, scented by the damp mossy smell of gardens soaked by rain. It was a smell loaded with nostalgia, and for once Penelope found herself caught off-guard, and was suffused with a mindless ecstasy that she had not known since she was a child. She thought of the last couple of years, the boredom, the narrowness of existence, the dearth of anything to look forward to. Yet now, in a single instant, the curtains had been whipped aside, and the windows beyond thrown open onto a brilliant view that had been there, waiting for her, all the time. A view, moreover,
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Cold feet, Sophie had always called this dropping of the heart, caused by an impetuous action suddenly regretted.
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For Penelope, it was an extraordinary time — a time of reawakening, as though, for longer than she cared to remember, she had been only half alive. Now, day by day, her inner vision cleared, and her perceptions were sharpened by a new awareness. One manifestation of this was the sudden significance of popular songs.
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She said, ‘What will happen?’ ‘How do you mean?’ ‘What will we do?’ ‘Continue to love each other.’ ‘I don’t want to go back. To things as they were before.’ ‘We can never do that.’ ‘But we have to. We can’t escape reality. And yet I want there to be tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow and to know that on all those tomorrows I can spend every waking hour with you.’ ‘I want that too.’ He sounded sad. ‘But it’s not to be.’
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‘I do try not to be selfish. I remind myself of the millions of women in the world who would give all they had to be in my shoes, safe and warm and fed and with all my family about me. But it isn’t any good. I just feel resentful because I can’t be with you all the time.
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To receive love, she must remain a woman prepared to give it, otherwise she would end up as a bitter and lonely old lady, with a cutting tongue and probably not a friend in the world.
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