Time At Last
(Set in London circa 1982, and a few years thereafter.)
Constance & Tim
Tim didn’t intend to fall in love with Jack, yet there he was, attentive without pressing him in any way. But now here was Constance with her young son August who couldn’t bear to be apart from her, so he came along instead of staying with one of her sisters, asked to mind the others. They’d walked over from her house so Constance could be with the Russians. She was in her element with them, he saw, speaking in her low voice as they laughed appreciatively. Tim spoke not a word of Russian, not that he could hear or rather that he could only hear their louder interjections, spurring her on while he told August one story after another from memory. And then one of them came over, leaning down and speaking in heavily accented English, “You must marry her! We’re all clear about this!” But August spoke up for his father. “Mummy’s married!” he protested. “She is,” Tim affirmed. “Now don’t fret, August. He only means that I should be your mother’s friend, one more person to protect her and help her take care of you and the others, as it’s too much even with her sisters.” August accepted this, as did the Russian, smiling, nodding, grateful that Tim had saved him from a scene with a child he hadn’t noticed. He went back to rejoin the others.
“It’s all decided then,” Constance said when she eventually made her way over, sitting at Tim’s side and letting August nestle in her lap.
Tim was reminded of how in weaving one inserts strands of color or lengths of metallic, shining composites in the warp, often left dangling at the edges. He thought of Jack hovering, and then of Constance in her light summer dress with a floral pattern, a dress that showed off her figure and went with her lightly tanned face. They were where the country surfaces in the city, and it felt all of a piece. Life is like this too. He sensed it would continue, their affair, but gaps can appear, as they sometimes lose interest. Tim was good at staying hopeful, even if he knew the other might hold out and let it end, suppressing regret thereafter. He didn’t think this with Constance, so hope continued. Still, he always feared the worst, wondering why anyone would bother with him. Why would she? He could see why, yet he wondered.
Jack is an object of speculation or vice versa, but Constance is that force of nature women can be. Children have it too, as August does with his mother. Tim liked August and admired the truth he voiced. It gave him a reason for ambivalence, which he felt at times. “I skirt close to passive, yet I’m alert as a cat with Constance,” he thought. He rose invariably to these occasions while Jack would likely only earn the love one feels for friends or close relations.
Constance, her thoughts
All things considered she preferred a dress. This went back how far? A long way, the frocks said. Quite an array, even now. Men dress uniformly from convenience. Only Tim’s friend Jack kept up with fashion. Tim’s concessions to it were minor, but he read the women’s sections the way other men follow sports. An eye for women, she felt, that began with how they dressed, signaling things of interest to an attentive person. And Tim was attentive, but Jack was even more so, Tim said. If he was Jack’s object, she was Tim’s, and he was also attentive to August, her youngest, most devoted-to-her child.
She saw that Tim appreciated Jack’s attention in the same way August appreciated his. In Tim, but not in her, it generated warmth. Tim could bathe in Jack’s attention without wanting to take it anywhere. Slow to heat up but once in motion, good for any distance she set: she liked that in a man, stretching out afternoons so she came and came, only pausing to cool down and talk. Amusing in the intervals — she liked that too. Her husband made love carefully, well enough to father children, and was perfectly solid. She’d never leave him, they both knew.
Of the four seasons, she liked spring best and the times in summer when spring reappeared — after rain, for example. She also liked terraces in gardens, and Russian poets, but only in outdoor settings, waving their cigarettes, laughing at her jokes and parodies of their mother tongue. She detested the heaviness of their novelists, their winters, their afflictions. Of novelists, she liked the Italians, some of them, and the English. She liked the clothing women wore and the way it found new places to be found, each a discovery, as was the case forever, and shedding them, informally yet choreographed for whoever took it in, knew her down to the bone, every nape and cranny.
She took to Russian but more to speak than read it, hear poets speak it. Italian should be sung, French spoken in the street, English left to do the work, keep up appearances, declaim from Greek from memory. Tim did this admirably. He knew no Russian, his French only passable, yet an ear for language, poetic, a kind of natural especially when loosened amorously. Never stupid, but rarely assertive — only about things like protecting them.
He meant it, she knew. She told the Russian so when he recounted it. As she said it, she saw why she felt free to give herself to Tim, his complete possession because then they bathed and went their separate ways, yet she only had to ring and there he was, the complementary man, a necessity for a wife like her, married to another, mother of his children. For what, she wondered, these dresses and etc., if not to shed for Tim, if not to wear for him so she could take them off and take him in? Because such a season has its run, like spring dwindling into summer’s parch or disappearing altogether. It went without saying she should take her fill. It was only good sense and Tim grasped this, as August did on some level too, this brief and earthly paradise.
