POST 8

BOOKS

As the weather continued hot each day and cloudless, the idea of Matthew (I never could remember in his absence exactly what he looked like), now he was to be married, haunted me daylight as well as night. Vivid, enchanting, fatiguing dreams, memories.

There was the horse incident, but it sickened me to think of that: he put me on it, picked me up all bent. He was at his best soothing the terrors created by literature. I remembered the Poe book, it was later than the horse business. One look at those pictures to go with those stories and I could not go to sleep or endure the dark for nights on end. Matthew rubbed my back and congratulated me on my marvellous perceptions.

"This author," he said, "wishes to seize upon and frighten you out of your living daylights."

"Does he?" I sobbed. I was nonetheless very impressed.

"Oh yes. Yes, it was all in his mind and he wanted to seek out a bit of your mind you didn't know you'd got, and share it with you. It's like weight-lifting. Unpleasant at the time, but it makes you strong."

"It makes me frightened," I protested.

"Worse things happen at sea."

"Worse? Look!" I boldly opened the book at the most terrible page. "This man is tied up and there are rats all over him, and those knives are swinging along up the room and they are going to cut him into...into slices," I said faintly. "There can't be anything worse than that, can there? That must be the very worst." I wanted him to say `That is the worst'. There would be at least that much comfort. Instead he said,

"No worst, there is none."

Nothing to my purpose. "Has anything so bad ever happened to you?" I tried another way.

"Yes. It has," he said, still thoughtful and sweeping with his whole hand a few crumbs perhaps off the picture. I watched him. "Yes, because it came into a bit of my mind I didn't know I'd got." We were in deep waters. I did not know what to say or think. I only wanted him to come back to me. I looked at him in awe. At last a smile came on to his mouth but not into his eyes. He ruffled my hair. "Connie, my darling child, this is nothing. Nothing to worry about. It's all made up!"

He got up, and I was happier. Something worse had happened to him (I almost understood him, almost believed him because his eyes glittered), very bad anyway, and he was still alive! But the picture had lost its power over me because when I looked at it I saw his hand passing across it sweeping it away.

I passed on to my Aunt Matthew's account (of my amazing percipience in the matter of Poe), much improved. I thought she would be as impressed by it as I was. For this piece of `miseducation and mis-information' he had been thoroughly castigated as wicked for encouraging morbid fantasies, nothing to do with life.



Saturday walks with Matthew during his wartime leave when we were back in London always sent us to the old bookshops. He wore his old clothes and I suppose I did not see him in uniform more than once or twice. But in those days I always saw him as a soldier. He never looked so handsome to me (he looked very handsome, but not so handsome) in a sports jacket or a waistcoat and chain. Oh he was handsome all right, upright, military bend, slight, with a confidence in his address to you of a special kind. The reason for this special confidence, according to Aunt Molly, was that `his gifts are recognised'. But I had only to remember the lock of dark hair that fell forward, the rumpled up waistcoat when he was lounging deep down in a chair, feet either in everyone's way on the floor, or perched up on some stool in everyone's way, to make him familiar to me again. Sometimes he was quiet, I mean very quiet, and there were secrets in his eyes. His eyes gave him away, and under the confidence and the good manners, there was something sensuous, furtive, formidable, a lot of things likely to cause trouble if too freely let out. Sometimes when Aunt Molly spoke to him it was to those secrets that she spoke. I knew that from an early age, because it was all spoken over my head in a quite different way from the usual. But the bookshops. Some had gone out of London `for the duration', but the one I liked best had gone underground into a reinforced fire-proofed cellar somewhere off Bayswater Road. Immediately the bent head cleared the doorway (I used to bend mine, needlessly, for it seemed a fitting part of the ritual). The powerful smell of chemicals and old books mingled with the natural must of medieval, well, ancient cellar steps. It was an arched tunnel of dusty stone that we descended, and perhaps the greatest excitement of the venture was reaching that step where I could at last behold the high desk directly in front of us with its bulwarks of books and columns of spiked papers, which parted in the middle not quite so steadily as the Red Sea, which framed the singular face, like a dried apricot with a beard, both in hue and texture, of Mr. Adonijah Perlmutter, as it was painted on his desk-front. The thickest lenses in the smallest brass frames had reduced his eyes to black shiny pinheads like the little balls in cracker puzzles that whizz about under their imprisoning glass discs until you persuade them into the last humiliation and drop them into the capture cups where they tremble mutinously. These eyes trembled sometimes if you were a stranger looking into them, but mostly they whizzed over the top of the glasses, one side, the other side, down the main pathway between the long shelves, up the stairs as you left (Mr. Perlmutter had been known to detect an unpaid for book as far away as the nearly top step), and constantly between the four high large convex mirrors that displayed the behaviour of his clients for his inspection, including a funny view of bottoms alone as their owners dived headfirst into tea chests at the cheap side. What had done his eyes good seemed to have made a nonsense halfway down his nose, for his spectacles rested, rooted there on the bottom of a valley of their own making.

