The Invitation

by Lucy Foley

He has lived in it for years as one might live in a hotel room for a week.

Hal knew, though, that this was the thing he wanted to do forever. He feared it, because he wanted it so badly. ‘I’ve lost it now,’ he says. ‘I can’t do it any longer.’ There is no answer at first, and he wonders if she might have fallen asleep. But then she says, ‘What happened?’ ‘The war,’ he says, because it is an accepted cliché these days – and also partially true.

‘You won’t have lost it. Once you’re a writer, it’s in you, somewhere.’

his mother’s distress as she watched the metamorphosis of her homeland into a dictator state. Now he does. A nonconformist to her core, and one who wore her national identity about her like one of her brightly coloured scarves, she must have felt it as a personal affront. And she must have felt powerless, too,

So I watch them jealously, the families. These are people who have been bombed out of their homes, who think, perhaps, that they have lost everything. I wonder if they will come to realize that what they have here is everything that matters.

Fame, he thinks, has a great deal to answer for. It rewards behaviour that should otherwise be stamped out long before adulthood.

Our bodies are weaker but our minds, perhaps, have acquired the necessary resilience.’

as a young man I gave up the engineering part – I had not the mathematical brain that was needed – and instead became rather good at flying the things.

He knows what she will do: sit, and gaze out at the sea. It holds a particular fascination for her, as though she never grows tired of looking at it. He thinks he understands. For one who grew up with it, as he did, it was – until recently – something like an old friend. For her, it is still a mesmerizing stranger.

He feels as though he has reconnected with life. He wants to wrest things from it. Incredible to think that such a short time ago he was quite content to drift through it.