ONE
There is an internal landscape, a geography of the soul, we search for its outlines all our lives.
Those who are Lucky enough to find it, ease like water over a stone, on to its fluid contours, and are home.
Some find it in the place of their birth; others may leave a seaside town, parched, and find themselves refreshed in the desert. There are those born in rolling countryside who are really only at ease in the intense and busy loneliness of the city.
For some, the search is for the imprint of another; a child or a mother, a grandfather or a brother, a lover, a husband, a wife, or a foe.
We may go through our lives happy or unhappy, successful or unfulfilled, loved or unloved, without ever standing cold with the shock of recognition, without ever feeling the agony as the twisted iron in our soul unlocks itself, and we slip at last into place.
I have been at the bedsides of the dying, who looked puzzled at their family’s grief as they left a world in which they had never felt at home.
I have seen men weep more at the death of their brother, whose being had once locked into theirs, than at the death of their child. I have watched brides become mothers, who only once, long ago, were radiant on their uncle’s knee.
And in my own life, I have traveled far, acquiring loved and unfamiliar companions; a wife, a son, and a daughter. I have lived with them, a loving alien in surroundings of unsatisfying beauty. An efficient dissembler, I gently and silently smoothed the rough edges of my being. I hid the awkwardness and pain with which I inclined towards my chosen outline, and tried to be what those I loved expected me to be – a good husband, a good father, and a good son.
Had I died at fifty I would have been a doctor, and an established politician, though not a household name. one who had made a contribution, and was much loved by his sorrowing wife, Ingrid, and by his children, Martyn and Sally.
My funeral would have been well attended by those who had gone further in life than I, and who therefore honored my memory by their presence. And by those who believed they had loved the private man, and by their tears gave testimony to his existence.
It would have been the funeral of an above-average man, more generously endowed with the world’s blessings than most. A man who, at the comparatively early age of fifty, had ended his journey. A journey which would certainly have led to some greater honour and achievement, had it continued.
But I did not die in my fiftieth year. There are few who know me now who do not regard that as a tragedy.
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