Sin
Page 11
There was a brief reading of the will. She left everything to me. There were a number of obituaries in the papers. Short, not very enlightening. No one knew her.
Charles and I beat out our time quietly now. We mark anniversaries where once we marked birthdays.
And if I'd never met her, would I have been good?
For in the end, that's all that matters.
We are here to add to the sum of human goodness. To prove the thing exists. And however futile each individual act of courage or generosity, self-sacrifice or grace—it still proves the thing exists. Each act adds to the fund. It needs replenishment. Not only because evil flourishes, and is, most indefensibly, defended. But because goodness is no longer a respectable aim in life. The hound of hell, envy, has driven it from the house.
We two, Charles and I, once united by the powerful bond of sin, now float towards each other across a sea of sorrow. Above the faces of the boys, who rise and fall, to watery graves, again and again.
And as we move towards each other, the face of Elizabeth also rises. Again and again.
And if I had never met her? What then? Did she create me? Or I her? Did I dream her? Am I Elizabeth? Now?
These questions long engage me. Do you have answers? Please. Please, answer me.
Answer me, as I leave you now.
As I leave you.
As I leave.
A Biography of Josephine Hart
Josephine Hart is the international bestselling author of six novels and two poetry anthologies. Her novels, which include Damage (1991), Sin (1992), and Oblivion (1995), are notable for their spare prose and themes of lust, betrayal, and obsessive love, and have been translated into twenty-seven languages.
Hart was born and raised in Mullingar, Ireland, and later moved to London to pursue careers in publishing, theater, and then writing. In the mid-1980s, she founded the Gallery Poets and West End Poetry Hour, an event that grew from her desire to make poetry a powerful force in people’s lives. While working as a director at Haymarket Publishing, Hart poured herself into Gallery Poets and ultimately went on to produce a number of West End plays, including Iris Murdoch’s “The Black Prince.” Shortly after marrying Maurice Saatchi, an advertising executive and former Chairman of the Conservative Party of Great Britain, Hart began creating the characters for her first three books but resisted the urge to commit them to paper. It wasn’t until Murdoch and Saatchi encouraged her to write a book that she finally decided to do so. Her first novel, Damage, about a British politician’s affair with his son’s fiancè, was a critical and commercial triumph, selling more than one million copies worldwide. Damage was made into the Oscar-nominated film of the same name starring Jeremy Irons and Juliette Binoche.
Hart’s subsequent novels have also received wide acclaim and success, and in 2007 The Reconstructionist was filmed by Italian director Roberto Ando. Her latest novel, The Truth About Love, was published in 2009 by Knopf and will be published in paperback in the U.S. in August 2010. She continues to support poetry, saying that it “gives voice to experience in a way no other literary art form can. It has never let me down.” The Josephine Hart Poetry Hour, a monthly poetry reading at London’s British Library, has attracted such readers as Bono, Bob Geldof, and Ralph Fiennes, among many others, since its inception in 2004, and the anthologies Catching Life by the Throat (2006) and Words that Burn (2008) are accompanied by CDs based on these readings.
Hart and Saatchi have two sons and divide their time between homes in England and France.
Hart during her first Communion at age seven in her hometown of Mullingar, Ireland.
A twelve-year-old Hart riding a pony during a visit to the Dublin Zoo.
Hart’s school picture, taken in Ireland during the 1960s. She is sitting on the nun’s immediate left. Hart moved to London later in the decade.
Hart in Dublin, Ireland, where she was judging the 1992 Irish Times International Fiction Prize. The winner that year was Mating by Norman Rush.
Maurice Saatchi and Hart at the Lyric Theatre Hammersmith in London in the early 1990s. Saatchi is the co-founder of Saatchi and Saatchi and MC Saatchi, two of the world’s largest advertising firms.
Ian McDiarmid, Hart, and Jonathan Kent on the stage of the Almeida Theatre in London.
Hart and Iris Murdoch.
From left: Charles Dance, Rupert Evans, Josephine Hart, and Jeremy Irons at her Poetry Hour at the British Library celebrating Robert Browning in 2009.
Josephine Hart in her garden in London in spring 2010.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The lines from “September 1939” by W.H. Auden are reproduced by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd.
copyright © 1992 by Josephine Hart
ISBN: 978-1-4532-0001-8
This edition published in 2010 by Open Road Integrated Media
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