The place was illuminated with strips of bright white light and open only on Saturdays, but the back cellar behind the desk, which Matthew occasionally visited, was open by appointment only to well-known customers on Sunday afternoons. (It was years before I knew the truth of those Sunday visits.) Matthew might make an enquiry after an order he had placed, `Flavius Josephus? Complete set?' and Mr. Perlmutter's eyes would close, squeeze right up for one fraction of a second, open one after the other, whizz round on an inspection and then he would say `Octavo. Fine binding. Uncut. Forty-two and six'. After that he would stoop under the desk, but not so far that his nose disappeared or he was made late for an inspection, and a lanky boy would come from that mysterious back cellar in answer to the bell, and while I was picking out picture books, old note-books, children's books, written-on postcards, and Matthew was picking out Nine French Poets or Das Evanglium des Matthaus or a few old copies of the Journal of Biblical Literature (again, it was a long time before I understood the connection of all this heavy theology with the book Matthew: Studies in the First Gospel, M.L. Kellory to be found in Uncle Paul's library because it was not until that was finally sold I found it lying forgotten on a shelf), a parcel might be wrapped.

I remember his tall straight figure bent backwards beside me, I bent backwards beside him, under our inordinate stacks of books, while we waited impatiently, loaded to the noses, for the door to 22 Golden Square Gardens to be opened. We would make for the nearest sofa in Uncle Paul's old room downstairs, cover it with all categories of reading matter and start examining and reading at once, dirty hands and all. Then I would find out that half his buys were for me and quite often my best ones, and most of what he had bought for himself, apart from the theology were unheard of French novels, and thick German books, or county histories, especially anything to do with Shropshire and Ludlow; occasionally `a binding'. On those days I had to carry my own books back. `Bindings' I understood were usually reserved for Sundays as were the specially ordered ones. I remember one Saturday morning he handed me four volumes of Macaulay's History of England that he had bought me. He was about to be demobilised and there was a festive note in the house. Tom came in, his son, he'd been playing football. I grimaced at Tom, displaying the gift, and then I made a face at Matthew, who took the book from me, opened it at random and started shouting.

"The nation, awaking from its rapturous trance, found itself sold to a foreign, a despotic, a Popish court, defeated on its own seas and rivers by a state of far inferior resources, and placed under the rule of panders and buffoons." Tom and I stood by in concentrated amazement while there rolled into our ears a thunder of sound, every wave bringing some bizarre creature to our senses, prisons and criminals, or Dutch ships in the Thames, or shameful subordinations, offences against liberty, sharpers and courtesans, harlot after harlot and bastard after bastard, or governments becoming odious, bosoms in a House of Commons elected in the ecstasy of penitence, disasters, sequestrations, exiles, seductions and panics, conspiracies, plots, and at high-tide, a gunpowder treason no less. Then on came Oates, and Babington and Digby; Sydney, Rosewell and Cornish. "Till the revolution purified our institutions and our manners, a state trial was merely a murder preceded by the uttering of certain gibberish and the performance of certain mummeries." Tom and I looked at each other through tears of joy, bursting to laugh. Matthew was carried away and bore it out to the very edge of doom, through the character of the king; obstinacy, passion, levity, apathy, indolence, artfulness, until `The panic gradually subsided'.