Tim’s domestic life
Tim lived with his sisters — that is, he lived with one sister or another as part of her household or close enough to count as part of it. These arrangements suited him and them, so they continued.
His had always been an improvisational existence, but fueled with sufficient talent to earn a living. He and they didn’t see the point of his setting up a home when they had several, including a country place they used in season, anchored by a sister whose feelings for the bucolic led her to stay on in the colder months while the rest lived in town.
Tim never brought any outsider to these shared houses unless a sister suggested it, having met this or that friend or acquaintance in the outer world he inhabited when not at home, which was fairly often. None of his several rooms was very large, just big enough to add a small desk and bookshelves, his library spread across these domiciles and moved, if need be, with the flow of life therein. Bookstores figured in his household economy, so his own collection was less extensive than even he’d expected. Like weight and fitness, it came along with habitual modesty except when something more was wanted.
An unspoken pact among them was never to speculate about another’s progress through life, but only to take pleasure in any expressed satisfaction. This commitment to a buoyant domestic scene was in contrast to their lives as adolescents. It was what led them to set up on their own in ways that suited them, and to make places within an evolving milieu of flats and houses.
Writing is what we do, they sometimes affirmed, and they did it whether or not there was a ready audience, finding one in time owing to their talent for it. A reputation too for living visibly west or south of convention, not vastly so and in fact you had to know them to see it.
Women are better at this than men, Tim noted. It was like Constance sidling out of the frame and then sidling in without incident. His sisters were close, chirping like birds in feast day kitchens. He kept his distance but set the tables and cleaned up afterward with a sure hand, a legacy of a season in Bordeaux. It was his preferred kind of schooling, like learning from a woman how to lead her through their afternoon. Memorable, he thought, and memory is themes and embellishments. He set the tables in this spirit, then engaged with whoever set off his mind’s receptivity. Observation was the heart of this, but his mind was fertile, his remarks drawing laughter or nods of appreciation. He wrote like this, like looking at a field and imagining the harvest.
Jack goes for a walk
Jack could have lounged in the garden his mother’s house shared with others, but instead he walked to the park, uncertain of his destination, but it was pleasant and he sat part of the time and took it in. Why, he asked himself, was Tim so much his type and yet clearly he wasn’t Tim’s?
Not that Tim wasn’t a good friend. Not that he wasn’t appreciative when Jack gave him a book or invited him to lunch. He usually read what he gave and rarely declined an invitation, but he evidently felt no physical attraction to Jack, so Jack held back.
Tim’s entire family were writers. He occasionally dined with them, as one of his sisters had taken a liking to him, and he found them not precisely literary, but more like the characters one meets in literature, with a lot of joking and an awareness of things filtered through their formidable sensibilities, each a variation on the others, so they talked the way children talk if they live in close quarters, which they didn’t, in fact, but that sort of shorthand, not a private language but definitely a stamp or mark of the family, completely unlike his own. And this was part of it, his longing. Ironically, the sister might fall for him, but he lacked the switch some men have, a switch he sensed Tim had if he could only find it, but then it was clear he never had. Alone with the sister once, he pressed her a bit. “Catnip. Tim seduces them without meaning to. Self-absorbed the way writers are, but then they come around and he goes off with them for a weekend or sometimes longer, returns, gets back to writing.”
Jack was no writer. He read. He thought about things, preferred women to men as companions, as they knew immediately he was benign, and so were open, intelligent, amusing. They liked fashion and were made for it. Compared to Tim, Jack took some care about his clothes, but nothing outré, as he defined it. Women could wear almost anything if it made sense to them when they put it on, and this was true from childhood. Jack took his fashion cues from peers. Tim threw on whatever was at hand, but the hand that reached for it knew what it was doing, thanks to his unerring eye.
Like my late mother, Jack realized. Some know and the knowledge persists. Tim walked, bicycled, or used cabs in town, but he owned an old Lancia, bought while on holiday and maintained like anything else mechanical, like his bicycle or a sister’s kitchen appliance. The Lancia was part of Tim’s knowing, Jack thought. Constance was also a classic of her type. “I am no classic,” Jack admitted. A banker, he made decent money, had background, clubbable, but that was it. Tim’s sister didn’t hold this against him. Neither did Tim, yet he never attended to him as he did with Constance or the Lancia. Writing was one thing he did, and Constance and the car were two others “consuming his time but worth its expenditure,” as Tim’s sister summed it up.
