The Town in Bloom (26 page)

Anyway, retrospection would get me nowhere – I was as bad as Lilian, searching for explanations of the inexplicable. Turn away from the past, think of those oil paints! There
had
been elderly people who had developed a real talent for painting. And was not the book I was finishing better than anything I had written before? Oh, if only I were younger in years! I hoped I believed in reincarnation. I hoped I had hundreds of lives ahead of me. Never would I opt for nirvana.

But even in this life there was still time. ‘The last act crowns the play.’ I had not quoted that to myself for many years. At eighteen I had equated the last act with marriage to Rex. What, at fifty-eight, did I equate it with? The sum total of life, no doubt, which must surely be the poet’s meaning. The catch about that was that, to me, no sum total would make death acceptable. Death is too much to ask of the living.

I was only two miles from home now, driving through the sleeping village. I thought kindly of my friends there.
But none of them spoke my language as the London friends of my youth did (except the young nuclear disarmer – and I did not quite speak his). Perhaps I would just
visit
Brice. It would be amusing to help Lilian with her room. And I ought to see more of Rex; it was outrageous that I should feel impatient with him. And I must keep in touch with Zelle – and was I not losing touch with Molly? Besides, there was so much in London to see, so much to study. I wanted to know more about the young … strange that though they laughed so loud, they so seldom smiled. Perhaps laughter was involuntary whereas smiling was part of an attitude to life. Fundamentally, so many of them were more serious than I and my friends had been. Youth was now conscious of the deplorable state of the world. In the ’twenties, only our private worlds had existed for us.

Now my headlights were shining along my white fence. That was to be my first oil painting, with the lane on top of the fence, and the green field on top of the lane … and the cycling child and the cows – I could easily make those up. No, I wouldn’t go to London just yet. Granny Moses must have her head.

Exciting to be here alone, in the small hours, under a brilliant moon … No other house in sight – that was what had first attracted me to the cottage. I was always a little proud because I never felt either lonely or scared. But I often felt astonished – astonished that I should be
allowed
to live here alone, to drive my own car, and sit up all night if I wanted to. Was I the only woman in the world who, at my age – and after a lifetime of quite rampant
independence
– still did not quite feel grown up?

It Ends with Revelations
The New Moon with the Old