POST 7

THE BUSINESS OF "TALKING TO AUNT MOLLY"

After tea I went to talk to Aunt Molly. I waited about in her room while she consulted her gardening manuals and telephoned the Secretary of the constituency Labour Party. I always misled myself into thinking that I knew my way round her. She talked a lot sometimes, but never to the point. Tonight there were to be man-to-man questions. I had them ready. I would forfeit the letter, and my secrets. `What was actually wrong with my mother?' and `What is all this about she might have married Matthew?' and `What was all that about us going to Washington? What happened?' `Sarah was the favourite, wasn't she?' In the event it was I, as usual, who was not very forthcoming. In the first place I had forgotten to provide myself with an ordinary excuse for being there, so very persistently that is, and I found myself, out of the blue, telling her about the terrible exam result. After condolences this hasty exposure of myself brought forth nothing but a eulogy on Frances. "It is Frances," said Aunt Molly, "who has inherited her mother's capacity for sharp judgement, perhaps divine dissatisfaction. Her brilliance and flair and her looks. Frances is no artist by temper, but I don't think it has ever occurred to her that there is anything the least intractable about the ideas, objects and raw materials of this world. She is very clever, mind and hands alike." I did not know whether Molly actually admired all this in Frances, (or actually believed in the `hands' bit), it having been inherited from my mother, but it was clear to me that Frances was Aunt Molly's favourite niece and always had been. She could do no wrong.

"Sarah too," continued my Aunt seeking to identify in her Dictionary of Trees, the habits of a red oak she had admired in Regent's Park only that afternoon, "seeing more than Frances does, the possibilities of doom and failure in these matters, nevertheless has a courageous and equally masterful way with them (more masterful in my opinion). I have often thought Sarah to be touched with genius. However that may be, she has certainly inherited your mother's musical talent. Whatever she may choose to do with her gift." Here Aunt Molly sniffed. Sarah in respect of her piano playing, as in so many other respects, was not amenable to advice, coercion or control. All this was exactly like Aunt Molly.

What about me?

Where could I place myself? Aunt Molly never did seem to see me. Perhaps, I thought, in giving out of likeness, I might be considered to be more like my father? I knew little about him. In The Times obituary he had been described as a brilliant political analyst and writer 'whose style welded substantial content with a reflective historical mind' had made memorable and lasting despatches 'that must come to mould the history of these war years'. He would be sadly missed, it said. I could find nothing there.

I could recall his playing with us as babies. A great deal of rough and tumble under the rather forbidding presence in the house of my mother upstairs in her room for long hours, either practising or as quiet as death. There were many anecdotes about her. People still referred to her in musical notes to concert programmes.

Perhaps my father had the great gift of paying complete attention to his children when he was with them. Anyway, I had always preferred his company to my mother's. But I was disposed to dislike him for what in the letter he had said about my mother, making her appear to be a woman fanatical about her career as a pianist, hard on her children, intolerably offensive to Matthew for some reason, depressed, and uncaring of her husband's care and feelings. There was nothing like it at all in all his other letters. I had read a good many by that time.

To keep the conversation going, to push it the way I wanted it to go I asked elaborate questions - oh, I was so elaborate and so tired of elaboration. And Aunt Molly was the person in the world hardest to divert from monologue. She went on talking, still complaining about Sarah now, but I was remembering my mother, the treat it was to be with her when we were allowed, her rare sweet intense smiles that made me thrillingly nervous, her large extraordinary hands, with their blunt-tipped fingers. And she had, what? Scorned Matthew? (I could go no further than a cliché) Because of course he must once have been in love with her. How could he not? I don't remember how I had made up my mind to it. My strongest memory of her was that sometimes when I spoke to her, dashed in on her, rarely, unexpectedly, importunately no doubt, as children will, she would frown and turn slowly her whole body towards me in surprise [and then] as though an enormous burden she could neither explain nor bear, was being placed on her heart. I remember looking round, on one occasion, for the uninvited stranger who must have come into the room, and finding only myself.

