tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-53405882039066765872024-02-08T11:20:02.357+00:00CONSTANCE YOKEHAM by Jacqueline WheldonVolume One: ACT OF GOUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger22125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5340588203906676587.post-59954403168914067942012-08-21T18:19:00.002+01:002012-08-21T18:19:51.997+01:00POST 22
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">From
behind the tulip tree Constance saw all:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Philip laughing with Sarah, that hint of unqualified energy in both of
them, unwatchfully themselves, rather more unusual in public, in Sarah, but
always there behind the thumb-sucking.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>They kissed lightly but definitely.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Sarah's silvery head thrown back, her beautiful mouth and nose distorted
with laughing so much and the kiss.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Philip kissing Sarah was nothing
complicated.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or, at least, you could say
it had been happening for years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>More
unexpected - this was Sarah kissing Philip, for she had put out her long thin
arms and pulled his face down to her mouth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Everyone doing it, kissing Philip, these days, public and private.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Philip had not sneezed at this capture, of
course, but it was the laughing and talking that counted;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>that, and Sarah examining his coat
buttons;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the intimacy of it and the way
it carried Sarah out of herself.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Sarah had already walked off still
laughing, swanking, very like Frances, with her bottom wagging, when Constance
saw Camilla watching.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Philip,
absentminded once more, had kicked the old deflated football flying.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Constance knew, sadly at last, he did not
want girls.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Constance hurried to catch
Sarah up, as if Sarah, having suddenly joined in proceedings, had now become
vulnerable.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>"That'll give Camilla something to
sulk about," said Sarah pleasantly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Constance construed that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That
was:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>one, taking Philip and his sister
seriously as lovers;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>two, attempting to
admit impediment between them;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>three,
completely overlooking the position, expectations and possible rights going
back now many, many months, of Frances in the question of Philip Harisonn's
mature embraces;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>four, being totally
ignorant of how things had proceeded, had seemed to proceed, as between Philip
and Constance;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>five, underestimating the
new Philip into the bargain.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Constance
had a thrilling shock of pure isolation;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>one sees not what another sees, even though this one was her sister
Sarah, and she, Constance and all her cohorts, had her by the invulnerable arm.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>"Philip's got a new girl-friend, I
think" said Sarah.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>For one delirious moment, Constance
thought Sarah must be referring to her.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>"Ah!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Look who comes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I thought he would."<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sarah, standing stock-still, waited.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Dr. Gerald Streeter joined them, a
smooth and substantial man, with such a weary look.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Gerald never moved fast if slow would do,
never answered quickly if an answer could be suspended while silence took
place.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But it was deceitful of him
because in the matter of a quick answer his thought-processes seemed well above
average, and in the matter of questioning you, he could give you the impression
you had been suddenly seized by a lie-detector.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Constance was wary of Dr. Streeter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Not old.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Extremely well-dressed,
in that quiet way doctors favour.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Straight grey eyes, clean-shape, doctor, friend.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At least, Constance had the impression that
he occasionally noticed her.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>"Hello," said Sarah, and
sucked her thumb.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>"Gerald, when are
you going to find that old case for me?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>My paints will exactly fit it."<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Sarah whined and sounded about ten years old, took Gerald's hand, and
went on sucking her thumb.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Constance was seeing something having
to do with the fact that she herself could greet Gerald Streeter only far more
gravely and, this afternoon, as it happened, meltingly, for she was tired of
being unnoticed and Gerald had looked searchingly at her when she smiled at him.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>This time, however, she was
disconcerted with being so melted.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She
rushed off through the rose-hedge, round the rose-hedge, and back into the
drawing-room diving between Matthew and Molly on their way out.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>She flopped into a puffy chair,
conscious of behaving in a ridiculous manner for her age, and
disappointed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All this rushing about was
not how she felt.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She discarded, as
being all too likely to succeed, the idea of going home unnoticed, and
substituted for it the idea of going out and getting thoroughly run over by a
lorry.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>From where she sat she could see
Philip in the garden having a well-deserved bad time with Frances.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They were quarrelling were they?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Tom, who now couldn't leave Philip alone, or
perhaps it was Frances in Philip's company he couldn't leave alone, was at that
moment approaching them with his father.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Dull old Matthew.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Frances,
recovering her glances from the trees and restraining certain admonitory gestures,
instantly held court.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Evanwoods had
arrived out there, Sarah embraced Mervyn and ignored his father, John Evanwood,
MP., to whom she had not spoken for years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Constance envied her sisters their self-possession in the presence of
men.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>But then, had either of them ever been,
for instance, in the hands of a priest who for years had been feeling the
cockles of their bottom on Wimbledon Common?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>That little worrying secret had not yet come out.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It might and it might not.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What would Frances do in such a
situation?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Constance would think up no
circumstance which would find Frances wanting at least a word or gesture
exactly appropriate to that circumstance's place in time, space and world
thought.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Frances would have hit him
perhaps?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Father Horbark, confessor,
friend, and neighbour?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nothing to
Frances.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Minimally, you could say
Frances would know exactly what she, Frances, <u>thought</u>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Constance did not know what she, Constance,
thought.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She had tried to be nice to
Father Horbark at the same time as keeping him at arm's length and well out of
the thickets on the Common through which for several years he had insisted on
carrying her.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Until one day she simply
couldn't help laughing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Her great legs
sticking out of his old puffing belly, his beard buried in her stomach.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Being nice to him was still especially
difficult because on these occasions he was such a bore.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On, and on, and on, the same question:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>ought she to be punished for being such a
naughty girl?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On and on.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Only to change it, when she would not answer
to:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>if so, how?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hand, brush, or ruler?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Always the same.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Why not lightning, fire, or boils?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For he was an intelligent and kindly man and
a very interesting theologian despite his sadism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The green and the yellow were always rinsed
out of those afternoons, turning them grey all over with the boredom of all
that thoughtful pain politely suffered.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Indifference without rudeness, very difficult.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Just as friendliness without sexual desires
seemed rather difficult this afternoon.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Constance, with resignation, remembered that Father Horbark would want
to take her out for a walk tomorrow afternoon after Sunday-school, and Aunt
Molly would say how nice of course she must go, and extraordinarily, she would
go, politely, unable to disappoint him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>As if she owed him something.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Sarah had disappeared once more.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Lucky old Sarah.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Constance always missed her when Sarah
followed her luck.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One could be quite
sure that Sarah would come out of a Father Horbark encounter smiling.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sarah would never get into it, of
course.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Really, she seemed to have the
most complete sense of self-preservation Constance had ever known.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sarah had a self such as nothing in the
world, with the exception perhaps of Gerald Streeter, could qualify against
Sarah's will.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Tom, deprived of a further private
conversation with Philip, or, as it may be, Frances, was on his way in from the
garden.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He stopped at the doorway.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>"And another thing," he
called to his father and Aunt Molly behind, "you have to bear in mind that
in another five years or so you're going to fall into the hands of a generation
who want something different, who didn't go to the wars at all, and won't go,
and who don't care for all this living in the gallant past...<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>"</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Tom's imitation of living in the
gallant past, with that hair and those fat hips and lips wobbling and
swaggering was ludicrous.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Constance
burst out laughing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He looked at her
very sternly and winked.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>"If you, dear Tom, are an example
of those you refer to, I trust we shall all be dead," Aunt Molly said
coming in as Tom and Philip left the room again.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>"He's right, of course," she said,
"and one welcomes it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Freshness and
zest."</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>"But we are not to cramp their
style, are we, by too ready an accommodation?" Laekia followed on.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Molly Absecond, who believed in the
subversion of society under cover of manners and the conventions, beamed
appreciatively.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Her two little soft
chins, her little beak of a nose and her bright eyes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She's like a sweet shiny little bird today,
Constance thought.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was
reassuring.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Constance dozed.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Laekia laughed and shook, and her
bangles shook and tinkled.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Constance
woke up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>"No, no, no.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I insist, you are a nation of worriers,"
Laekia said.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>"That is my most
useful sense of you.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Conscience-mongers," she added a little more tartly and with