Tim’s modest proposal
Over lunch, as always at Jack’s invitation, Tim leaned forward slightly, paused a moment, then launched into it. “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “You have that big house in Bayswater and I have a sister who likes you. What if you took her up? She’s undemanding. I think she’d like children, but then you look the part of a father, I would say, a banker, that house with its kids’ paradise of a garden. Women know things men don’t. I think houses lack spirit if they’re not around. And it’s not just for her sake that I’m asking. It would bring you into our family, our sister’s husband, a father. It’s certainly a better role in life than mine, a writer still living with his sisters, like Wordsworth although thankfully I don’t figure in their diaries nor do they dote on me. No, I was just born to it. You could join us, a good addition.”
“Have you lost your mind?,” Jack almost said, but caught himself as bankers are trained to do and considered the offer. Not exactly his line: this was the obvious objection, but French kings had stepped up despite the rumors, Cecil Beaton fell for that Swedish actress, Duncan Grant bedded Vanessa. So, clearly, it was possible.
He did like the sister. He saw that she was sweet on him, saw through him to find something more and Tim seemed to see it too, a sort of possibility he flirted with sometimes, feeling at sea in his mother’s house, unnaturally empty despite parties, diversions. That there were other ways to fill it he was aware, but too many Tatler profiles signaled “Be wary.”
When the trading day was over, Jack made his way home, writing the letter in his head. Artemis, but known as Tem, was the youngest. “Twinned but displaced,” she’d said of her and Tim. “We’re both orphans,” he thought. They all were, of course, but did she feel it more, raised mostly by her sisters and, like Tim, still sharing their houses? He imagined so.
No writer, but he wrote clearly, and strove in his letter to be open, not that he valued openness that much, but it seemed called for here. Who am I? in relation to her especially, or perhaps, who are we? As he wrote, he saw that Tim had found and flipped a switch, apparently waiting to be found, labeled “family,” like one of the tiny labels in the fuse box, written by his father before his untimely death.
The arc of his past relationships arose, crushes and his dislike of casual, relying on a destiny which left him with friends but otherwise unrequited. Tim, attentive to the nuances of others’ lives, seemed to move through relationships with a kind of Jane Austen logic. He noted this, “as it may subject me to satire.”
Artemis. Tim sometimes said her name in full, a slight awe to it, not unlike Constance when he said it with a nod in her direction, a shifting Mecca. Of his sisters, Tem was his favorite because “most like me, I suppose, well, not really but in ways we recognize, like finding the same things funny despite masses of difference and even incompatibility. We would make an ideal couple, but society frowns on it, so no.” His theory that profound difference made for happiness seemed rooted in his memory of his parents.
One kind of love
It was Monday when they’d had lunch and Tuesday when he mailed the letter. Saturday morning, Tem appeared, wheeling her bicycle into his front hall, then making them breakfast from what she found at hand, a breakfast of the sort a woman makes, Jack thought, as it reminded him of his mother’s.
What followed was seduction, he thought later. Jack was struck by how much she resembled Tim had Tim been a woman, a certain boyishness knowingly put to use and insight into the way he worked and how to bring out the parts that worked for her. This was repeated and repeated. In fact, she never really went home except to shift things incrementally to the house, and there wasn’t that much of it, as she lived minimally, being essentially a houseguest heretofore.
“We had better register ourselves before I whelp your bastard,” she said matter-of-factly at breakfast. He nodded, as the thought had also occurred to him. It was characteristic, he realized, of the piecemeal way she conducted her life, each day added to the previous one as if a plan guided it, as perhaps it did.
They sent out announcements and had a party. At work, the senior men stopped by, a bit surprised but visibly pleased by what they took as a sign of maturity, orthodoxy, the natural evolution of things to their older minds. A few eyebrows were raised, but Tem’s sisters took to him like a lost brother.
Gradually their household reshaped itself. They slept in separate rooms, but used Jack’s parents’ room to fuck as its bathroom had been done French as Tem put it once when they bathed together in its big tub. Soon pregnant, but not set back by it, nauseous, as some women are, she seemed to be made for it. A boy, she guessed, which was confirmed, and she worked up a scheme for their accommodation, him and his siblings, as she anticipated there would be. It was as Tim foresaw, Jack thought, how family has its own momentum, how one falls into useful roles like supporting it and staying alive so as not to orphan anyone prematurely.
