Saturday, 29 April 2023

The Peacock 863

 My life continued in a pleasant, well-ordered and very predictable fog.  Very Swedish bourgeois.  Yohanna became fatter and fatter with our soon to arrive little girl, I continued planning, conducting and grading classes, continued going to the theatre, or the cinema and even to an opera with Yohanna.  We dined out a lot.  Sometimes I got drunk, which never seemed to end well, because that was another trigger for my forgotten weeks at the Refuge.  I couldn't remember anything but simply would get flooded with a sense of emptiness and dread anxiety.  And of course, Greta and I continued to meet every week for lunch.  She was a very attractive girl, but for some reason, I couldn't imagine trying to spark an affair with her, especially given how much she reminded me of the kid in the mansion.  Greta and I didn't really talk about stuff, just mundane matters about our daily lives and life on the campus and how her courses of studies were going.  Marguerite my daughter was borne, and a couple of months later Yohanna and I were wed in a small civil ceremony.  It was shortly after in July, I think, when I arrived just five minutes late to the restaurant, and realised that Greta and I were having company.  Flanking her at the table sat the two old people from the Refuge, resplendent in freshly laundered tweeds, Mother and Father both....

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