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.