Post 9

SPOUTING

Matthew handed me the book back. I wiped my eyes. He winked at me.

"I don't suppose either of you were aware that there was an attempt to make the son of Lucy Waters King of England?"

"What is that, she's got?" Tom wanted to know.

"I sent you a set last summer. I don't suppose for a moment you've ever opened it."

"Haven't I? No, I suppose I haven't. But I've got one, so that's good. Is lunch ready?"

I was kissing Tom's father very heartily and Tom was thinking, I knew, that I was pretty soppy. Tom came back and kissed his father too. I collected the best books, all I could carry and a few over, and I followed Tom upstairs, reciting at full blast: `The nation, awaking from its rapturous trance, found itself sold to a foreign, a despotic, a Popish court.' The pile became inordinate again on the second floor, seriously so, and I was picking them all up when Frances appeared coming down the stairs very dressed. "`Even in the bosom of that very House of Commons which had been elected by the nation in the ecstasy of its penitence, of its joy and of its hope,'" I declaimed to her, and I was just going on when she said, "You're not spouting again?"

"`Of its joy and of its hope,`" I shouted after her, "`an opposition sprang up and became powerful.'" I was leaning too far over the banister in order to get my effect and a book fell off the pile and on to her head beneath, and oh, the ecstasy of that in which there was no penitence whatever. She had a strong arm and chucked it back. It landed behind me somewhere near Tom's door in a painfully flabbergasted state. I was filled with virtuous disgust and staggered on upstairs.

As luck would have it I was still at it at lunchtime, mumbling under my breath. "`The storm had been long gathering. At length it burst with a fury which threatened the whole frame of society..."

"You spend time learning acres and acres of nonsense; why don't you turn your talents to something useful like Shakespeare?" Frances pushed her chair back.

"God spare us," Aunt Molly put in.

"I'm afraid she spent no time at all," Matthew laughed, and his laugh made me feel extremely comfortable. "It runs in the family. You remember, Molly?"

"Have you asked her what it all means?" Aunt Molly enquired severely.

"I wouldn't rely myself for one moment on what it means, but for dramatic effects it can't be beaten." It was not, this trait that ran in the family and as practised by me, held in very high esteem as I well knew. Nevertheless, it ran in the family and I was the only one who had inherited it. It was a mark of Favour. I enjoyed a lovely warm flush of smugness.

In that summer of 1950 such flattering incidents, recalled, set greatly pleasing fantasies fluttering round me every day. I picked out, for special imaginative treatment on the theme of physical encounter with Matthew, back-rubbing, hand-holding, the way he would, in the old days, occasionally lay his hand on the back of my bare neck. Other pieces of mind I had not known I'd got were not idle either. In one of the more respectable ones of these I conducted dialogues with him (indeed invented them only with a view as to how I should in the event conduct them), on such topics as the grace of the swaying acacia trees. I told him how you could crystallise with liquid sugar the long cream floreted bunches of blossom, to eat. I described the shape of birds' heads, the shoes and stockings of pleasant old ladies promenading in the market, and nothing was too trivial to delight us, trapped as we were together in my mind. His responses, all my own work as they were, always congratulated me on my percipience. Even my recent brush, my first, with the authorities (police to be exact) on the prohibited post-war Grodust bomb-site near the Silver Street Baths, I told him about. (I was as a matter of fact on that occasion waiting hopefully there, looking around, for the appearance of certain boys, when the police, one policeman, had taken me unwilling and embarrassed, to stand in front of each DANGER notice, in turn, requiring me to Read!) Having told Matthew an elegantly edited version of this, and he with my assistance having appreciated the lark, I felt better about their having my name and address.

My actual encounters with him had ceased to have any regularity about three years before, after the war had ended, and I now met him on the odd occasions when I happened to be in and he happened to call. (Although I had been known to mope about, waiting for him, when it was almost perfectly certain that he would not come.) But now, I was in love with him again, and this time it was different. There was a curious new element in it all.

Go, go, go! insisted the presences assembling. Write it down! Don't lose a moment of it! I was in great good health, ready to force my way to power with Matthew. It was not so much `and damn Mrs. Patricia Raleigh-Kenys'; I simply did not give her a thought.

Towards the middle of June, when the heat-dreams had at last had to come to terms with the reality of the simmering town, the sameness of work, the dearth of nymphs and knights, and no breeze or shower had loosened the sun's grip on the baked earth and inhabitants, even then, when Matthew had not been near us, this extraordinary assembly of presences in me was still in good fettle. It had worked out exactly how I would be with him when he at last came. "If thou look'st Uncle in my eye thou art undone." That sort of thing. Underneath all the excitement of being in love, and in love with being in love, there was something else. It seemed to me that I had seen the past, the Past, there in Matthew for the finding. It seemed to me, I think, at that point, that my isolation from the past, from any real knowledge of my mad mother and broken father, was the cause of the sadness that was always waiting for me at the bottom of my heart.


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