on the path

Words failed him.

That bloke is just such a, bloody, BLAB. He, Just, Will, Not, keep his big fat mouth shut. He's a flaming liability. I should have known better. We're in a whole world of grief now. Yeah, thanks mate. Thanks very much. Thought you'd let slip some juicy goss did you, nothing better to do. He should be locked up that bloke. I tell you what, that's it now, I'm done with him.

And so he went on, Frank, for five or ten more minutes. There wasn't much point me saying anything, he had to have his head, so he yelled and banged the table and called Dennie "that bloke", until in the twilight of his fury he expressed his feelings in a woodwind music of sighs and groans, from which burst isolated rockets of a single syllable.

But I see I'm over-writing, I'm really not used to this sort of thing, so you must forgive me if I just plough on not daring to stop, and perhaps I may shove a sign up now and then, with the words PLEASE SKIP!

In my husband's eyes one of the chief principles of morality was, Can you keep a secret. And as for blabbing to a woman! Frank had a great fear of women, that's probably why he married me.

And yes, I quite agreed with him, Dennie blabbing to Yasmin was downright bloody infuriating, and this had happened at the worst possible time, when she'd only just lent us the £20,000  and when we were so anxious to show ourselves deserving cases (which we certainly were not) and very grateful to her (which we certainly were),  and instead we'd kicked her in the guts or rather Dennie had by failing to keep his thieving trap shut, but it was us not Dennie who'd suffer all the fallout, us and Yasmin who now loathed us, as I informed Frank when she hung up.

Sex tonight? Frank said later. Oh yes, marvelous, said I though my mind wasn't really on it .........................
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,................... I could always make Frank laugh ...................
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 Thinking about it now, that was one of our last voyages on the rumpled Spanish Main. What a crew we were after all, Frank always premature, the old romancer, and as for me, I never cared much about it, whoever I might be with, but let's not go into that now.

Well it so happened, this business of secrets came up that same evening, while I was at the Moral Maze. Under the green parasols, as indeed above them, there was a merry peaceful piping, not unfuelled by glasses of chianti (not the birds, obvs).

I can't remember exactly who said what, though Mimi was very strong, and Pascal stomped off at one point. Anyway, I will give you my abiding sense of it.

Kept secrets underpin our social existence. Like other reticencies they are the cushions in the sofa, or rather the hidden girders behind a neo-Baroque façade (PLEASE SKIP?), the foundations that persuade us to come out into a plaza like this one, confident of not being made to hear and of not being asked to tell, invited to display our most valuable qualities, able to appreciate each other, to listen and to love. Life, or everything about life that's worthwhile, life is the breath of a garden, it is a chosen space for delicacy and fragrance. The secrets that we steadfastly keep are like the weeds kept just outside the garden fence, the brambles, nettles and buttercups; no less true or beautiful or justified than the ruby peonies within, at least not in the eyes of a truly steady philosopher, but once let the brambles in, and you don't have a garden any more. No more peonies, no more chianti, no more sunset or Mimi's golden elbows with the matelot tee rolled up. (Perhaps I've gone a little off track in that last sentence.)

And yet.... Does the Bible ever stand up and clearly spell it out, that one of the really important commandments is to just bloody keep shtum? It has plenty to say for proclaiming God's Truth, and for letting your yay be yay, and for confessing your sins; it has plenty to say, too, against whited sepulchres, forked tongues and Phariseeism. It is hard to escape the drift of those accumulated opinions. And doesn't nature itself rise up, in the shape of Dennie's loose-tongued gossip, to assert the outrage of constraint, the indecency of manacles, upon the natural impulses of the heart? Should our words, more than our emotions, be cloaked, controlled, choked down? Shouldn't we aspire to complete transparency, our palms open, our fingers spread apart? Do trees button their roots from streaming the news, do jackdaws ration their woody caws, do infants conceal their smiles or their tears, does the sun think twice before shining between clouds?

We had automatically kept Yasmin out of the loop, for her own good (and, admittedly, for ours) --- it was not a difficult decision --- yet I doubted, somehow, if Yasmin would altogether see how right we were to keep her in the dark, or would recommend the same behaviour in our future dealings with her, should such ever occur.

It was hard to know. On which note, I turned over and went. But Frank was quiet and I sensed he was awake.

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