amusement to see them pay attention.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>"Two sides to every question.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But rarely three, or seven, or seventeen sides.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Just two.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Good and bad, right and wrong, for and against, public and private, life
and death, and never the twain to meet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>And those who do not work at their opinions monopolise one side of every
question just the same.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Oh no, excuse me
Geoffrey, pragmatists or not, you British are rarely free to celebrate your
twenty-five experienced selves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You have
crumbs on your chin, Geoffrey."</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>"Laekia, I shall miss you,"
Molly said.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>"East is East and West is West and
never the twain shall meet," chanted Mrs. Penny Evanwood, bending her
young bulk stiffly from the waist to secure a lonely cucumber sandwich from a
low table.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I don't know about that, Constance
thought, sleepy and disgruntled, watching Camilla now on Philip's arm;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>oh, I don't know.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>"The North Korean Army crossed the
parallel last Saturday the twenty-fourth of June," Geoffrey gulped his
whisky ferociously, saying what apparently had to be said, was expected to be
said, pleasant little gathering or no, to Molly Absecond who could not agree
with him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The aggressors, she said were
the South Koreans.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Constance dozed.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Mrs. Sage entered noisily with
refillings of water and a new brew.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Constance opened one eye.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How did
Mrs. Sage figure as a British worrier?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>She was a worrier, of course.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She
was a British worrier of the class who worry about who they can get to do their
worrying for them effectively;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>as though
Mrs. Sage did not feel herself, somehow, fully-fledged in her rights in the
worrying respect.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Sarah was back softly playing the
piano, beautifully playing the Scarlatti Pastorale, despite Mrs. Penny
Evanwood's weighty presence on the piano, her unsynchronized foot-tapping
work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sarah paused in what seemed a flawless
phrase, rearranged an emphasis, frowned ...<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>"Ah!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You know, you should take it up
seriously.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Oh no, I quite mean what I
say, you should take it up seriously.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Oh
no, please, I must say what I think, I think you should take the piano up
seriously, take music up seriously."<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Mrs. Evanwood beamed on Sarah, who sat dumbly looking at her.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>"You're a shy modest child.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I know.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>And I know how well your teachers think of you, I've been talking to
your Aunt, and you must overcome your reluctance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You play divinely."</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>"I don't play divinely.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I play seriously."</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>"Naughty child," Penny
Evanwood cooed, fluttering her fingers under Sarah's nose.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>"You must make an effort.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Effort!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I know you young people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You're
all lazy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Like my pretty one,
Shirley.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Going in for nursing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If she only took it seriously as she ought,
she could be a doctor."</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>"This piano is out of tune,"
Sarah said in a straight-eyed way that caused Mrs. Evanwood to place her point
solely on one more flutter of her fingers and a bleat:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>"Naughty girls.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Naughty girls."<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sarah excused herself and went back into the
garden.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Geoffrey Harisonn was explaining to
Molly what a typical Hate Week in China was like.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Molly Absecond, on behalf, apparently, of the
Chinese was resisting him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Constance
looked at them balefully.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>"What's the matter with
you?"<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Matthew bent down.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>"Off your food?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Fallen in love?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I haven't seen a single smile the whole
afternoon."<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Matthew had just
planted an avuncular rub on Constance's head when Camilla that tall and bronze
young woman, not much older than Frances, came over to her mother bringing,
very subvertly, Gerald Streeter's attention with her.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Constance was unmistakably excited and
envious about that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Leaving Camilla to
take on her duties, Laekia came round the table to start leave-taking of her
guests.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She asked first for news of
Matthew's Patricia.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Constance sat by
their standing figures with her eyes closed.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>"Patricia has taken a real fancy
to Ludlow.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She's there now.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She means to renovate it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I think I shall have to inhibit one or two of
her more ambitious schemes," Matthew laughed, in a way most loving of
Patricia and himself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>"It's needed
a woman there for years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I can't tell
you how delighted I am."</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Ludlow!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Just the very name made her heart stop beating for a moment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Arden.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Arcadia.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was a loss very hard
to bear and more powerful, for a moment, than the memory of the kisses Philip
had given and forgotten.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She put her
hands in her face.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Where the hell was
Sarah?</span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5340588203906676587.post-86960974920237442482012-08-21T18:18:00.000+01:002015-07-31T23:00:49.593+01:00POST 21<style>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Constance
and her cohorts went in search of Sarah in the darker spaces of the house.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Funny word, <u>go</u>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Many opportunities for remembering how funny
it really was these days.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She shivered
in the sunless interior.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sarah was
nowhere to be found. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Constance felt
keenly, in the absence of Sarah, the pointlessness just under the surface of
everything in life as she looked into and studied every empty room.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She was enthralled by the ludicrous
inequality between the persistence of the ancient furniture and the life-span
of a young woman measured out in sunny Saturday afternoons and she rejoiced in
her vision.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rejoiced, really, in the
limitless freedom of those powers of human invention that the vision showed her.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am the centre of the universe and without
me nothing has meaning.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One-sidedness
would do.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>However, Loverdale House was decidedly
not, had never been, her favourite place.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In all the years she had known it, it had been a closed house, rarely
lived in.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There was no life here, no
family, no servants, and only Mrs. Sage helping out at the two-day visits.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In Loverdale she liked to keep to the public
rooms.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even for one accustomed, as she
was, uninvited and at the smallest opportunity to study in strange houses - for
there is always in human arrangements something to learn - what must be
considered the strictly private, such as closed bookrooms, bedrooms overlooking
gardens, planning of bathrooms, ingenuity of airing cupboards, coolness of
larders, inclusiveness of dressing-rooms, the ventilation mechanisms of roof
windows, space on high landings, light and air wells, places where the guns and
boots and bicycles are kept, outbuildings with or without livestock (habit
picked up first in Ludlow), there was no sacrifice in keeping to the public and
peopled rooms of this familiar old house.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Yet she went bravely on her way until she came to Philip's bedroom, the
one he usually used, and here she sat on the bed and took up his reading,
complete with notes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She turned to the
notes, all dots, dashes and flashes, idly at first, not recognising them for
what they were;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and even when she did
she went on reading.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There was a quarrel
here with someone called Richard St. Ains, last week, and a letter to that
gentleman no less;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>she turned quickly
on.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Philip's ideas about staying in the
Army as an instructor and what he would teach, there was a great deal about
taking Frances up a mountain, none of which she stopped more than a few moments
to read, on the grounds that that might fairly constitute not reading any of it
at all.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But she then came to a riveting
bit about a Diary.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>`A reminder and
record, rarely referred to, of mental and physical events.'<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not my idea of a Diary.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She looked up from her reading.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She was being watched.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>She went quickly into the
corridor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nobody.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As she turned at the door, the white and
crimson tiles in the fireplace winked at her.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The old yew cupboard and chest, yellow and glinting;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>what there was of daylight reflected off the
polish of these objects all-seeing stares of blank white light.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>See.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even the heavy old crimson bedspread;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>she stood there mesmerised before it;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>faceted with sheened quilting, it was a mass
of eyes, alert little bright eyes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>See.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>You.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Everything stood around her
accusing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The whole atmosphere, eyes,
conniving with her sixth sense, the activity of which she was inclined to
discourage in timid moments - this being one.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Wracked with guilt - nevertheless despite it - perhaps because of it -
not to pay the price of guilt for nothing - she decided in a sudden inspiration
- in the name of creative interference - to borrow a book! - any book - take it
- she took - not the one being read - but another, without looking at it - take
it and leave - No - put the notes straight - how were they? - Leave - and do <u>what</u>
with the book? - Put it where? - How leave the house with it? - She put it back
and hastily left the room.</span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5340588203906676587.post-26977122303333754432011-12-08T11:14:00.001+00:002015-07-31T23:00:23.233+01:00POST 20 <style>
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<br />
-<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">->
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In the
garden, Camilla joined Tom and Philip, hanging on to her brother's arm,
whispering. Tom was pleased when
Philip pushed her gently off and she went away. Radiantly beautiful women embarrassed Tom, and
demonstrations that were not girlish but assuredly womanly embarrassed him
fearfully. Besides, that sort of
thing with his sister... Tom
caught Constance's eye. She was
doing overmuch beaming and grimacing in Philip's vicinity perhaps.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Philip
looked affectionately at Tom and Tom could not help feeling flattered and
pleased as well he might.
