Free Damage by Josephine Hart Page A

the time but with what care and kindness and love he did what I asked.
    ‘I am now going to have a bath. Perhaps you would stand outside the door?’ And he did. I bathed, slipping under the water again and again, knowing with glorious, triumphant certainty that I would live.
    In Henrietta’s baby-pink room I dressed in the jeans and shirt someone had packed for me, then I went down the stairs into my new life.
    What is there to say of funerals? They are all the same and each one is unique. They are the ultimate separation, the ultimate letting-go. For which of us would willingly join the body in its coffin in earth or fire or water? Life is usually loved more than our most sacred love. In that knowledge lies the beginning of our cruelty and of our survival.
    Aston had loved me more than life itself. That was his destruction.
    Over the years, these events followed. Some of them I’ve already told you. My parents divorced. I went to college in America. Then I came to England and became a journalist.
    If all this has been presented to you in a flat voice, that’s because the truth of a life can never be told. I send you a journalist’s report. Some photographs would complete it.
    My story has taken only a night to report to you. It has taken thirty-three years to live. The dailiness of it all fades away — others fade away. So few pages for Aston’s life! In your life how many pages for me? The external tale of a man’s life can be turned by any journalist into an article or two. And even after years of research by a biographer can only be extended to a book that can be read in two or three weeks.
    And so here is my story, on a few pages. The map of my journey to you. Not to explain myself to you. That is unnecessary. But as one would show a photograph to one’s beloved, and say, ‘That’s how I was then,’ and smile at the lost creature of childhood. My ‘photograph’ elicits tears rather than smiles, but the creature is lost either way.
    The dawn is coming. I’m tired. The type looks cold and dark on the white page …
    Anna”
    It was delivered to my office the following morning. It was marked ‘personal and confidential’ and thereby drew some furtive glances from my secretary. Anna was right. It was a map. That was all. A gift I would treasure. I had known her the first moment I had seen her.
    I went for a short walk, touching the letter in my pocket as I went over its contents in my mind.
    Mean thoughts came to me. Perhaps her terrible tale was told in order to furnish her with an excuse for her suggested arrangement of marriage to Martyn and a life lived profoundly also with me.
    She spoke of arrangements. Why didn’t I examine some possible arrangements myself? Divorce Ingrid. Marry Anna. Martyn is young. He will get over it. And what of Ingrid? It had never been a passionate marriage and she had great reserves of strength. She had her large network of friends. She would survive. Sally too could cope well. After all, what I contemplated was a commonplace cruelty. The only unusual aspect was Martyn’s relationship with Anna.
    My career would be damaged, certainly. But it could weather the storm. I was not so ambitious that my career would count for very much, if I had to choose between a public life and a life with Anna.
    But Anna had said she would not marry me. Oh, but she will, she will, I told myself. Visions of Anna and me as man and wife — breakfasts together, dinners with friends, holidays together — flooded my mind. I felt sick. The visions had a hideous incongruity. It wouldn’t work. We were made for other things. For needs that had to be answered day or night – sudden longings – a strange language of the body. An inner voice cried, ‘Anna won’t marry you’. And she was right. Her arrangement was pure. No one would suffer. The surface could remain exactly as it was. Ingrid and I, Sally, Martyn and Anna, each of us continuing along our chosen path.
    After all, I had lived a life