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I suppose all lives are picaresque and formless, full of unconnected episodes and haphazard events and peopled by random characters whose lives intersect with ours to no purpose, but we are all schooled in a literary and oral tradition in which each incident and character is seen as performing a specific function in a pattern of our own self-important imaginings.
Inevitably, and because it is almost ungrammatical - and certainly cruel to a
reader with an innate sense of justice and tidiness - to tell a story with no end consequent upon what has gone before, these stories end either in marriage or in death. To most of us, death seems a little extreme as an ending to provide a shape when we can see no other. Marriage, however, is held forth as a desirable and logical conclusion which is as readily available to us at every turn as drink to an alcoholic. Of course, it is a logical end to a story which deals with struggles to find the wealth with which to marry and the right candidate. The young on marriage are presumed to have done their biological duty by the race.
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Now they are in effect dead and the reader can turn his attention to the next generation. The now old and settled hero and heroine sink into the background to be ‘happy ever after’ (albeit, perhaps, fat, scrofular and at one another’s throats for fifty years), no longer subject to destructive passions or longings beyond the scope of the storyteller.
And we believe it – or, at least, I believed it. All the discomforts of adventure – the sofas and improvised beds on the floor, the corridor-creeping, the penury, the roller-coaster passions and griefs – would be over when once the credits rolled over the clinch, the melt, the mounting strains of Love Is a Many Splendoured Thing.
Tony thought of marriage as an ending no less than I. We are still good friends in so far as our lives and temperaments can overlap without causing violent reactions, and I don’t want to blame any of my subsequent conduct on him. He has always been kind and loving and loyal even as I ranted and railed and fell apart.
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