"What are you going to do?
Have you decided?"</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Tom
looked back at his graceful cousin in his old civvies and laughed
excitedly. "I know exactly,
exactly."</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "Not
much exactness ever comes out in your letters; it's mostly waffle."</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> The
present-stated degree of exactness of Tom's knowing had much to do with his
eagerness to engage Philip's whole attention again. Tom had felt a distance between them over the last year. "Brought up on Molly Absecond's
Thursday Meetings," here Tom thrust back his head housewards, "you'd
expect me to know wouldn't you?
You can't mix up poetry and philanthropy and conversation and kindness
and Fabianism and communism and uninformed abuse and letters to the newspapers
as she does and call that politics."</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "Don't
be too sure about it," Philip said mildly after a moment. "In any case, everything's not as
sure as it was. Anyway, I'm not
really talking about your politics.
I'm talking about your imminent call-up."</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "Oh
that! I'll stay out of it as long
as I can, completely if I can.
Anyway, come what may, I finish my degree and go dead seriously into
politics. Labour Party
centre. I've told you. History of the working-class movement
in this country to be properly interpreted. Get a proper language.
Much overdue." But he
was at a loss to fill up the silence.
"Don't you agree?"
Even that remark about language failed to rouse. As Philip said nothing, Tom took the
opportunity to kick the very old football up the garden, watching it soar and
land dead. "You know, make
the Labour Party real for <u>us</u>, work like hell... "</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Constance
sighed with a frustrated desire to shine in some way; explode perhaps.
Bleak House.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "No,
I'm talking about your imminent personal fate. You're going to be called up. You never talk about that in your letters."</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "You
seem to have... I don't know,
changed your attitude about a lot of things," said Tom, running out of
ready talk. "I wish you
wouldn't keep on saying <u>imminent</u>.
Used to be a pleasure to talk to you!"</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "Are
you going to be as much of a man as your father?" Philip teased. Like Frances, Tom sometimes did not
notice teasing.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "My
father? Holy cows! How does he come into it?" Philip seemed to allow a lot of time
for Tom to answer the question for himself - which Tom failed to do. "What do you <u>mean</u>?" he
asked piteously.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "How
are you going to find out anything about yourself? Or your father?
By graduating and marrying Frances at twenty-one and going into
politics? Or what?"</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Constance
flushed. Now that was
interesting. Philip had noticed
Tom had he?</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "I
shan't be marrying anyone at the age of twenty-one I promise you. And my warrior instincts are well in
hand. We don't all have to arrive
at maturity through primitive heroism and killing. Buzz off, Con.
Fran's too good for either of us."</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "That's
something else you're quite sure about is it? What war is?
What maturity is?"</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "What?"</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "You
don't have to learn? Luckily some
of us are born mature with mature opinions on who should be fighting whom in
Korea and everywhere else no doubt, as long as it's not you apparently, as you
were telling your father the other night." Oh good! He
remembered something from the other night. "Some of us are born to be leaders of opinion? Fine."</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> You
had to hand it to Tom that he remained cool and was able at this point to
display genuine political subject-turning talent. "You've got an old idea of war from the
British Army," he said largely. "Take Korea. All you need these days is plenty of modern equipment and
more firepower than they've got.
When the Americans really get started in there, they'll reduce the whole
thing to law and order in no time.
Nothing to it. As a matter
of fact, I don't think I can possibly go into the Army. Nothing to do with bravery. I'd die of the tedium."</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "You've
got a funny idea of war... And who
mentioned bravery?" Philip laughed.
"And who are you, not to die of tedium? Better men than you have had much worse stretches of
wilderness opened to them for their exploration, beyond anything you could
imagine. They learn to possess
their own souls. You have to be
tough, of course."</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Tom
was astonished. "Well, bloody
hell. You <u>have</u> changed your
mind about a lot of things. And
your vocabulary! You're like the
rest. The Army will do me good,
make a man of me, widen my outlook.
I know! Those who can read
are allowed to talk to those who can't.
Teach them the rule book.
Two solid years of time-wasting boredom and barbarism... ."</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "Extraordinary
... about barbarians,"
Philip said. "There might not
be any barbarians except for your snotty way of looking at things. Your closed door. I should have thought a couple of years
in the democratic army would have fitted in well with your socialist principles. Or don't other people, and variety,
interest you?"</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "You
don't fool me, Phil. You've got
the weight of the old traditional family skeletons. Indian Civil Service.
Army. Brigadier Barny
Harisonn, VC. Oh, I admire
it," Tom said, fairly circumspectly, having in common with Philip another
soldier grandparent on the Kellory side, "but it's over. Honour, patriotism, colonial
tradition. Springs of glorious
action they were, not springs of thought.
India's only a start Phil.
The Empire's going to come down round your ears. And with it, the Army as we know
it. You must try to keep up with
the new times as best you can."</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> But
it was Tom who seemed old-fashioned, so tremendously full of certainty, and
closed-up; and Philip who seemed,
despite his desire to stay in the Army, modern, curious, tentative and
uncertain. Constance seemed to
recognise Philip's uncertainty as not unlike her own. It was that particular kind of uncertainty, she reassured
herself, which came from recognising more about life, not less, than Tom did.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> The
birds sang in the trees and in the silence there was no other sound and it was
at this point that Tom first realised the obvious disconnection between his
view that a war had to be fought in Korea for democracy and his own disinclination
even to go into the Army. (So far
as Constance had taken pains to gather it seemed that despite their comfortable
agreement on so much else, on Korea, Frances was with Aunt Molly for the North,
communists; while Tom, on balance
was with his father for the South, democrats. She kept trying to remember that.)</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "Look
here," Tom said belligerently, "my believing in force in Korea and
being bored by the Army is no contradiction. There's the importance of political thought and political
thinkers you don't pay attention to...
