Free Judgment Day by Penelope Lively Page B

God. I said I believed in love and she said God is love and I said, no. And after that we avoided the subject.
    No, my days are not empty; in fact, I find them miraculousThe legacy, I think, of telling people for a thousand years that they will have to pay for their sins is that you end up with someone like me. I wait for payment to be exacted anyway. I feel guilty because it has not.
    She made the beds, went downstairs and out again. Back in the mini, she sped between fleeing fields, hills, villages. Driving too fast, reproved once by an overtaking lorry, the driver in his cab towering above her, cutting in front and forcing her to slow down. Peter scolded her sometimes about her driving. Once he'd been really angry after a near accident. Tempting providence, he called it. Providence doesn't need tempting, she'd snapped, that's the problem, as far as I'm concerned. But the incident had rattled her (accounting for the ill temper}, as now she was rattled by the thunderous pressure of the lorry alongside. She drove more decorously, paying attention to the charms of the landscape.
    I love my husband, she thought. I look around at other people's husbands, at other men generally, and heave a sigh of relief. His deficiencies, if one can call them that, are that he is too busy and too successful and I am no longer the only or indeed the principal person with a claim on him. I love my husband and therefore I will try to do as he would wish and not drive too fast.
    There were huge clouds piled around the horizon, the cumulus clouds of early summer, opalescent shifting shapes, themselves a source of light so that the whole sky was brilliant. On such a day as this, she remembered, on such a day of sun and shadow and high running wind, she had climbed a hill somewhere, almost ten years ago, and at the top had flung herself down breathless on her back and stared up into just such clouds and as she did so had feltthe first flutter of the child in her womb. A moment of amazement and delight and incredulity. Thus are the heightened moments of our lives tethered to the physical world, and brought back by it. Well, that interesting flutter was now Anna—screaming and whooping in Laddenham primary school playground—but the joyous instant on the hilltop one carried around yet, as something else.
    The town, with which she was not familiar, although it was only fifteen miles from Spelbury, had a stern attitude toward on-street parking and the municipal car parks were all full. Eventually she found a space in the far corner of a cindery, rubbish-strewn overflow car park, tucked away the mini, and set off for the public library.
    The library, plate glass without and sleekly carpeted within, was a new building. The shelves were well stocked, the catalog abundant, the squashy black chairs and individual desks invited repose or study. Clare, well pleased, browsed and dipped and selected for an hour or so. In the local history section, an agreeable and obliging young man answered her queries and provided references and information. Waiting for him to bring some books, she noted with approval that the reading desks were almost all occupied by teenagers, in refuge perhaps from inadequate school facilities, heads bowed tranquilly over their work.
    Going into the ladies' lavatory on the way out, she found herself in a cubicle the walls of which were covered with graffiti of startling sexual crudity. Long masturbatory fantasies involving carrots or sausages were interspersed with drawings of male and female genitals, separately and in conjunction, and clinical accounts of the writers' ownsexual exploits. Clare sat reading, in interest and amazement. One could fancy oneself in the latrines of some army barracks, not the ladies' lavatory of the public library in a midland market town. The handwriting, in tempo pen, ball-point, and occasionally aerosol paint, was almost exclusively the unformed script of, it seemed to her, children. Or adolescents at the