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‘Oh hell,’ said George, full of despair.
‘Then why make such a fuss?’ said Ted. ‘We were only going to take you to your lorry.’
Willi cleared his throat. It was always a rasping, rather clumsy sound. He did this frequently. It was never from nervousness, but sometimes as a tactful warning, and sometimes the statement: I know something you don’t. I recognized that this time it meant the second, and he was saying that the reason why George didn’t want anyone near his caravan was because there was a woman in it. Willi would never betray a confidence, even indirectly, when sober, so that meant he was drunk. To cover the indiscretion I whispered to Maryrose: ‘We keep forgetting that George is older than us, we must seem like a pack of kids to him.’ I spoke loudly enough for the others to hear. And George heard and gave me a wry grateful smile over his shoulder. But we still couldn’t move Jimmy. There we all stood, looking down at him. It was now long after midnight, and the heat had gone from the soil, and the moon was low over the mountains behind us. I remember wondering how it was that Jimmy, who when in his senses could never seem anything but graceless and pathetic, had just this once, when he was lying drunk in a patch of dirty gravel, managed to appear both dignified and moving, with the black wound on his forehead. And I was simultaneously wondering who the woman could be - which of the tough farmers’ wives, or marriageable daughters, or hotel guests we had drunk with in the bar that evening had crept down to George’s caravan, trying to make herself invisible in the water-clear moonlight. I remember envying her. I remember loving George for just that moment with a sharp painful love, while I called myself all kinds of a fool. For I had turned him down often enough. At that time in my life, for reasons I didn’t understand until later, I didn’t let myself be chosen by men who really wanted me.
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About
The Golden Notebook is a collaboration between if:book London and Apt.
Principal funding by Arts Council England.
HarperCollins, the publisher of The Golden Notebook, digitized the book for us and generously gave permission to reproduce it here in its entirety at no cost.
Additional support from The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and New York University
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