Tem rethought the house for children at different ages. She loved its shared commons, walled off from the adjoining streets by their house and others. They split the shopping, as she liked to shop alone. She gave him tips on fruits in season while meat, fish, vegetables she rarely delegated.
On weekends, she studied the magazines and queried him on fashion. “I never thought about it,” she said, “but I’m your wife and need to look the part.” She also put the question to Tim and her sisters. They felt her instincts about clothes were sound, if warped by parsimony. All that vintage was a clue and now she could afford the new. “Classic,” Tim advised, and named some shops whose labels he remembered from the clothing Constance shed when they were together, as his visual memory extended to them. As he reeled them off, their sisters nodded while Jack made a list. The dresses Constance preferred lent themselves to Tem’s condition, which made sense as they shared it sometimes. Had Tim thought of that, Jack wondered?
Tim, Tem & Pen
Tim described his dilemma with Constance and her dilemma with him. Using the expression “horns of a dilemma,” Tem referred to the Minoan acrobat who leapt over the bull. “But who is the bull and where does she land? What happens next?” Tim asked. Tem replied that a dilemma is always an invitation to transcend, to reach a different ground.
“What do you owe Constance?” she asked. “I vowed to protect her and August,” Tim answered. Tem was unsure what this meant, but reluctant to press her brother, who was uncharacteristically ruffled. Yet just her asking seemed to calm him. “August and the Russian heard me make it,” Tim said. “The Russian repeated it to Constance, who affirmed it to him and then later recounted this to me in August’s hearing. It’s our one binding tie.”
“You’re like a knight,” Tem noted, “but the story is inverted. You have to find a sword and place it between you.” He looked at her. “But August?” August was older now, just as Tem was a mother of two. “Whatever you do,” she said, “you must protect him, as well.” It was on her mind, as some of Jack’s male friends were deathly ill now or dead.
Walking down from Tem’s, Tim heard a familiar young voice, looked left to see August and a woman who resembled Constance but wasn’t her. “This is my aunt Pen,” August said, unfailingly polite. “This is Tim, my mother’s friend.” She extended her hand and met his eyes. “Penelope,” she said.
“Constance has mentioned you,” she continued. “You’re a writer?” Tim nodded. “She said you’ve just published a novel and that it’s getting noticed.” Tim nodded. All this time, their eyes were locked on each other. Tim let her words fly by, nodding when she ended a sentence. He was struck by the similarities and differences from Constance. “Do you also speak Russian?” he asked. “I’m a classicist,” she answered. “I leave Russian to my sister.” Tim nodded. “I hardly know a word,” he said. “Do you live nearby?” she asked. “No, but my sister Artemis lives in Bayswater and I was visiting her.” Pen nodded. “What a lovely name! I’d much rather be a goddess than a muse.” Tim looked her up and down. “Penelope suits you. My sister is called Tem. We’re quite alike, so Tim and Tem, or vice versa, our whole lives.” She nodded, adding “Tim and Pen” as if trying it out.
“I have no particular place to go,” Tim said. “Would you like to walk back with me? We could have some lunch and you could meet her.” Pen nodded. “We were also just out walking. Constance is very busy with her new baby, so I took August. Did she tell you?” Tim shook his head.
He’d promised to fix Jack’s bicycle, so he and August set to work on that while Pen and Tem talked. August asked if Tim could fix his bicycle. He nodded. When she learned this, Tem invited them all back the following afternoon. “Give her your book, Tim” she said, and he fetched a copy. “Could you please inscribe it?” Pen asked. He did. “Walk with them to the park, Tim,” Tem told him, and he did.
Penelope, her thoughts
After she brought August back to Constance’s house, Pen took Tim’s book with her to a nearby café, where she opened it, and found and read his inscription:
They told me, Penelope, they told me you had wed.
They brought the bitter news to hear, but I remained in bed
and slept. Eventually I dreamt that you and I,
tiring the sun with loving, had set him down the sky.
A muse is a goddess to a writer, is she not? I believe so.
When their eyes locked, Pen imagined, they must have had the same thought. She liked it that he made no reference to her sister, nor asked her to bring her a message. That he and Constance had been lovers, she knew, although her sister never said so directly. The telltale glow of satiation gave her away.
