Yan came to see me. I was delighted and fell straight on his neck. He said first of all I looked well and secondly that he had heard I was being hard on people. He was referring to George and his wife, of course, whom I\u2019ve stopped seeing. I explained my reasons and he said he didn\u2019t blame me one bit. We agreed that all we did was whiling away time for them. Once we\u2019d left them, they were back with their old problems: lack of attention, lack of company. They would themselves have to come to terms with that, now \u2013 they were old enough. I had come to realize that I couldn\u2019t give them any help and therefore wasted a lot of physical and nervous energy which could be spent more satisfactorily. I have acted accordingly and am now being called \u201chard\u201d. I thought my reputation would change\u2026Yan said he felt guilty for not seeing them more often. However, that is his business.<\/p>\n
What had I done all this time he hadn\u2019t seen me, he wondered. I had seen him last when my parents were here, and he told me he had found my mother \u201ccharming\u201d. I had done some translation work in the mean time, poetry which is normally known in a musical context only. As a rule, people are more interested in the music than in the words. I showed him the cycle of Schumann Lieder. He wasn\u2019t too sure what they were about. \u201cThe ideal man,\u201d I said, trying to put it in a nutshell, because there wasn\u2019t time for more. He sighed. And then the other pieces. Words and music composed by the same person. Of course, he knew the music well enough.<\/p>\n
We passed on to another subject. Yan\u2019s daughter was having a year in Iceland. Jeremy and his wife had been there, too, for a holiday. I had heard a lot about it. Yan hasn\u2019t been, neither have I. My husband has and found it dreadfully cold. I didn\u2019t think I would ever be able to get him to go there again, I said to Yan. \u201cWhy don\u2019t the two of us go?\u201d Yan suggested. His wife has also been. \u201cWhy not at all!\u201d I said, \u201cno harm in making plans.\u201d<\/p>\n
My eldest daughter came home from school and joined us for a little chat. I managed to send her away after a while, saying there was a piece of cake waiting for her in the kitchen. Yan couldn\u2019t stay much longer. We would have some music some time, he said. I smiled without looking at him nor making any comment. He added cautiously: \u201cIf it\u2019s alright with you.\u201d I said: \u201cGuess!\u201d He said: \u201cVery soon!\u201d I was interested to hear that. I know what \u201csoon\u201d means for him. It means an \u201cindefinite length of time\u201d. What would \u201cvery soon\u201d mean? A \u201cvery indefinite length of time\u201d? I shall find out in due course. When he left, I watched him out onto the road as usual.<\/p>\n
Later, I asked my husband, would he consider taking me to Iceland? He said \u201cWhy not\u201d much to my surprize and I learnt what the attraction was: the Brown Trout in one of the lakes which he had been prevented from sampling when he went for the first time.<\/p>\n
I went to bed thinking about another Schumann Lied: Loreley. And who were Circe and Calypso?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yan came to see me. I was delighted and fell straight on his neck. He said first of all I looked well and secondly that he had heard I was being hard on people. He was referring to George and his wife, of course, whom I\u2019ve stopped seeing. I explained my reasons and he said […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading-aloud"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.d-c-k.com\/Readingaloud1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.d-c-k.com\/Readingaloud1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.d-c-k.com\/Readingaloud1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.d-c-k.com\/Readingaloud1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.d-c-k.com\/Readingaloud1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.d-c-k.com\/Readingaloud1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.d-c-k.com\/Readingaloud1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.d-c-k.com\/Readingaloud1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.d-c-k.com\/Readingaloud1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}