"</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "Ah! I hoped you might get round to it. Well then, the freedom of a country's
thinkers depends on its armed services, on its being able to defend itself and
its thinkers, that's you I suppose, when attacked. I don't think that will change much in the near future. You evidently consider your ideas are
being attacked, at least?"</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Constance
wondered how she would ever again be able to interest him.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "You
have to serve your time, so what are you going <u>in</u> for? That's all I'm asking. I'm trying to help."</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "It's
all one to me. You'll be back at
Oxford. Nothing for you to worry
about."</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "I? But you know I'm not going back."</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "Ah,
but you're not serious. What about
your thesis? Not going back at
all?"</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "Probably
not, unless they take me, or somebody will, as an old man!"</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "National
Service rotted your brain, or something?
I don't believe it. I
thought you were supposed to be ambitious."</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "Oh,
I'm ambitious! My ambitions have
changed. I've started the first
part of my new education where I hope to go on with it."</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "You
must be out of your mind."</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "No. I'm somewhere near speaking the
truth."</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "Education! Army! You've just got a taste for bloody paradoxes, that's
all. Oh, it's well-known. Frances always says that. Have you actually signed on?"</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "It's
in hand."</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "Are
you bent on getting to this er..?"</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "Korea? Not so easy. Meanwhile I've been offered a job as Instructor at a battle
school."</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-right: 18pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "Oh
fine, fine! Marvellous news I must
say. Go on then. Go! And more fool you."</span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5340588203906676587.post-51608389436363549972011-12-08T11:07:00.000+00:002015-07-31T23:01:31.826+01:00POST 19<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Kensington side-road was white and still; one or two parked cars, nothing moving. The sky was deep blue. The house was surrounded by ancient trees and grown over by dusty shrubs. It had for an entrance twelve-foot wrought-iron gates of oriental design set crookedly open in rust between pillars of stone with lamps on them. For aesthetic reasons they had never gone the way of less imposing ironworks into the war effort. This house had no glare on it. The dark brick soaked up light. The sun inflittering through old lime trees revealed now an unexpected window, now a broken sill, now the crutches on which this stout looking though clearly fragile house was propped at one side. Loverdale House. Sad lovers. Constance, with a cohort of her Presences, as many as had ever assembled, stood there and they could not make up her mind to go in. It reminded her of landmines and bombs. Frances, when she caught up, had no inhibitions. She flounced forward up and round the drive between banks of overgrown shrubs, some in half-hearted and dusty flower, and made her way to the front door.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "Molly! Down the side, my dear. Front is all nailed up." Philip's father, Geoffrey Harisonn, muffled in foliage at an upstairs window shouted down. The side! </span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Choked with weeds and where the props were. It was dark there, not a shaft of a glare. Frances, after her confrontation with the nailed-up front door, came purposefully round the side after them. She passed them, delicately swinging for speed round the props, and led the way. All right for her. She was going to confront Philip now. It was well-known, in that devious way Frances had of making things well-known, that she was at last and once more in the relationship of masterful altercation with Philip Harisonn since last Thursday. It was Constance now whom the idea of Philip made very nervous.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> She slipped straight into the nearest seat which happened to be the long stool of the grand piano by the garden window. On the piano was a huge bowl of fleshy flowers. Cover! Sarah put her hand briefly on Constance's neck. "It's all right," she said. "the house isn't going to fall down. You can stop crouching!"</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> The house of course is going to fall down.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Greetings exchanged.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "Hello, Mrs. Harisonn," said Frances, looking into those deep violet eyes.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "Philip is in the garden," said Laekia Harisonn, although Frances had not asked her. Frances did not budge. "He's a fool. See if you can get some sense out of him, Frances." Constance craned her giveaway feet onto the piano stool as Frances went seriously to get some sense out of Philip.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "Hello Constance," Laekia called. "I can see you!" Laekia fluttered her spiky fingers, silver nails; "Well, the Evanwoods to come; and Dr. Streeter. You, please dear Molly, speak to Geoffrey. Father and son. They've just had a quarrel here. Philip has been very bad to his uncle Matthew. Geoffrey's disappointed and worried about Philip. We expected him to go back to the University. And it's all come to it that he shall stay in the Army. And now war in Korea!"</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Constance suddenly remembered, with astonishment at forgetting, that Philip, of course, had connections with the Army and World Affairs. It now seemed a very good thing that none of them had any idea of that scene in her bedroom.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "He's certainly chosen his moment, just as you're off. And what will happen to the house?" said Molly.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "Lap of gods," said Laekia.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "It's always been in the lap of the gods," said Aunt Molly, "At the moment it looks to me as if they've stood up and dropped it." She had never been able to associate Laekia with possession of Loverdale House.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Sarah and Frances gone, Molly off to greet Geoffrey, Constance examined, under the piano, the gold-threaded design round the bottom of Mrs. Harisonn's yellow silk sari, paid minute attention to the beautiful gold sandals, the painted pointed toenails and was not in the least surprised that Philip should be in love with his half-sister Camilla who was as dark and beautiful as her mother. Laekia rustled out through the sitting-room door. Constance put away Army and world affairs and prepared to let passion and love take their place; as how could they help it? </span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> In the garden there was no Philip, but there was Tom, and what Frances did, possibly as her first move in the coming encounter with Philip, was to greet Tom extravagantly, and rear about, like a bolting lettuce in a high wind, at his very first remark. Manfully resistant to this girlish play, Tom stood there, his unignorable chest and stomach thrust out, smirking.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> The room to herself.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Constance scrutinised it; the inside less prone to collapse than outside. The puffy deep armchairs had pale dimpled cushions with bits of looking glass embroidered into them, the melon silk lampshades like faded footballs; carpet and curtains alike ballooned here and there dinged with yellow and gold. Safe. Constance breathed more easily, walked about the spacious room awfully gently. She was saving herself for the first sight of Philip when, hearing she had arrived, he rushed in to find her alone. On the mantelpiece, marble and white, stood a gold stopped clock and a few carvings of pillow-fleshed gentlemen in the lotus position with tiny maniacal grins on their shiny bald heads.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "Hello, Mrs. Sage." A woman bumping a trolley over the carpet which had swollen under and behind the door came awkwardly into the room. A strand of Mrs. Olive Sage's suspiciously orange-black hair, which was not plentiful, fell forward as a hairpin pinged over the sugar bowl. The sugar tongs plong-ed to the floor and disappeared under the table.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "Have a crawl and pick them up, there's a dear girl," said Mrs. Sage straightening up breathlessly.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "Have you seen their teeth? Come and have a look," said Constance fingering a navel reflectively.