Semua Bab Staying with him: Bab 171 - Bab 180

Diana came in March.She had been to the new house before — she had come when they first moved in, thespecific Diana visit of the first month, the bag and the plan and the assessment of thehallway and the comment about the hall table needing to be slightly further from thedoor. She had come again in the summer. This visit was different from those visits in away she understood before Diana had come through the door, the way she understoodthe quality of the Diana visits from the quality of the advance notice.Diana had said, on the Sunday call in February: I want to see the garden in March.Not the house. The garden. Specifically. March.She had thought about this.She thought it was because Diana had been told about the garden — she had describedthe garden to Diana on the Sunday calls across the months since the move, the bench inthe corner and the east-bed plant and the baby under the bench and the spring that wascoming. Diana had received all of these descriptions with the at

In his third full year the academy felt like his.She had noticed this the way she noticed the developments in the things she cared mostabout, which was slowly and then all at once, the gradual change becoming visible onlywhen it had accumulated enough to be visible, the way the flat had become theirs not ona specific day but suddenly all at once on the Tuesday in April when she had put her keyin the bowl and understood she was home.The academy had become his at some point in the third year.She went on a Thursday in October, the October of the third full year, and she sat in thechair in the office and she watched him through the window with the fixed blind and sheunderstood that what she was seeing was not the academy in the first year, the carefulattention of a man who was still learning the shape of the thing, or the academy in thesecond year, the man who had learned the shape and was working within it with thespecific competence of the learning completed. She was seeing

She put up curtains in the spring of the second year.Not in the hallway — the hallway had the curtain rail with nothing on it, as it had alwayshad, the specific choice of the rail without the curtain that she had been making sincethe first week of the flat. She put up curtains in the other rooms, the rooms that neededthem, the rooms where the evening light required the managing and the morning lightneeded the ability to be excluded on the days she wanted to sleep past the dawn.She had not had curtains in the flat.The flat’s windows had had blinds, the specific blinds that had come with the flat andthat she had not replaced because the blinds were adequate and the replacing of themhad not seemed worth the effort. She had been in the flat for six years with the blindsand the blinds had been the blinds.The new house had no blinds.The new house had the windows, which were the right windows, and the windows hadnothing in them, and in the first year this had been fine, the noth

On a Sunday evening in May she stood in the kitchen with the last of the washing updone and the house quiet around her and she felt the specific quality of beingcompletely present.Not the meditated version, not the practised version, not the version she brought to theconsulting room with the specific professional attention of a decade of the work. Theordinary version. The version that was simply the quality of a person who had beenpractising the being-present for long enough that the being-present was now thedefault, the floor she stood on rather than the achievement she was reaching toward.She was present.The washing up was done and the house was quiet and she was in the kitchen in the Mayevening and she was present.She thought about what remained.The everything she had been inventorying since October, the autumn inventory of thethings that had accumulated, the bowl and the shelf and the photograph and the curtainrail and the garden and the bench. She had been thinking

She put the curtain rail up in the hallway of the new house on the fifth day, which wasthe day she had decided the curtain rail belonged on the wall rather than on the hallwayfloor, which was the day she stood in the new hallway with the screwdriver and theladder and the specific sense that the doing of it was the right doing of it, the beginningof the new place.She was thinking about this again.She was in the room with the south light on a Tuesday morning in November and shewas writing, the specific writing that was the writing she had been doing since thespring, the thing she had been doing on Tuesday mornings for the months since thespring when it had begun as the personal writing in the garden corner with the notebookand had moved indoors to the desk with the south window and had become what it wasnow, which was still not quite named but was in the process of being named through thedoing of it.She was writing about the curtain rail.Not only the curtain rail. She was