of pig are you? Are you so grand now that you can’t be bothered with your little sister, now not so little? I suppose it’s just possible that you are off on some mission you can’t tell me about, and if so, I forgive you. But if that’s not the reason, you are now, officially, in the doghouse. Way below Einstein in the pecking order
Alan’s back and he’s not the same. He says that his wife’s suicide attempt was not a real attempt. Oh, she slit her wrists all right, but he says she made sure there were people around who were more or less certain to find her. But the way he behaves, the way he is toward me, the little tendernesses that we used to exchange, the intimate sillinesses that people share when they are in love… all those have gone, certainly for the time being. He’s also lost a lot of the forcefulness that I liked about him; it’s as if his intellect has been dulled by going home. His idealism is dulled too. Maybe, perhaps, just being back in Britain got to him; maybe it was too depressing but he won’t talk about it, and I don’t like that.
(Several hours later.) He just talked about it. He saw me writing this letter, leaned over me, and read what I was writing. And it’s cleared the air a bit.
Alan says it’s true, that being back in Britain depressed him. The view of the war is so different there from the way it is here at the Front. In Britain, he says, people are bullish, aggressive, very anti-German in a simplistic kind of way. He says it’s not so much London, which is very involved in the war, obviously, but in the countryside, where people are able to lead their lives as if the war is miles away, which of course it is. He says people still play cricket, visit the pub, fish in rivers and canals. He knows that normal life has to go on—otherwise all is lost, people need an escape from war. Even so, the gulf between the Front and the British countryside is enormous. He says that, after this war is over, the big difference between people will be between those who have been at the Front and those who haven’t. It will be a big divide in our society, and it will disfigure us.
I have no way of knowing if this is true, but I trust Alan. He’s not here right now and can’t see me writing this, so let me add something: I don’t think this is a complete explanation for how he has been a different man since he has been back. There’s something more personal too, though I don’t know (yet) what it is.
Write, you brute.
Izzy
Dear Brute,
This will be short. You deserve only short letters until you respond.
Alan is back in Britain, in Scotland actually, for his wife’s funeral.
Yes, that’s right. She tried to commit suicide a second time, and succeeded. He received a telegram two days ago. Before he went, he told me that he realized he’d been awkward with me and the reason was guilt. On his first trip home, it was clear that his wife really loved him, more than she loved her children, and that, contrary to what he told me, her first attempt was not a “cry for help” at all but a warning to him, that if he didn’t come back to her she would keep trying until she really did do away with herself. The children were devastated, he said, but… and this was the real dilemma facing him: he, too, loved me more than he loved his children. Hal, what a terrible thing. Is it an unnatural thing for both parents to love someone else more than they love their children?
I’m back in charge, being bossy all over again. But inside I’m churned up.
All love.
xxx (still only three at the moment).
Izzy
The following day, Sunday, after a late start, Sam and Will and I drove out again toward Middle Hill but stopped short of the village. We climbed out of the car and strolled along the canal. At first I thought it was a mistake. It was the same stretch of water where we had walked that day in the pouring rain when I had first realized that Sam had a baby and she had confessed to me, in the shelter and darkness under the bridge, who Will’s father was. Did I really