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Mrs. Sage stood undecided. She was the victim of an easily-roused curiosity and very responsive to tried friendship. Shedding and cursing another hairpin she came where she was bidden and examined the little fat thing under Constance's hand.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "Showin his pearlies, isn't he?" Mrs. Sage moved along, not too fast. "This one's my favourite." A larger piece, something spikily different in copper gilt and jewels, all four arms and ferocious private parts. "He's a bit thinner, which I prefer," said Mrs. Sage. "He's their God of Love you know. He's the Dancer. All that stomach muscle. He gets more exercise I suppose. Mr. Philip showed me." Constance transferred her finger. "Have you seen Mr. Philip's new Chinese pictures?"</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "No, what are they like?" asked Constance, face to face with a rare copy of a rare print from the Palace Museum Collection, Taichung. She watched Mrs. Sage being pleased with the picture. It was pleasing; both Mrs. Sage being pleased, and the picture. One pale plump young man playing a Chinese-type mandolin, one pale plump one, his instrument laid by, listening, one arranging flowers, all equally engaged in the pursuit of Being, as were also and very much, the banana palms. "Ch'in Ying," Mrs. Sage read out, setting back her head to get the reading distance, "Passing A Summer Day Beneath Banana Palms."</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "I know why he likes that." Constance was full of insight and therefore happiness.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "He told me" Mrs. Sage dropped her voice, "before they had the you know quarrel about the war business. Everything is of the same, all the people, all the plants, and all the musical instruments, everything equal."</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Oh yes, poet's eye and everything equal value. But there was something else as well, and Constance knew what it was. His taste for an intense and unearthly quality of spiritual outback that Camilla's great beauty also suggested. That she was his half-sister was for Philip only one thing about Camilla, and not the most important, the picture said.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "He's a great duck anyhow," said Mrs. Sage, perhaps feeling from the silence that Mr. Philip needed defending. "Even if he do give them the dickens sometimes. Very rude to his uncle, Mr. Kellory. I was surprised. Both such nice-natured people. Still, they never did get on, those two."</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "Is Susan here?" Constance said, distantly - partly because she had come over feeling plainfaced, solid of flesh and unbeautiful; partly because Mrs. Sage's whispering disturbed her. I hope Susan is not here. Constance admired Mrs. Sage, but Mrs. Sage's daughter Susan she did not. At the end of the long garden rose up a lixiodendron tree with its pretty summery leaves. Something funny had come over Mrs. Sage's voice.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "Naughty girl wouldn't come. Too high and mighty and with good friends too. Charity this and condescension that. I'm going to have explanations with her when I get back. Your sister Frances is very upset." All this savage and distant, came to Constance from under the table-cloths. Mrs. Sage after the sugar-tongs.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "Aah! It's easy to upset Frances," said Constance.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "Suz better mark my words." Mrs. Sage spoiled the room coming out backwards, crawling with a lock of hair over her face. "I don't know why your Aunt Molly or anyone else takes any notice of her." Mrs. Sage checked the trolley and went out muttering.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Poor Susan, life spent having explanations and marking her mother's words. Serves her right. Constance looked away up the garden, not quite so secure in her own lovely fate as she had been.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Behind her, in the sitting-room, Mrs. Laekia Harisonn lifted the lids of two massive silver pots and stood praying, or sniffing, in the way of the rising steam.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "Modest, well modest," she said. Her violet eyes were steamy pools. "Before the war, you know, never less than five kinds."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "What were they?" asked Philip.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "Assam, Darjeeling, Nilgiris my favourite, Malacco...</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "Earl Grey, Queen Mary Blend," put in Mrs. Sage.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "But here just two pots of plain ration tea, infused in silver, but democratic for all. Democracy its best flavour in the end, eh Mrs. Sage?" Mrs. Harisonn seemed wistful. She asked Mrs. Sage to join them in their leave taking.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "I had better clear up here quickly so I'm ready to go early, Mrs. Harisonn, thank you very kindly," said Mrs. Sage. "Susan just a bit off. Nasty headache. Working hard."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "Give my love to Susan," said Philip. "I'm sorry to have missed her. I'll have to come down and see her and Robert before I go back. I particularly want to see Robert. He missed his call-up, didn't he?"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "For which I am truly grateful poor lad. I lost his father. One's enough," said Mrs. Sage, coming out rather strongly, though quietly and privately, considering company.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "How's Terminus? I haven't been in Terminus for ages. Is it still a great place?"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "Oh, it's not um" said Mrs. Sage, pleased.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "It's a great place if you can afford to be spiritual about it. You don't have to live there," said Laekia.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "Perhaps" said Philip stiffly, as if he'd said enough to Laekia for one day.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "Yes. You can practise more-spiritual-than-thou", said Laekia, obviously not under the same inhibition.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Regulating her breathing, smoothing her hair, encouraging anodyne thoughts like stop grimacing to assuage the pain of her smile, which had got stuck, Constance was getting over the shock of Philip's sudden appearance in the flesh of open neck, old tweed trousers, not quite such a flawless appearance. He had smiled and nodded to her and put his hand on her head certainly, but Sarah was there by his side at the time.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "I like Terminus too," Constance said now; though how to dissociate this remark from looking as if she was condescending to Olive Sage and resisting Laekia when she was only encouraging Philip to look at her, she did not know. She did like Terminus, although it was very wrong to do so. It was something she and Philip had always had in common. He had never avoided the Old House.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "Little volcano you have there, Mrs. Sage," said Laekia in reference to the recalcitrant Susan. "Have two of my own." Laekia addressed herself to Philip. "They are forces of nature, the young. Philip and Camilla, do they belong to us I ask myself."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> "They don't," said Molly Absecond.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Laekia's fine plump fingers pointed their way through the five hundred little links of a gold collar. Philip was not amused. "Going to the war!" said Laekia. "His poor father!"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Mrs. Sage, safely generalising, knew so very exactly what was meant. She lost the run of a couple of plates and caught them in time. The three ladies departed in a not very business-like manner to the kitchen. Philip took himself off without a word.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> It was going to be one of those days when absolutely nobody paid any attention whatsoever to Constance Yokeham. Might as well be invisible.</span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5340588203906676587.post-781894032385287412011-09-24T22:29:00.002+01:002011-12-08T10:57:48.621+00:00POST 18<style>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;">Up early, carefully dressed for school the next morning, a fragile, restrained breakfast (as befitted one's new status as a potential Tower), Constance, her mind as clear as the blue sky, just breathed the summer air on the way to school, smiling at strange old ladies, toddlers, policeman, practising road courtesy, so that when, two or three times, it came, during the day, to the homework question, a certain set of contradictions took up her mind.