Even while I endured that heavy image on my heart, while the pain of it was still there, Aunt Molly's voice butted in with a name. "...and Matthew's sister Lisette was your mother's friend. Lisette and Bee. Those two young girls lived in each other's pockets at Loverdale House." Lisette Kellory, Matthew's sister, Philip's mother, not of the smallest interest or memory to me. I had never met her. "I always thought your mother Bee might have married Matthew," Aunt Molly mused. "Is that why she was living in the Kellory House?" "But he was a very callous young man - careless, careless young man. And here he is being careless all over again. Berenice ought to have married Matthew and your father Charles ought to have married Lisette."

I did not stop to ask myself how we had arrived at this familiar but always transfixing turn of the conversation. By my unuttered thoughts no doubt. I had often had that experience. No, all I could think was, `Then I should never have been born.' Tonight the weather was hot and the idea went very naturally and hard home - this idea that seemed to have crossed the minds of so many people - to roost with the thought of being dead anyway. One has been born, fortuitously as it were, as a result of trials of strength and affection between careless young adults. A stunning thought, but a bit of a non-starter. (After all it is against chance, I had established, that you have to wrest meaning from life.) It was at that point that I sat there and prepared myself to look on Matthew Kellory, the next time I saw him, to explore him with new free eyes. I had had crushes on and off him, ever since I was born.

"What?" I said.

"I said Matthew is getting married again."

I could not believe it.

"Don't look so stupid child. The lady is Mrs. Patricia Raleigh-Kenys. Know her? Of course you know her. She was the lady who said, Why don't you send them all away to school. What? I said, Send orphans away? That's a poor notion of the right way to bring up orphaned girls with a family name to live up to. She was a researcher into criminal statistics at the Home Office, some such occupation. She's probably taken him on as a case! We must think of a useful wedding present," Aunt Molly smiled, by no means kindly.

Post 6

A STOLEN LETTER: NOT THE FIRST

The previous evening before I went to bed I had taken a rather high-fettled action, even for me; for although shy and unnoticeable sometimes to a degree that used to make me angry but no longer does, I have never been unadventurous. I had, over the past weeks, found and systematically rifled Aunt Molly's very private old-letter drawer full of the papers of my late Uncle Paul. It was not the place where she kept Philip's letters and, sometimes indiscreetly, letters of `general interest' to the rest of us: which being freely available nobody but me had time to read. This private drawer had no handle, it was at the back of her desk, and to my paralysed astonishment, opened for me to a random touch like Aladdin's cave one day when she had asked me to look for her glasses. It was from Uncle Paul's papers there that I discovered, a little later, that my other grandfather Alistair had been murdered by his wife Jenny my other grandmother. But last night I had stolen a letter I did not intend to put back. It contained an unusual, unsettling revelation. I read it again.

This letter was one of several from my father to his elder half-brother my Uncle Paul. It was about my mother. It was from the Boulevard St. Michel, Paris, Thursday evening, July 1939. `My dear Paul, It is very late. Idleness prevents my getting into bed. I have finished my work. I am driven to letterwriting. This damned war-scare is all over the streets here and no-one talks about anything else. Paris is in a panic; not wild, shouting fear, but gentle quick-glancing panic, which confident official references to the Maginot Line do nothing to allay... Poor Berenice, she still works too hard, practises too long, worries too much about her career, which is all fantasy, as you know, for her gift has left her. She worries, (but with a touch of exaltation), I think, about a new war; she worries about me, about the little girls. In her last letter she writes of `tendencies she does not admire in Sarah', who, let me remind you, is at present under five years old! Berenice writes like this as though I have been away for years. I have been away five days tomorrow. I return on Tuesday, and whatever she means by `tendencies' other than Sarah's natural inclination not to practise the piano eight hours a day, it will be one of the subjects for her interminable, mad, metaphysics when I get back; and a mysterious disappearance will follow. My character, friends, means of livelihood will be called to account once more by my poor sick girl. Sometimes I wonder if I can stand it. I must stand it. Too much has already been sacrificed to standing it. I feel like taking her bodily to see the man that old Streeter advised us to see, for there is no prevailing with her. Something is eating her life away. What a joyful girl she was when we married. How soon that changed. My guilt is boundless when I am with her and eats me up. I hate myself, and sometimes, God help me, I hate her. Perhaps after all she should have married Matthew.