“Pen and Tim,” she thought again. She liked that he used her full name, that he said it suited her. The irony of her sister’s name must be clear to him, but it was clear to her that his sensibility was wistful. Yet here it was, this bold inscription, flipping the dead Heraclitus on his head to make room for something new. Pen wondered suddenly if the babe was Tim’s. But in this sense Constance lived up to her name. Honour might be more fitting, rendering unto Caesar the occasional offspring, proof that their marriage stayed on its appointed rails, despite layovers in small towns. And it was over, Tim’s headshake told her.
“A muse is a goddess to a writer.” She liked that best of all, but admired his improvisation, only there because Artemis had prompted it as well as urging him to walk them to the park, listening and nodding as she talked, putting a hand on August’s shoulder at their farewell, his eyes meeting hers. “Tomorrow, then,” he’d said, and she’d nodded.
She turned the book over, looking at his photo, reading the description, the blurbs, and the brief profile. “A minimalist with real feeling,” one of the blurbs enthused. That seemed accurate.
“August told me you ran into Tim,” Constance said later. Pen kept his book out of sight, not wanting her to read the inscription. “He said Tim offered to fix his bicycle, so you’re going back tomorrow.” Pen nodded. “It’s so like him,” Constance said. “Thank you for taking August. The baby fussed all morning.” Her telephone rang and, answering it, she launched into Russian. Pen slipped the book into her bag, settled their visit with August, waved to her sister, who waved back reflexively, and departed.
It’s odd, she thought, that Constance was never affected by her lovers. They came and went, and she characterized them afterward in much the same way those writers did on the back of Tim’s book. Yet she liked him, Pen surmised, trusted him — with August, for example, who also liked and trusted him. Tim is like this, she felt, a friend with layers, as Constance might put it, but there were more, Pen believed. Tim sees this too, she told herself. He’d written as much.
Tem & Tim
“You ought to marry her,” Tem said. “I had the same thought,” Tim replied. He’d carried it back from the park, how he needed finally to secure what had been elusive, but now made sense in that way that things involving women and desire only could. Constance would be a sister, not a lover, and if Penelope would also be a lover at first, she would be much more, if the gods smiled on them, and August would have cousins to go with his sisters.
This flew by unsaid, but Tem knew his thoughts by the way they played across his face. “She has gorgeous eyes,” she said, and Tim nodded. He’d brought them back too. He glanced at the clock and calculated the hours and minutes until they would cross the park again.
“She likes Artemis,” Tim said. “She told me,” Tem affirmed. “She’ll have a goddess as a sister-in-law. You’ll marry a muse and have a young emperor as a nephew, not a son.” But Tim thought of August as August, as Constance was never in the cards. It was license only August’s father granted her, much as he tolerated her Russians telephoning at all hours. It stopped short of procreation, and this explained why she’d ceased to call. Otherwise, she’d have been pregnant long before, he guessed. Desire sparked it in women like Constance, but her marriage pulled that urge back into its orbit, her man the sun around whom she revolved, whereas he was just some outer planet, wobbling along without a second thought until she called and he put things aside and met her.
“Goodness, Tim, you never wobble!” Tem said, when he put this to her in summary, “but writers are dicey.” Even Pen would be wary if my book wasn’t out, but it is, Tim thought. Not yet bankable, but Pen would never marry a banker, at least not one like her brother-in-law, no matter how liberal. Still, would she marry a writer? And how was his inscription received? Odd that he just wrote it out, but rememberng and improvising were two of his talents. He only ever declaimed if irony was needed or he was asked for it. Like love, he thought, that combo, a little magnetism and the force field of another’s desire, first felt in his 16th summer, summoned by his lithesome tennis instructor, an acquaintance of Elizabeth, the oldest of his sisters.
“You fuck a good deal better than you serve,” she told him. The summer had the loping rhythm of one long afternoon after another. She was on the pill. The term began and they parted. His tennis was as bad as ever, but he’d acquired a reputation, Elizabeth said. “Don’t let it go to your head,” she added. He nodded. He’d liked bedding this woman, but their talk stayed with him. Bits of it found their way into his stories.
He could trace the route from her to Constance. Was it true? That Penelope appeared, that August introduced them, felt entirely new. “Yes,” he said aloud, but then his face clouded, “if she’ll have me.” Watching him all the while, Tem smiled at him. “Of course, she’ll have you. I saw this almost at the start.”
