MORNING SERIAL
SHE and Effi would not have got on at all, he thought. Effi would have been horrified at this headlong straight talking. Ill-bred, Effi would have thought at this refusal of deference.
Too full of herself by half. The two of them were walking so close, often brushing against one another, yet Michael felt the remoteness between their generations. He could never have suffered a woman with such a tongue. The recognition further released him from the eroticised image that had possessed him. He couldn’t be bothered, hadn’t the energy, he thought, to hurt her.
And his love for Wolfi required that he stand back and hold his peace. Wolfi was the one human being to whom he had devoted himself. If he let go now, Wolfi would perhaps in course of time circle back. Perhaps.
‘I think we should go back,’ he said. ‘She’ll never have come this far.’ But, as he had intuited, Isolde was not thinking of Rachel. The mind begins at self, and it returns to self, he thought: the people it sees serve as mirrors along the way.
‘Excuse me if I ask you something, Mr Quantz,’ she said, ‘since we’re on our own.’ ‘Indeed.’
‘Wolfi said,’ and Michael heard her breath catch, ‘Wolfi said, you knew my parents. Is that right?’
And she had put the sword back in his hand. She had bent her neck to the blade or offered to run upon it.
‘Wolfi is remarkable for his facility in getting hold of the wrong end of the stick, absolutely remarkable, he should have a degree in it: I was merely hypothesising.’
There was a pause. He could hear the water slap and suck among the reeds, which rustled when the breeze gusted in a amongst them. The wild geese had all gone south. His stomach griped.
‘Oh, so you don’t, didn’t, know my parents?’ ‘Hardly.’
Another pause. Not given herself to casuistry, Isolde was evidently finding it hard to deal with it in another.
> The Element of Water by Stevie Davies is published by Parthian in the Library of Wales series www.parthianbooks.com