The Good Parents by Joan London Page B

the Lost Father. Long ago, before Kitty was born, before he could remember, their father had become an absence, soundless
     as the black water that had engulfed him, and like the water, always there.
    His own life was a film or a book, and this was a chapter soon to be finished. He was the hero and also the writer. This was
     what it must be like to be a poet, one epiphany after the other!
    This Capelli stuff was magic. No wonder it was catching on. A great wave was breaking, he could feel it, an extraordinary
     club was forming, a bright new ragged army was lining up against everything that had oppressed him about his future as a man,
     the nine-to-five, the mortgage, the retirement plan. Giving the finger to the old men who ran things, the government, the
     law, the army, and their war in Vietnam. He longed to have a draft card to burn on St George’s Terrace.
    The accused was lying drugged on his bed
. I am lying drugged on my bed, he told himself. And he was not the only one. Allacross the world people were letting their hair grow, lighting up and lying down and becoming poets.
    Jacob called it the Tolstoy factor, from the time when he spent the entire two weeks’ swot-vac before the Leaving reading
War and Peace
. Beech had left the book on his bed, saying casually: ‘This is supposed to be the greatest novel in the world.’ He and Beech
     often exchanged books and always knew what the other was reading. There was a slightly competitive edge to it. That year they’d
     read, neck and neck,
Crime and Punishment
,
Another Country
,
Catch 22
,
Justine
,
The Outsider.
Beech himself hadn’t read
War and Peace
, he’d bought it in a second-hand shop on his way to visit Jacob. It was the evening of their last ever day at school and
     they were drinking Arlene’s sherry in the sleepout. From tomorrow both of them would have to study day and night if they were
     to get the results they needed. They agreed not to meet again until after the exams. They slapped each other around the shoulders
     for good luck and, mildly drunk, Beech sloped off to the rectory,
his work done
, Jacob came to think. He would never know whether Beech left the book on his bed on purpose, or whether, as he said, he just
     forgot it. The minister’s son, instrument of the devil.
    Day after day he told himself that his whole future depended on this dash to the finish line, and yet even as he ate his breakfast,
     stolid with panic, he found himself reaching for the book. Only Tolstoy’s world was real to him. Every morning, it was as
     if he picked himself up out of the snow and set off again, blindly marching to his doom. This was how he wanted life to be,
     heightened and distilled! What were a few exams in the faceof the great movements of love and history?
Why do I struggle
? he thought, with Pierre.
Why am I troubled in this narrow, cramped routine, when life, all life, with all its joys, lies open before me?
He
was
Pierre, the eye of the novel, the observer. The noble slob. He was astounded by Tolstoy’s insight. Was this the story of
     every man’s inner life, with its private hungers, its unrequited loves? With the secret desire for fame:
I want glory! I want to be beloved by people I don’t know!
    And war, with the same male dilemma, whether or not to fight.
    No matter how much he resolved, as he fell asleep at night, to pull himself together, take control of himself, in the morning
     his hands opened the book as if by themselves. He was paralysed in a bad dream. He was teetering on the edge of an abyss.
     He’d swum too far out of his depth. And all the time he watched himself, like a scientist observing a rat on a treadmill.
    He told himself that he was caught up in the tidal wave of great literature. That all the real moments of his life had come
     from books or films. That he’d always preferred art to life. He even toyed with the idea – wasting ever more time – that this
     was his tribute to art, his sacrifice. But he knew that