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I suppose if I had known her father……
I never met him – socially, I mean. I saw him once, in the later days, standing on a corner in that soup kitchen of a town with the shiftless look of a vagrant, kicking at the pavement with worn-out boots as though he was waiting impatiently for something to happen. Yet in all of his life, nothing ever did. Fortune never came to him and he made no effort to reach out and get it. If he had love he had nowhere to keep it – if he had compassion he had no way to let it show.
That was why ‘Anda turned out the way she did: that was what made her what she was. I am as convinced of that as I am convinced we were fated of ourselves – from the start we had no hope. Constancy was just not in either of our lives: we had no terms of reference; no rule to guide us. In the end the lifebelt just slipped away, leaving us to the mercy of the current. Did she wave to me, or I to her? I cannot remember – I was too busy drowning.