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"> The desire to, as it were, <u>confirm</u> the teachers in their life's work, to be that star pupil with whom they shared gladly their life's involvement with the subject taught, came into conflict with the necessity (in fulfilling the confirmation) to tell a number of lies about the failure to produce any homework. There was something here in this particular department of failure and bad faith, that Constance occasionally felt very bad indeed about, and because of that she did not normally persist in investigating it, in case she caused herself pain. Today, the lies did not feel good at all, did not cohere with the radiance of her feelings, the experience she had had of Philip, in fact. She felt unusually apologetic and ashamed of herself.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"> Rather surprisingly, the results of having gone too far with Philip - quite unlike the fantasies inspired by wanting to go too far with Matthew - were won entirely to the cause of virtue. (This always was to be the case. Constance wanted to be of good character for Philip, Matthew she just wanted.) Homework dedicated entirely to Philip Harisonn - at some cost to syntax and mathematical calculation - took place during the following days. <u>Describe as accurately as possible the</u> <u>causes of the Asiatic monsoons</u>. Darling Philip, when I think of your early childhood in India. India. (Your ghastly sister.) Ah, the onset of those delicious south-west winds at the beginning of June, the imprisoned heat of the land, the inthrust of sea air into the hot interior, the formation of the great ascending air-currents. <u>Why is Carbon Unique</u>? Dearest Philip, if I am to speak of covalent bonds and stable linkages, my thoughts inevitably, I will be graphite to your diamond. <u>Describe in 500 words The Rout of San Romano, by</u> <u>Paolo Uccello</u>. I cannot make up my mind whether I should want you to be on those magnificent chargers, thrusting your spear about, right and sinister, in front of the picture, or whether I should prefer you to be lying with me tucked away in that quiet empty field on the left under the hedge, under the sun. I say you should be with me. The picture says, No. You must have a front place, you must be a principal character. `<u>The motion picture art of Charlie Chaplin will</u> <u>inevitably make a Japanese laugh as heartily as a Dane'. Is</u> <u>this true? Discuss</u>. As my friend Lieutenant Philip Harisonn has often said, the Chinese sense of humour is very different from ours. There is no tradition of Socratic thought in Chinese history...</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"> It was all good health, great efficiency, the longing for some virtuous but inarticulable consequence from having gone far too far. Desk-clearing, room-cleaning, book-checking, joyous song broke out. One joyous verse of song jazzed up a bit. "To-mo-row shall be my-y-y dancing day. I would my tru-ue lo-ove did so chance to-oo see the legend of my-y play, to-o call my true lo-ove to my-y da-ance. Si-ing O my love, O my love, my love, my love..."</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"> This annoyed Frances. That kind of thing was bad enough at Christmas, and repetition upon repetition got her serial-time thoughts badly tangled.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"> As Constance explained, it was not she, the sympathetic complaint-receiver, who was making this disturbance, but an independent spirit, the song itself, perhaps, who kept it up, kept itself up, perfecting itself; sometimes without her knowledge, or indeed her permission. Frances's head and temper got worse. How, being the cause of what seemed a real nuisance and being contrite about that, one could still feel so virtuous and unremittingly full of song was a mystery, but the song went on through the delight of all the cleansing activities, frequent baths, manicures and the care of blouses.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"> Her somewhat advanced though frequently short-stopping plans to seduce Philip when next he should appear or she appear unto him, were firmly based on the image of his preliminary phone-call - where, that is, he had not time to write; although there was a chance he might have time, three days, well two days, but that chance not, as it were, being taken up by him, did not seriously undermine the firmness of the expectations that without delay, let him only set foot in London, the telephone would ring; a plan to meet would evolve - a little vague at the moment as to detail in the expectant imagination, not for a lack but rather a plethora, a superabundance of detail, which made it difficult to know where in time to allocate, to expect, what delicious and virile development of the passions. There would be, would there perhaps? that invitation to supper declined by Frances?</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"> In the event, the call came from Philip's step-mother. They were invited, everyone, to Loverdale House to say goodbye to her and Philip's father before they left London to go to New York and the United Nations.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"> "You sure they said Loverdale?"</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"> "Where else do you expect them to be?"</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"> "I don't know. I hate that place. I don't know why. I just do. Philip won't be there, I don't suppose?"</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"> "He'll be there all right. I've spoken to him on the telephone," Frances said.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"> So much for the letter from Philip followed by a phonecall. Constance had not, either, envisaged a crowd scene. She and Philip would have to manage as best they could. Obviously, he had to clear things up with Frances first. But after that.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"> Barny, the hungry cat had returned again, its third visit. Because she liked cats, man to man without loving them, and would have liked to have a cat, but mainly because it was, to her, Constance, Philip's cat, she had been surreptitiously feeding it with scraps under the hedge at the side of the front garden. Frances who claimed to hate the `vicious brutes' had noticed Barny first this evening, from the top window, and leaving her work, <u>actually leaving her work to do so</u>, had rushed down the house like thunderbolts pursued by lightning, and chased him away with curses.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"> Constance went out later to find him, but failed.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16pt;"><br /></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5340588203906676587.post-61322446907742811322011-09-24T22:21:00.003+01:002011-12-08T10:57:13.534+00:00POST 17<style>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;">He showed no signs of leaving.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"> "Oh, I don't know," he sighed. And came to look over her shoulder to see the view perhaps where she stood looking out of her tiny window at next-door's blank wall. He put his hands on her shoulders.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"> "I don't know. I don't know."</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"> "Don't shake me to death," she whispered.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"> "Of course not." He pressed his front thoughtfully and unconsciously to Constance's back as though she was his shield. His arms came over her shoulders, his hands on her crossed arms, their feet started to move in united stiff-leg sway, very slowly, from side to side an inch at a time. An old game. He was thinking. Constance was inclined to believe that the pressure of his stomach against her back because done unconsciously was more vital to him that his abstraction into thought. But she did not envy Frances the disturbing attentions of this divided heart.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"> Her nightgown was very thin. The coldness of his belt-buckle was getting warm against her back.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"> Philip went on thinking and there was something about this mental space between them more than Constance could very well stand. His body was hard and cool, the belt and buttons and rough stuff, and the smell of him clean and severe was nostalgic and maddening, giving rise to perfect fantasies of lust. The time had come for a little creative interference in that distant self-possession. She too was possessive, and inspired. She could not help herself.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"> "I'm being a wall to you," she whispered.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"> "Oh wall," he whispered down her back, "full often hast thou heard my moans". She shivered from her neck right down the backs of her legs, and closed her eyes. "I'm being a wall to you," he whispered again. "Women grow on the sunny side of the wall", he breathed behind her ear.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"> "Who said that?" She turned her face slightly into his shoulder from an inability to keep still. Comfortable this shoulder.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"> "Don't know."</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"> "Within this wall of flesh there is a Soule counts thee her creditor," she said softly, the effect of flesh on mind prompting the resurrection there of lost wisdoms.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"> He hugged her gently, responsively, consciousness returning to his flesh; and slightly, from the inside, the wall cracked. She turned round in his arms and he did not loosen them. In the candlelight his eyes were dark and beautiful and his pale face flawless. She watched his lips.