Bee's solution to our `problem' (for she regards them collectively as one, large familiar and revered old friend - and perhaps they are, as most of you seem to believe, but if I accept that I think I might despair) is that the war situation being what it is, she should take the three girls to Washington. Maybe she is right to think we should go our separate ways; but the idea of Matthew, of all people, taking them under his wing in Washington is intolerable to me. In any case, how could he possibly, after all that has happened, want ever to set eyes on Bee again? In the event of war it would probably be the best place for them, there is no doubt, but in her present condition of health she could not even undertake the journey, let alone endure the exile. I do wish she would let herself get well, but I think her heart is now forever set against that...'

I did not finish it. It was signed by my father Charles. I gazed at the handwriting and the signature, upright, bold, astonished and sad that this mark on the paper had lasted so much longer than he had. It was a terrible letter to me, and my mind, as it was the first time I read it, lingered interminably on the one sentence where I stopped. Reading it yet again, I came with a fresh shock, as every time it had shocked me, to: `Perhaps after all she should have married Matthew'. As if the consequences of my mother having married my father and not Matthew were, after all, inconsequential. I felt personally affronted and insubstantial. It brought back a remark to my mind that I had once overhead Aunt Molly make to Matthew himself. `Charles's mistake was that he did not realise that Bee was unfit to have children.' As if the existence of the three of us, in Molly's household and under Molly's care did not give the lie to that!

I sat on the bed a long time, pondering once more. No, I did not have the slightest wish to go swimming, or move. It was not that, later, I did not intend to do my homework; it simply never crossed my mind to do it.

Post 5

MORE HOT DAYS

At school, the sixth form after lunch, a retiring there of spirit into the deeper recesses of heat, into the enjoyment of bodily stillness, the studying of red patterns on the closed eyelids, fantasies of the male and female life on the edge of sleep.

That morning I had awoken with the luxurious feeling that always comes to me when I have dreamed about my parents. I knew I had been with them. I trusted the dream more than the contents of the letter I had stolen.

"Constance!"

I was informed that a letter had gone to my Aunt Molly advising her of the impossibility of my getting through the coming examinations. I was always ashamed of those letters, although apparently brazen. No, I had nothing to say.

I was sorry about the school letter but not for long downcast by it. Once out in the air I was full of joy, sprightly and inventive, as the first hot days always made me. I rushed home on my bicycle to Golden Square Gardens, enjoying the sunbaked traffic; at one with a community of drivers. I still like that feeling, that we drivers are all powerful and skilful on the roads. As I turned into Golden Square Gardens, the sun was full on the front of No. 22, blazing on it; the clean sharp shadows in the unhacked forest trees enclosed in the communal garden delighted me. I bounced my bicycle down into the basement area and dashed back and up the stone steps to the front door; that scorching once-white door, white again in the sunshine. I was going to the swimming baths in Silver Street. I stood for a moment, my eyes shut and the sun full on my face. It was as if when I opened the door the sun invited itself in with me. As if a dazzling particle split off at the spin and entered with me. The old hall was suddenly flooded with light. I frowned and shaded my eyes with both hands from the radiance. Straight ahead of me, in the very heart of the heat, on the area of wall behind the winding of the stairs stood my mother and father hiding their eyes from the brightness, and between them stood Jesus, not shadowed there, but coloured in clothes of blue and green. I stopped and the door closed behind me although I have no memory of shutting it. The sight faded. I must have stood there moments on end, my heart beating the mind out of me.

I mention the weather.

Frances my elder sister adores heat because it allows her perhaps to wilt and wallow, thus taking many burdens off her conscience and will. It also makes her very beautiful: reddens her lips, glints her hair. This does not always make her better-tempered, with me anyway, but I think it makes her happier. In theory, she is a sun-lover. But one or two days are max. Perhaps this summer was different. Sarah, who is two years older than I am, comes to life in the heat I've noticed. I mean more than usual. She becomes full of inventions for parties (though Sarah's parties never were in our house unfortunately), runs up ridiculous clothes, paints of course (I think she had just started at the Kenttner Annexe in those days as an art student) plays the piano and reduces her sleep to about four hours a night.

