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Downstairs at the Monticello I sip a fine Sonoma Valley Chardonnay and read P. D. James. Her man is on the Norfolk coast again while I am on the Pacific seaboard thousands of miles west, on another planet. His clues, as ever, allow him to piece together a complex jigsaw of a universe where effect follows cause as night follows day, where any disruption to the moral order is strictly temporary. Here, my mini bar is stocked with lethal substances (so a warning sign reminds me every time I’m tempted by a Scotch); my TV orders me to open my heart to Jesus, embrace eternal life; and a man, who has surely inhaled something, mistakes me for Elton John; thanks me for the song I wrote for Diana.
Across the Channel, where wogs begin, Hitler rattles his sabre these long summer days of appeasement and young Philip, somewhere between boredom and fear, from his vantage point on the Leas, peers short-sightedly towards all that is not England, the abroad he will soon decry, the world he'll be so disinclined to know.
This youthful egg-head, an unlikely figure in shorts and sandals, has yet to discover what jazz and all its untamed rhythms mean to one whose days are measured out in coffee spoons; has yet to discover sex, which will begin in 1963 (between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles' first LP)...
For now, he has no notion what will, one day, survive of him, of us — only a growing, nagging sense of what it is that parents do.
We are not quite in Arcadia here — I stretched lazily by the lake and you trimming the croquet lawn. The others are phantoms about the property.
Someone, I think, is tending the vines, another mending the walls in deference to the old poet with friends in the White House.
Twenty-one nameless ducks glide proudly across the lake and somewhere else Reggie the cat lies scrawnily in the sun
and Sweetpea, whose pedigree is doubtful, sneaks a quiet nap, relinquishing duties for which he always seems ill-suited.
No, we are not in Arcadia here, but that land is never far away — closer than Cape Cod, where summer is already yielding to a brown and splendid fall.
And now I can't remember if it was Dedalus or Jennings whose metaphysics led him to locate himself with such precision in his universe: building, road, town, county, country, continent, hemisphere, planet, galaxy — a tiny, living pulse against the enormity of things, a living embodiment of insignificance, purpose unknown, unless to show we need no why and no because. On clear, cold nights, when the stars come out to play, their indifference convinces me that I exist no further than the clothes I wear, the crystal glass I clasp; and that is less than the deep gold whiskey that scalds my throat.
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