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"> "O w'wall, thou sweet and lovely wall..."</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"> She put her fingers across his mouth and stopped it. "In this same interlude, it doth befall, That I, one Constance by name, present a wall: And such a wall as I would have you think That had in it a cranny'd hole or chink, Through which the lovers, Pyramus and Thisbe, Did whisper often very secretly." She looked at him through her fingers, at his forehead, his eyebrows, his eyes, his mouth. "This loam, this roughcast and this stone doth show That I am that same wall: the truth is so: And this the cranny is, right and sinister, Through which the fearful lovers are to whisper."</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"> She had him there, transfixed. Her hands as gentle as flowers on his face, she joined a small ring with her fingers and thumbs and through the ring, touching his mouth, she kissed him full on the mouth. Both of them trembled.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"> To relieve herself of the pain of the following silence and wonder and the warmth of his hands hard on her back, she said in a shrill loud voice she could not control "If I blow my horn hard enough will the wall fall down on Jericho?"</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"> He let her go then, slowly, with an amused look that seemed to but did not quite in fact offer up a spy-hole through the wall behind which he kept his world. "I give you the wall," he mocked, one arm thrown out. "The cleaner, safer side of the pavement."</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"> "We'll see!" she mocked back.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"> "Ah, Con! Dear me!" He drew her back to him again. "Dear me, dear me..." He buried his head in her neck, hugged her to him, and then kissed her so gently that there was no doubt that he meant it. "You're a tower, not a wall," he said, and put his hands up round her throat. "You're going to be..." There could be but one turn of events now, and the idea made her frightened and helpless in his hands.<br /></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"> "It's all right, it's all right, Con," he whispered. "I really have to go now." But he did not.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"> He caught at her as she swayed a little.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"> "I'm all right," she said, but she could not look at him.<br /></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"> He kissed her, his eyes lingering longer than his lips, and sat her down gently on the bed. "Goodnight, Con. Sleep well."</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"> She lay on her bed for hours, missing him.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"> Well, there were messages here, but she had no idea what they were, except that she was going to take it that he had said more than he knew. She had certainly said more than he knew.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;"> His stutter these days was reserved largely for Camilla apparently, and that was a relief.</span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5340588203906676587.post-69357302627545101392011-04-20T09:44:00.002+01:002011-04-20T09:56:19.141+01:00POST 16Constance trudged upstairs to the third floor. She had had a marvellous evening. Life was full now of ongoing possibilities once Philip returned on leave at the end of the week; and strains of Delius, awfully quietly, it being midnight, came from Sarah's old upright in her room. All that counted.<br /><br /> But it also counted that she, Constance, had done no homework again. And she had forgotten to bring up a light-bulb for her bedroom and she could not work in bed by candlelight and she was worn out in any case. She passed her bedroom door and went on to the top sitting-room she shared. She regarded with profound distaste the books thrown about all over her desk. Fran's - she had inherited their father's leather-topped brass-handled, mahogany affair rescued and restored from the wreckage of the Old House - was as usual impeccably tidy, with actual pens and pencils and ink in the pen-and-ink stand, and reference books on guard at the ready. Sarah's desk was empty.<br /><br /> Down in the bathroom, Constance, made happy once more by her courageous decision to abandon all thoughts of homework, it was only punitive post-exam homework anyway, examined her newly-washed face above the damp neck-rim of a faded nightgown. It was a shiny, waxy white face, huge dark old eyeholes, red eyes, grey hair, referred to politely but not politely enough as ash. Plain. Good chin-line if you could keep your head half-cocked like that all the time and not a bad nose in the Greek fashion always providing the upper lip rested halfway down the chin. Dirty feet! Gym tomorrow! She yawned and her eyes were just filling copiously with tears of tiredness when a really galvanising racket broke out directly above in Sarah's room. Sarah and Philip no less, in unison, parts and counterparts, solo and duet, andante and allegro, con brio, without discretion, let or hindrance, were singing an old, all too recognisable song, and sending it chiming round the house. Not only was it loud, it was also lewd, Philip having written the words for Sarah, Sarah the music for Philip when they were children. They had based their childhood love-affair on it just at the time Sarah's first lover, Mervyn Evanwood, proposed himself, years ago, as Master of Ceremonies at a sitting-room concert. Astonishing words. Poem of Hate for Sarah Yokeham and Mervyn Evanwood. And he has flown as frail men should, as blows the dogrose off the wood. Breath held, as between wonder and lightning, waiting for the storm to burst from below, Constance hummed and danced upstairs, whirled and hopped onto the landing, wiping her washed, wet feet on the carpet and joining ecstatically in her own childhood once more. Last verse.<br /><br /> <span style="font-style:italic;">I hate you singer on the stage<br /> Because you're such a tempting age<br /> Of ravishing voice and doubtful taste<br /> Because you haven't got much waist.<br /> Your nose is long<br /> Your mouth is wide<br /> And I can almost see inside<br /> You sing your song<br /> And all your teeth<br /> Stand dark among<br /> That pound of beef<br /> You call your tongue<br /> You <br /> call <br /> your <br /> tongue.<br /> And yet you seem to light a fire<br /> In me of all my heart's desire<br /> Your flesh I yearn for like my mother's<br /> Although you spurn me for another's<br /> Don't have him, Sarah Yokeham, or <br /> Plonk, plonk, before you're spoken for</span> <br /><br />Ever so quietly, and in pretty counterpart<br /><br /> <span style="font-style:italic;">Don't have him Sarah Yokeham or<br /> Plonk, plonk, before you're spoken for.</span><br /><br /> Nothing could content them, having excited themselves so skilfully in there, but that the repetition of these huge absurdities must follow in canon, quite preventing them from hearing the oncoming crashing of feet. Constance glided smugly to her room and left the door ajar. The candle juddered. She got into bed and listened.<br /><br /> She could not hear what was being said. The racket had stopped. Laughter. She was just about to get out of bed again to join the departures when her bedroom door opened a little.<br /><br /> "Con...are you in bed? Can I come to say goodnight?"<br /><br /> And stay to say goodmorning.<br /><br /> Blinking prettily, she hoped, and sleepily, as if sleepily, to hide such embarrassing inspirations, Constance was about to sit up, having rescued her feet from under Philip's behind, when Frances came in and sat down next to him on the chair at the bottom of the divan. Philip put his head on Frances's shoulder. Frances got up. One would never pass Frances by, but when she pushed back her heavy hair to speak her mind, being as honest as she knew how, her eyes shining, then he must love her completely. Damn them. "Why don't you look at me, or smile at me?" Philip said to Frances, smiling. He got up. He took her hand. He was going to lead her away perhaps. But she did not want to go. She now sat down on Constance's bed, practically on Constance's knees. Lovely view of two backs if viewed longitudinally.<br /><br /> "You never told me how you liked The Man Who Fell Off Snowdon," Philip said.<br /><br /> Constance was well aware that her presence, much as Fran might hate it, would, Fran hoped, make Philip safe. No end to Fran's silliness.<br /><br /> "I didn't like it. It was an attack. Let the sun set on Frances, it said."<br /><br /> "Well," Philip laughed, "misunderstood again! When you hold up to me as a thousand times more significant to Man a city church which I know you may possibly have studied once and certainly never notice except wilfully, you inspire me, I turned you into a mountain..." (There seemed to Constance wide margins for misunderstanding there, if Philip were putting a fair care)<br /><br /> "It's no good joking, Philip." Frances withdrew her hand. He shook her shoulder gently. She seemed only embarrassed and angry, heavy. Her heaviness, the particular kind of immovable sense of her own righteousness irritated him. Anyway, it irritated Constance; anyone would think she Constance was invisible, like some servant, beneath notice.