Free The Astrologer's Daughter by Rebecca Lim Page B

the Crown, Dean of St Paul’s. Secret marriage (12 children!!) ended political
career. Wife died of childbirth.
    ‘Well, that would be right,’ I mutter, disgustedly, ‘dying of childbirth. That’s
something to look forward to, as a woman. Why couldn’t Dalgeish have given us Stevie
Smith, or maybe Yeats or Auden or Whitman like some of the others? Even that guy
who didn’t punctuate enough and loved himself sick some alliteration…’
    ‘Gerard Manley Hopkins?’ Simon interjects dryly.
    ‘Yeah, him. I could just about understand him . But she always saves me the poems
and plays written in 400-year-old English. Crap. Not doing it.’
    ‘She saves them for me, too, remember?’ Simon says, easing his car into a service
lane, still peering up at the buildings as we roll along slowly. ‘Just read one out.
That’ll be the one, then we will—’
    ‘ You will .’
    ‘—build the talk around it,’ he finishes, sighing.
    When I say nothing for an entire block, he tries again. ‘There will be themes…’
    ‘And shit.’
    ‘ Themes we…’
    ‘ You. ’
    ‘…can pull out of it— you’re very argumentative, did you know that? —and maybe discuss
in more depth.’
    Conscious that I’m pouting like a toddler but I can’t help myself, I stab my finger
blindly into one of the pages and mutter:
    If they be two, they are two so
As stiffe twin compasses are two,
Thy soule the fixt foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the’other doe.
    ‘Oh, the metaphysical poets,’ I snap. ‘If someone compared me to a compass , I’d fucking
drop them.’
    Simon slows the car and turns to me. ‘I would have picked that one, too,’ he replies
evenly, and I can tell how hard he’s trying to be patient because he’s not patient—I’ve
seen him in action reducing debating hard-arses like Catherine Dinh to tears. ‘It’s
the best of the bunch, A Valediction forbidding mourning .’
    ‘They’re all about love,’ I snarl, ‘or God, or loving God. Not in the mood, quite
frankly.’
    ‘This one was probably about his wife,’ Simon replies absently, pulling up the handbrake
as the car shudders to a complete halt. ‘I’ll need to look into that. The whole secret
marriage angle.’
    ‘Angle?’ I parrot, glancing out the window, distracted by the official signage and
all the blank, black windows that allow only the looking out of, not the looking
in. We’re here. Then it suddenly strikes me; what I’m groping for, in my head.
    ‘ Compass ,’ I say.
    Simon looks askance at me. ‘Sorry, I thought we’d moved on from the whole compass
thing.’
    But I always play them, games of association: This word leads to this word leads
to this word. Words are the only currency I have too much of. Simon has reminded
me of my mother’s battered tin box of compasses. She’d left all her almanacs behind—that
chart the stars and planets in their manifold phases across the skies and years and
decades and hemispheres—tattered and taped-up from daily use, cobbled from sources
everywhere, indexed by country, by date. But in my multiple ransackings of home I
never saw a single one of her compasses.
    She’s had them since childhood and sometimes even carried one around in the front
pocket of her shirt; you’d see the silver tip poking through the weave, tiny but
lethal, as she did the vacuuming, or picked at her dinner. Years after she stopped
carrying me around, she still carried them .
    She would only leave home with them if she was drawing a chart for someone in situ ,
in their own environment. In those cases, she had all the coordinates already mapped
out in her head, memorised.
    A parlour trick , she would call it, modestly, as she sketched out someone’s celestially
ordained life map before their rapt eyes. Over cups of tea, someone would have their
own little universe rendered live on paper.
    The compasses had to be with her. I wasn’t sure if it was important, but I needed
to tell Wurbik to maybe tell people, put it