I am different. In the heat I begin to simmer quietly; my eyes feed my heart, no reference to me. Many things have happened to me on hot days. The Old House where I lived with my parents in London was blown up by a stray landmine on a hot day just before lunchtime 17th June 1942. Both my parents were killed; and I, but not my sisters who were in Birley Fine, was reported dead. I have seen that in the newspapers that have been kept. A mark of Favour: myself reported dead; I alive to read it. (For years I could not recall whether it was Matthew or Gerald Streeter, our doctor, who took me by force away, I remember yelling and screaming and only just before the explosion. I have never forgotten the force. In dreams I used to hear myself screaming.)

Whenever it gets hot I seem to remember, by that I mean I remember without any will or effort, it comes to me that I was reported killed, and I am naturally very thankful to be alive. (It was a hot day, in the early evening, now I think of it, in May 1951, when the telegram came from the War Office to say that Philip had died in Korea.) What comes back to me when it gets hot is that every day may be your last and there is no heavenly design in life. Any meaning life has you must make entirely for yourself. (I used to get excited about that as an obvious and astonishing idea of pure freedom until I discovered it was not true.) I always remembered that as if I'd just thought of it for the first time. Any meaning life has you must make for yourself; and just to re-have that thought fresh was the actual source of revelations, creative thoughts about sex and friendship and work with me, and it made me very powerful.

It made me daring in the mind, anyway. That summer there were more revelations than usual - above all the power to recognise familiar people and situations as new and strange. I came into a power of language, an inheritance of, how shall I say? my own experiences as a child, all with tongues and I began to understand all this activity as a slowly gathering assembly of portents, Presences, selves, benign, exuberant, and unignorable. All coming, talking to me, answering me from the very limits of my life, out of the heat, out of the twice-granted life, coaxing, whispering Look closely at this! Notice that! Consider! Observe! How delightful! How strange! How promising! Find out! I stood there, with the vision of my parents fading, the geological folds of my mind stirring, the past stirring itself - I had that exact impression, the Past - in the heat and shadow of the hall. The sun is an ancient red ball of fire and life, requires you by sunlight and oxygen, by the energy in the blood and memory, to - urges you to - you are in love with him - go, go, go. The hall was dark green in shadows and above me, coming in at the stained stair window, a dazzling shaft of sun falling.

I went straight upstairs, up and up again, to my bedroom. Instantly, as I opened the door, bringing with me the vision I had seen in the hall, my dream of the night before came to meet me. I sat down on the bed edge and closed my eyes. Hot, quiet, lulled, I was in the presence of my parents.

I did not imagine they were there. I did not even sit there thinking about them. I simply sat in their presence reassured. The red world behind my eyelids has a different time-scale, a moment is an age. When I opened my eyes I did not move, but the old time-scale reasserted itself.

I did not go to the Silver Street Baths to swim.

Post 4

"Saw them in Kew Gardens?" Aunt Molly questioned; seriously, I knew, because she took off her reading glasses again to see me better. "What were you doing in Kew Gardens may I ask?"
She might have asked, she might not. I was prepared. "Ah! Half day. For the exams. I didn't tell you(?)" Not a word of a lie, a self-imposed half-day and I did not make the last sentence even very much of a question. "I took my, a, notebook."
"Good girl. Don't let me get any more letters."
No indeed, for she might feel obliged to the headmistress to answer the next one herself. I went straight upstairs and left a note on Sarah's bed, in code, to tell her I needed a letter forged in Aunt Molly's hand for school next morning. Temperature 103. Aunt Molly would not really have minded giving me a letter to excuse me herself, but it would have been without reference to temperature or any other disobliging disturbance, on the never-apologise-never-explain principle she adopted in commerce with friends, relations, servants alike. But oh, the nuisance for her, of putting pen to paper. It would have been unforgivable to put her to such trouble. And oh, the embarrassment to me, to be the messenger bearing the unconventional, unpredictable, and quite unsatisfactory excuse note to my Head Mistress.


COMPOSITION
Write an account of a very hot day you have enjoyed.

The sky blue enamel, the sun glittering on the grits of London pavement, the trees burdened with a shining splendour of heat to be borne only in absolute stillness, Constance, accompanied at lunchtime by the man person she loves, walked the dazzling dry street. Even the birds were silent.

