Read All Souls for Free Online

simply choose to answer them or not and that in the end it would come to the same thing; when you share your daily life with someone, you look for ways of living in peace with them. If I answered your questions I could lie to you (and you would have to accept the lie as thetruth) or I could tell you the truth (and you might not be sure you wanted the truth). If I didn't answer your questions, you could keep insisting and I could get angry and argue with you and reproach you and still not answer, or even look at you perplexed and remain silent for days on end and still not answer until you got fed up with my reproachful gaze and with not hearing my voice. We always condemn ourselves by what we say, not by what we do, by what we say or by what we say we do, not by what others say or by what we actually have done. You can't force someone to answer, and if you were Ted or you were married, you'd know that. The world is full of unwitting bastard children who inherit the fortune or the poverty of those who did not engender them. Family resemblances notwithstanding, no man has ever known for certain that he was the father of his children. Between married couples, neither partner answers questions they don't want to answer, and so they ask each other very few. There are plenty of couples who don't talk to each other at all."
    'And what if, despite all you say, Ted chose to be like me today and he did ask those questions? What would you say if, when he came through that door, he submitted you to an interrogation ? What were you doing together in Reading last night? Where had you been? Did you go to bed together? Are you lovers? Do you sleep together? Since when?" "I'd say just what I said to you: you're a fool." She put down the newspaper and got up, stepping on the ash she'd continued to drop without noticing on to the carpet by her feet. She came over to where I was standing and I turned round and we both stood in silence looking out of the window: it was sunny and cloudy. Her breasts brushed against my back. The boys were on the steps of the Radcliffe Camera begging for pennies for their guy. I opened the window and threw them a coin, and the clink of coin on stone made the four of them look round at us; but I'd already closed the window and theycould only just make us out behind the glass. Clare stroked the back of my neck with her hand and my shoe with one of her bare feet. I imagined she would probably be thinking about her son. My shoe was smeared with grey.
     
     
    THIS is WHAT CROMER - BLAKE wrote in his diary for that fifth of November and which I transcribe today:
     
    What surprises me most is that the disease does not for the moment stop me taking an interest in other people's lives. I've decided to behave as if nothing were wrong with me and to say nothing to anyone except to B, and to him only if my worst fears are confirmed. This doesn't prove to have been that difficult, once the decision was made. But the strange thing isn't that I'm able to behave secretly and properly, it's my own unchanging interest in the world around me that's odd. Everything matters to me, everything touches me. In fact I don't have to pretend because I still can't persuade myself that this can or will happen to me. I can't get used to the idea that with things as they are I could end up dying, and that were that to happen (I cross my fingers) I would no longer be in a position to learn about the continuing saga of other people's lives. It's as if someone were to snatch from my hands a book I'm devouring with infinite curiosity. It's inconceivable. Although if that was all it was, it wouldn't be so bad, the worst thing is that there won't be any more books, life is the one and only codex.
    Life is still so medieval.
    Of course, nothing more is likely to happen to me, death will have happened to me, which is quite enough. I can't get used to the idea, and that's why I don't want to go back to the doctor just yet or to see Dayanand who, with his