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.