Under his sunblind, a grocer at quarter past one in the afternoon, sits outside his shop asleep. Constance studies the little pouts of his bottom lip as breaths escape. Behind him, the dark cave of the empty store quiet and cool against the glare from the pavement. Outside the fruit-piled greengrocers' shops, even some oranges, outside the flower shops on the high road, runnellings of water crisscrossing into the gutter from flushing hoses to keep the dust down. No fish on the slabs, no meat rations in the windows, only bunches of tired parsley.

Distant sun-struck windows flash high beams and messages across the squares and by-ways of the town. A reader of such messages, she smiles at her perfect companion. Nothing to say.

In the royal parks, bleached, unpainted deckchairs support bodies lifeless to this world. [From the particular to the generalised] It is as if each body in a deep dream has taken leave to explore some private penumbra which has set up a silence between it and the distant traffic. Everywhere throughout the metropolis, young men stretch upon the public lawns and parish greens, by lakes and ponds; young women in pale cottons, clean blouses, shoes cast upon the grass, lie prone and distant beside the remains of picnic lunches, accepting languidly, here and there, a caress from the breeze or a man's hand; all magazines and newspapers on the droop, few interested in what the world has to bring. The old on the nod and blink, chins upon chests, on the park benches, where you don't have to pay and you don't have to drop your bottom into a deck chair like a spoonful of pudding into a basin.

Four o'clock and in the dark green clubrooms, [What do you know of gentlemen's clubs?] substantial men dream of the evening to come, cold suppers, cool wine and mild flirtations in the summer gardens of the home counties. There is a droning of bees and the whiskery noises of other insects, the distant hum of an occasional aeroplane, the sounds of ships' hooters from the river, smell of mock-orange and petrol and dust and grass and stone and water, all these effects forwarding those plans to get to the sea, get lost in a hot wood, make love, drink nectar. Today. The first day of heat, an hour for dreams and memories. It had come to this: she had a special person there, (though he was reading, and I could not) sitting beside her, on a seat bearing the inscription Swynnerton bore "Silver, a flowered cross sable" Isobel Ferguson who Loved Summer Days. Nothing more than that, but it seemed like everything." [Please see me]

That was about three years after Matthew had married Patricia, when my famous three wishes had come awe-inspiringly true. Later that very evening, I seem to have written:
"This cooling beautiful night with a warm blissful late spring day full of Matthew's company behind me and half a moon up now over the misty park, my world all given back to me, free from school for ever, here I am living in Matthew's flat as part of his household, Patricia and her daughters. The `two women' he had inherited quite as if he were really my father. Not quite. There is between us the promise of something like the loving relationship I used to dream about as a child in all my fantasies. Something like it. The thought of its developing further as my fantasies developed it is very dreadful and attractive to me; and I cannot deny that this possibility of a real love affair between Matthew and me and the weather with its promises is what has set me so hard to write again, and what helps to give zest to this piece of work. I have now undertaken to myself, to put everything I have ever written in order, from the beginning. I know my concealed intentions are ambivalent, because it is a mental desire (I think) which prompts me to say to myself, 'but a love affair with Matthew is simply more life, simply more complicated, rich experience, properly due to the self and its expansion'. But I have to admit that I work superbly well, and I am conscious to the very farthest edges of my senses and my vision of the whole universe it sometimes seems to me, at times when I am, as now, emotionally and sexually aroused to an intense degree."

At that time, if it was a love-affair, it was a love-affair with pen and paper and words. How marvellous it must have been to be so young, so frank, so confident, so delighted; how magnificent to make one's self up as one went along getting it all down on paper with no sense of the intense selection that went into it all. Such careless fantasies; so unaware of the dangers. And how often I sat down to put all my writings in order, to `start again from the beginning', as now I do for the last time. Every day in those days was a new beginning. With the small shore wave breaking over my toes, I watched the deep billows far out in the future and contemplated with such gladness how very softly they would break over my shoulders and I would float above the undertow of my pain at last.

The black martins, the swifts, brought me back to these old bundles, but now I forget why. I was looking for some starting-place in 1950. It was before Matthew came that summer with his announcements. Sometime in May? I wrote about it, possibly about that time.