Read Online London Triptych by Jonathan Kemp - Free Book Online

son the bohemian life of the artist: I would have a trade and graft for a living.
    Father is more difficult to conjure. Like a phantom, he defies contour, wavering between being and becoming. A man in outline only. He was a placid, almost invisible man, who went along with his life without complaint. Mother and he spent little time together. He was a tailor by trade, running the family business as his father had before him, and his grandfather before that. He did very well though he wasn’t quite Savile Row. As a child I was always immaculately dressed in suits that he, or more likely one of his underlings, had made. He was a man devoid of energy, a man from whom all enthusiasm or sign of life had been removed, drained gradually, over years, in slow and steady drips. Nothing seemed to cheer him, nothing ever amused him. I don’t think I ever heard him laugh. He would sit and read the newspaper for hours on end, tutting to himself intermittently like a clock slowly ticking. If he had dreams or interests, I’ve no idea what they were. He had no hobbies that I was aware of, unless you can call criticising everyone and everything you come across a hobby. I suppose it passed the time for him.
    I can recall only two occasions when the topic of our conversation was at all intimate, though I use the term with vast reservations, as you shall see. The first time was the occasion on which he imparted to me the facts of life. I was ten or eleven, and it must have been one of the school holidays, during which I would return home to that silent and cheerless place in which my parents lived. On this particular occasion, Father was watching out of the drawing room window, which gave out onto our modest lawn. I was sitting reading, or most probably drawing. He called me over, by name, and I ran to his side, pleased to be receiving his attention. It was rare indeed for him to acknowledge my presence at all. He pointed out of the window and I followed the direction of his finger. On the lawn outside were two of our dogs copulating, though at the time I hardly knew what they were doing, and the scene merely struck me as humorous and shameful. I was immediately disturbed, wanting desperately to laugh, though sensing I shouldn’t. “If you do that to a woman, you’ll get her pregnant and have to marry her. You would do well to remember that,” he said, in a tone that conveyed unequivocally that that was to be his one comment on the subject and the lesson was over. I returned to my chair, not knowing whether I wanted to laugh or to cry. I knew already that I had no desire whatsoever to “do that to a woman,” though I had already begun to fantasise about what it must be like to be a woman succumbing to intercourse.
    The second occasion was nearly twenty years later, when I was approaching my thirtieth birthday. I was still living at home and had never once courted a woman. One morning over breakfast, from behind his newspaper, Father said, “Colin, your mother and I think it’s time you were married.”
    I dutifully found a woman quiet and compliant enough to be my bride. Joan was one of the secretaries at the commercial agency where I then worked, and we’d been friends, sort of, for two years before I asked her to marry me. We had been to the cinema together, sometimes as much as once a week, and often discussed novels over lunch, exchanging books we’d particularly enjoyed. She was a handsome woman, with large, soft brown eyes and a generous smile, and she smiled often. (She said, “It costs nothing to smile.”) Not overly talkative, but intelligent and well-read, with an irreverent sense of humour I admired. I didn’t know if she had ever considered what we were doing to be some kind of courtship, but I knew that I never had. Until my father suggested I marry, I had regarded it as no more than a simple friendship: we never approached discussing our private lives. But I realized I had never known her to go out with any other man