THE EDUCATION OF A QUEEN
685
to answer when I could face it. But I never had to. The next
week he caught pneumonia hoeing in that damned garden and,
even with sulfa, died in a few days. Perhaps if penicillin had been
released for civilian use-but I don't
think
so. There is destiny.
Mother and Jason traveled three hundred and fifty miles
for the ftUlera!. I did not write them that I was in the infirmary,
though I was tempted. I went with them to the funeral and forced
myself to look into Joshua's box and I promised that fearsome,
unnatural face .. . what? I don't know. To love, maybe. Simply
to love.
I was sincere, but it is not so easy to keep promises. Love
what? Whom? I like my work
as
an art critic very much, and I
love my family. Perhaps that's enough. The promiscuity stopped, of
course, and of course I quickly became a very steady character.
Sometimes, I suspect, a bit of a bore.
Before leaving for Europe this summer I spent
a
week with
all of them-my parents, Jason, his wife, their four-year-old
Daphne Otig.-in a cottage on one of the lakes where we go, where
we've always gone.
Little Daphne said to me: "When will you be married, aunty?
Will you be married tomorrow?"
"No."
"I'm very sorry," she answered with genuine regret.
"But Daphne, I don't really want to marry anyone I know."
It is true, but their obvious disbelief-all of them with apolo-
getic eyes-unnerves me. When we fall to discussing Joshua,
as
we inevitably do, I can .no longer sustain my objectivity. He rides
up to greet me-that smiling skeleton beating time on his brass
steed- and I become annoyed and questioning.
" I
mean,
why didn't he do good work after that?"
"Weak. He was too weak, I tell you!" My father shrugs. For
him
Joshua will always
be
a shrug. There he lost a battle, not with
Joshua but with fate who leers and snatches
back
even from the
grip
of
kings.
"He took himself
in
and out of a state institution. Single–
handed. He laid hold of his life and lived
it
reasonably through
to the end. I don't call that
weak,"
says Jason.
. "Just the same, his relationships with women . . ." I proceed
