Two is Lonely

On arriving at the cottage that same night we found a cable from Toby, very terse, saying Rachel was being put on a plane which would be landing at London Airport in the early hours of the following morning. There are either no words, or at least two thousand, to describe the discussions of the night . . . I met the plane with a sense of numbed inevitability. She has been with us ever since.

Now it’s 1973. David is nearly fourteen. Rachel, my unadopted daughter, is thirteen. And my second son, Andy’s and mine, Guy, is five. We live in Andy’s house-in-the-field, enlarged now to hold our curiously-constituted family.

It would be pleasant to be able to say that Chris, on his return from his wanderings, settled down with us and married Georgie, but he didn’t. True, he lived with her for a bit, but then took off again, to the Far East this time, after a series of shattering rows with his father. The last we heard of him he was living with a stone-age tribe in Borneo. Andy still can’t speak of him calmly and I still love him. So, more oddly, does Georgie, who, with her three-year-old daughter, lives with us, though officially she’s supposed to be renting Andy’s cottage. For me it’s like watching history—my history—repeat itself. She also refused an abortion, and wouldn’t allow us to locate Chris and tell him . . . Well, but at least she had us. And one day Chris will turn up . . .

For the rest: Whistler has married again. I’ve met her several times. She’s very sweet, as John said, not a ha’porth of harm in her. But although basically antagonistic to me, she was, when it came to the crunch, glad enough to let me keep Rachel, though I’ve never been given any legal security. Impossible for me to understand . . . We could never be friends.

When I married I sold out my share of the shop to Jo, and she moved herself and it to London, leaving the original as a branch with Georgie nominally in charge. Amanda is at boarding school and we see her every holiday, except when they go off to glamorous foreign parts. She is highly sophisticated and David finds her far too much to handle. He may catch up later, but at the moment all his brotherly devotion is for Rachel. He is what Toby would call quite a little mensch these days—my queer-fears have long since melted away, thanks largely to Andy.

Andy remains to some extent a mystery to me. Perhaps that’s the secret of our success. Closed doors have opened one by one, but not all of them by any means, and those remaining closed continue to intrigue me. The open ones have revealed a man whom I was entirely right to entrust myself to.

Terry died. He actually did die . . . It was poor mad Grace who wrote to tell me, through the police . . . Her strange letter struck an astonishing note of grief, a grief she apparently expected me to share. But for my part, instinctive relief mingled thickly with guilt, for hadn’t I ill-wished him? Andy pooh-poohed my unease, but years later, when I told John, he said matter-of-factly: ‘Yes, you probably helped to kill him. Happens all the time. Can’t be helped. Anyway, everybody better off now, specially him.’

John has become a name to conjure with. He roamed about the world with his dwindling hippie band (he took over their leadership when Chris left) picking up folk-songs all over the place, and suddenly burst upon the pop world from San Francisco . . . I believe he even had his budding entourage of groupies before he firmly shook them off. Somehow he has managed to remain a loner, even in that claustrophobic world, and basically I found him unchanged. Of course the look of contempt he feared in David’s eyes has not appeared; rather there is a gleam of devoted admiration. David is only too delighted to brag at school that John is his friend.

David is normal, as normal as any fourteen-year-old can be in these peculiar times. Even Rachel’s ill-timed advent, and Guy’s a year later, didn’t unduly upset him—I think because he was too absorbed at the time in coming to terms with his adventure, which was traumatic for him and for us. It really is tempting to go on at length about the children, all so different and so exciting . . . Guy promises to be the cleverest, Rachel is the strongest, the most beautiful and the most temperamental; but David and I went through most together and for me he will always be the one I am closest to.

And Toby? Toby is still in the kibbutz. He writes occasionally, I mean he writes to me, but of novels there has been only one in six years, a strange introverted book with a kibbutz setting which I think hardly anyone read except me. It was not very good; it was as if his mind had been on something else when he wrote it—irrigation, perhaps . . . That novel freed me as nothing had until then, and I can view his proposed visit next year to see his daughters (Rachel has been annually to see him) with reasonable equanimity, or at least, I could, were it not for the appalling fear that he will have grown up and want to take her from me . . .