About Tim’s book
When she was finally alone, Pen opened his book again and read it, cover to cover. It was, as promised, minimalist but with feeling, a dialogue between a man and a series of women. It began and ended in media res, which made it ambiguous if one sought a denouement of some sort, but she felt this was likely true to life in Tim’s case. Also true were the implied inner lives of the conversing pairs, one constant and the others not, understandably, as they came and went while he moved through time in a manner that reminded Pen of the way finches were said to evolve, a little different at each season. He was quite young, she reflected, when the book opened, and steadily older as it progressed. That he was the constant and they were the variables was a good way of hiding her sister in plain sight. She did seem captured in the last section, although all was altered except small bits of her that only a sister or a lover would notice, buried in their dialogue with no reference to place, clothes, weather, etc., if one or the other failed to comment on it. No thought except what was said, unlike most novels that bore into heads and surface the meta burbling within.
It was funny, though, their back-and-forth. The man sometimes declaimed while introducing errors and variations, not always picked up by the other. Irony, she saw, was how he softened a prodigious memory for texts, and humor if the other could see the joke. If not, other things were remarked on, as he was attentive to the woman’s subjects and objects.
A theory worked its way across the narrative. A working theory, she added, that tried to make sense of the pairings as different species of desire and the means brought to them, the arrangements and their playing out, with talk as accompaniment to fucking, as the women mostly called it, while the man spoke openly of something more, perhaps a craving for it like a postcoital cigarette only it kept going, she noted, counting the interludes, and not a word about it except a stammering of affection as the woman realized the time and departed, so also a theory of time’s elasticity or how desire fits itself interstitially between the usual press of others. His attentiveness to the other in that space of time was total, and each was well attended to, certainly.
Was it autofiction? He didn’t deny or agree, but “a novel,” the publisher made clear. Nor did it suggest continuation, just the uncertainty of these affairs, conducted under others’ noses, likely. The last seemed the most desirous, funny about the men she frequented, their egos and foibles, always trying and failing to bed her, always given the slip. Only one had a real hold on her, but he was distracted, only ever pausing to mate.
“Constance,” she said aloud, but the dialogue was cagey, the other men Italian, complaining they can never tell who’s talking, while she laments that pasta is ruining her figure, not that her husband would notice. The man tells her she’s beautiful. Coming from him, it doesn’t seem banal.
Tim reflects
One way Tim organized his thoughts was to pitch himself forward in time and then look back. He did this now, faced with the interregnum in which he found himself, no longer summoned by Constance and as yet unsummoned or not yet summoning her sister. He felt his memory shifting to this fictional viewing platform, from which he caught a glimpse of one of Constance’s characteristic dresses that she filled so perfectly. Perfection, he thought, is a short-order agony for one dismissed from its company. Yet immediately he turned his gaze to Penelope’s eyes, surprised by the unexpected ease with which he did so, as if released from a succession of spells a series of desirous but ultimately elusive women had cast. “I am done with spells,” he told himself, but silently.
His editor had wanted to categorize his book as autofiction, but Tim resisted. Aren’t novels memoirs in disguise in any case, even the historic ones? So, a novel it was, a work of fiction by an identified writer who issued the usual disclaimer. And it was true that he’d taken care to shift things around, the events and traits and words. Yet reality has a way of skimming the underside of such accounts, like a shark one imagines is there, absent fin notwithstanding. The world is a latticework of women, the novel had it, joined by desire’s rise and fall. Strange then to think that Penelope was excepted, that they were excepted together from what was in the end a kind of befalling, like the creature in the birdcage in Eliot’s Waste Land epigram. Penelope was the opener of that small door or his conjurer.
How far had he cast himself? Far enough that there were children, he sensed, and even children of those children, looking to them as founders of their offshoot dynasty, separated at last from sisterhoods on both sides, although provisionally, such things being indivisible in reality, forces that move through time to a rhythm of their own, hence offshoot, like a tidal current, an estuary of some larger, fertile sea on which they were no longer adrift but looked out at it from the distance of their semi-detached realm.
Finding his way back, Tim telephoned: “I cannot wait.” As he walked down to the park, he thought how for once they desired at the same pitch, or was it tempo? Four hands, the senses in tune, attuned: it was thus when they met and knew that it was time.
“Time at last,” Penelope said.
Note: I visited the house in Bayswater in the early 1980s. That period in and around London gave me this story’s setting. The illustrations are mine except the photo above, taken from the web. I’ve always liked this model. Tim’s inscription riffs on William Cory’s “Heraclitus,” which appears twice in Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Knox Brothers (1977). She calls it “an inaccurate translation from the Greek…by an Eton schoolmaster to help his class…” When Constance criticizes Russian novelists, she’s thinking of the classics.
