Free As Near as I Can Get by Paul Ableman Page B

definition and this implies—and then looming ahead I saw, as so often on this sort of mental voyage, some huge dictum formulated back, far back, when none of the considerations now motivating my own quest had existed even in larval form and consequently representing what mighty span of prophetic reach! Ahead, taking shape, I saw the portentous, not yet-to-be-fathomed words, but words readily dissociable from the superstitious connotation still generally assigned to them: ‘In the beginning was the word’. My mind was poising itself for the exultant, predatory leap of understanding when suddenly, borne in upon it by a low voice behind saying nothing of any special or even general interest, came an avalanche of unsought reflections and considerations which, in an instant, dammed up completely the adventurous stream of thought.
    What was the remark, Vanessa, with which, on that kinetic, lilac night before we had ever exchanged a word,you mysteriously unleashed a spate of romantic fragments? Was it ‘Not artichokes …’ or ‘they kept watching me, you know ?’or ‘I’ve never swum in the sea’, none of these things, all of them, for I realized immediately afterwards that I had actually been listening to the low murmur of your transatlantic voice for some time. Perhaps, therefore, it was a cumulative rather than a solitary stimulus which suddenly shattered my scholarly reverie and forced me to glance round and see the small, twinkling, wide-eyed face of my future Kansan mistress as, released by some cerebral relay, the refrain ‘summer, summer, summer’, bearing with it images of human love and pain, ached in my reeling brain.
    ‘ Songe à la douceur ….’
    Vanessa, you smiled at me! Past the three hulking, self-confident bulls flirting and joking with you, you widened your tiny mouth in a tiny, radiant, spontaneous smile. At me? Why? You didn’t need my height as, I had found, some girls did. There was more than competitive height in the beefy triangle around you, but out from that Euclidian prison of Olympic champions, you projected a ray of welcome at my sullen, surprised, peering face.
    ‘Take some back? Eh? Shall we? Back to my place? A few quarts?’
    While I irritably rejected Peter’s plaintive appeal, fortified by docile paws laid beseechingly on my shoulders, our potential life together, Vanessa, began to crystallize in my mind. It required isolation, a cottage—no, perhaps not a cottage, a narrow, porched, sandstone house in a smallish, non-industrial town. Isolation, however, remained emphatically the primary requirement, a dwelling where we could be uncompromisingly together. The conventional appurtenances of married life, friends, place of employment , a dozen dismal links with official and commercial establishments (ministries and dairies) were completely absent from my vision. Somewhere where we could love and be alone was all that was needed, where I could lookat you and see that wistful, exquisite smile forever, and hold you, know that lithe, concealed body in its unveiled sweetness and know it with my own body, held to my own body, timelessly. Somehow, the world was missing too. Russia had been absorbed by the roseate but apparently corrosive mists which hovered in the circumference of my vision, and America had dissolved there too, and so had the dreadful laboratories with their chilling discoveries. Much of England had gone too—in fact there was nothing left but us, Vanessa, not even Kansas.
    ‘You want to, don’t you, Charley? Eh? Shall we take a few quarts——’
    So urgent, by now, was Peter’s supplication that his cold pipe, which had been nestling in its accustomed place between his teeth, deprived of adequate support by its master’s vigorous oral exertions, fell to the trampled floor and Peter sank after it.
    ‘Eh? What do you think——?’
    The wistful, muffled plea still floated up from our feet across which, through the tough leather, we could feel Peter’s erratic