<br /><br /> "You've been arguing with Matthew. You get dreadfully...intense."<br /><br /> "But I learned something. Didn't you? Strange how my mere presence takes all the life out of you," Philip said. Constance moved off irritably about a foot down the bed, earhole exposed.<br /><br /> "In all your letters not one word have you said about staying in the Army."<br /><br /> "I talked to you about it in Wales. Nothing's definite."<br /><br /> "To me, it makes our writing to each other, our whole friendship, of little importance."<br /><br /> "Not that you mind my staying in the Army. You must be rather pleased. We can proceed on paper."<br /><br /> "What exactly does that mean?"<br /><br /> "I've told you what I could. I've only just decided to try. It's impossible to write everything. You don't write everything."<br /><br /> "I do!" Frances must have flushed at that, she was deeply offended. She stood up.<br /><br /> "Especially you." But he must have known she was only defending the importance of their letters in her life, because he turned to smile towards her again.<br /><br /> "There's something ...odd about this decision that you haven't told me," she said.<br /><br /> He shaded his eyes as if from the candlelight, screwing them up. "There are no rules for being yourself," he said. Frances was tense, holding her body hard, trembling a little in the dark room. Her face was crumpled, frowning, her eyes distant. They were both pained by what they saw wherever it was they were looking at. Then Frances turned to him. Her eyes pleaded. Let it be a first simple love. Constance shivered with the message and the insight, and covered her head.<br /><br /> "We can't talk here," Frances said.<br /><br /> "Oh my God! I can leave," said Constance and got furiously our of her bed. Not that that interrupted anybody.<br /><br /> "Certainly we can talk here. The very place you chose. Enjoy the world."<br /><br /> He did not want a first simple love. He moved away from Frances. "I'm back again on Saturday. I'll take you out to supper. How about that?" He looked at Frances hopefully, and took Constance's arm. The meaning of that, Constance looked down at his hand, was that he did not want to frighten Frances.<br /><br /> "No, that's impossible." Oh indeed! Spontaneity was not Fran's strong point. She obviously had not decided what to say to him. If she yearned for him now it was not for his company. Philip examined the junk on the mantelpiece. Constance sighed for all the waste. Frances, after a moment, left.<br /><br /> Philip turned rather helplessly towards the door. "Tell me if you change your mind about supper," he called, but in a way that made Constance feel angry with both of them.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5340588203906676587.post-90271193515748098102011-04-01T22:01:00.004+01:002011-04-01T22:22:45.847+01:00POST 15Aunt Molly came back, with Frances grinning behind her. Philip got up and took Molly by the arm. "How's your golf? How about golf next week when I get back?"<br /><br /> "Golf? Really, Philip? Will you have time? My dear, that would be a treat. You dear soul." Aunt Molly kissed him very fondly and patted him several times. "Darling boy," she said, "You always make me talk too much. Don't go off to that beastly war, that's all."<br /><br /> Constance leaped up, inexplicably unburdened and full of life.<br /><br /> "Tell Sarah for goodness' sake to stop that noise," Molly said. "And Constance, go to bed. It's nearly ten o'clock. School tomorrow!"<br /><br /> "Sarah, as always, is playing very well." Philip kissed Molly. "And I haven't finished with Constance."<br /><br /> "Well, off you go, anyway," Aunt Molly sent them off. "Goodnight!"<br /><br /> When they reached the sitting room, Frances said, "For God's sake Sarah!" Sarah slipped off the piano stool, lingered a moment, and disappeared, sucking her thumb.<br /><br /> Mrs. Kenys had not arrived; and the effect of the conversation with Philip was to make Constance ashamed that she had hoped Mrs. Kenys would not come. She went over and kissed Matthew lightly, playfully, but not really playfully, and when he took her hand and held it, the better to listen to Tom she did not snatch it away.<br /><br /> Tom was giving out his opinion on the atom bomb: it was, he said, disgraceful. For pure essence of ennui this was, after a while, hard to beat. Even so, she looked at Tom's plump hands, his large chin. In the matter of being known and Philip's not having finished with her, she could probably melt for Tom too tonight.<br /><br /> As for Philip, he made the night smell of the future. She watched him as he parted from the silky, sulky Camilla with a swift glow of intelligent amused enmity, returned with interest by Camilla. Constance did not know if he was handsome but could never have helped liking his face. He could easily become the object of her own most profound attention; without she in turn becoming the object of his. Does one-sidedness matter? It didn't matter. If he put his body against hers as he had done earlier, her own face would turn beautiful in his arms.<br /><br /> Even Frances she saw afresh. How Philip must love her. Frances being of large character in Constance's admiring opinion, had returned to life and power, forceful, wilful and radiant. She was putting it on of course, not quite at ease, but it was admirably done, tawny hair brushed unfashionably long, chin up as high as Philip's. Silvery Sarah would probably not come back. Sarah had no desire or perhaps no need to test her independence or her character in public.<br /><br /> If Philip and Frances had made love to each other, how could it possibly have gone so wrong? Something to do with Camilla? If they had not made love, perhaps that was the trouble? How did Philip make Frances so unlike herself? How could Frances even pretend to prefer, at the moment, Tom's attentions to those of Philip?<br /><br /> Well, Tom too is alive, meaning by that no singular thing but that he too lives and breathes and so, for that reason, this time of night and heat, is entirely loveable. What counts is that Constance is melting for all of them. All these men, all her friends. Wants to give to them, be taken by them. Out of herself. And they are being so boring.<br /><br /> "How's old Grodust?" Constance said to Philip who had put himself in a chair next to Frances. Frances was avoiding sofas.<br /><br /> "Grodust? You mean Barbara?" He looked as if he could eat her.<br /><br /> "Barbara? Seem to be a lot of them," she was excited by his intense interest. The Barbara behind the publication of Philip's poems? "Grodusts. No. I mean the General." She met Matthew's eye.<br /><br /> "Come and sit here," Matthew made room, "by your Uncle Matthew."<br /><br /> You are not my Uncle and the time when I wished you were is long past. You are Tom's father and Philip's uncle, and Tom and Philip living with us through the war does not, I hope, turn them into my cousins. In private you have been nakedly Matthew. We have indulged in awful practices. Sitting next to you now makes that seem very distasteful. She sat down.<br /><br /> Incidentally, said a Presence, if you ponder that distaste, persist with it, don't dash off from it, you might discover something quite interesting about fantasies. As to the rites, well, now there is Philip.<br /><br /> "So, you've cheered up. You've been teasing that boy Philip. I've been watching you," Matthew said. She smiled. "What's so amusing?"<br /><br /> "You're making love to me!"<br /><br /> "Am I? Let me tell you. You have a way of looking at people which is shy, mild and persistent, and I may add, calculating. And then you grin like a Cheshire cat. It's not unnoticeable."<br /><br /> "You admit it?" she said softly, taking a drink from his glass of champagne. "You're making love to me?"<br /><br /> "Better than making you cry isn't it?" He went on smiling, only his eyes now. "And how are you getting on at school?"<br /><br /> "All right, thank you," she said and got up, picking up a sponge finger to eat on the way. She stopped at the door leaning there. Oh God! How is School?! It was a lovely evening, but she was doing it all, the lovemaking for herself.<br /><br /> "It's gratifying to know I haven't wasted my cash on his education anyway," said Matthew behind her, looking at his son gratified. Tom was certainly educated; proper little Hitler Mrs. Sage always said he was, and Constance believed that domestic friend of long-standing.<br /><br /> Hating Matthew and envious of the attention Tom got from his father - but what matter? There they all were, a self-contained group under the lamps. They were on to Korea now, good and proper. What did they know? What did any of them really know? It was a very good question to which, she had, since reading the Book of Job, already worked out quite a good answer. They knew nothing, and they never remembered the important thing. God's great maw was after the lot of them. Where were they when God created the earth? Nowhere. They were nowhere. And it was the one thing none of them remembered. None of them remembered. It was, all, such a waste. Not remembering that turned so much to waste. Not remembering made their affairs seem so big and timeless. All of them, wasting her readiness, wasting their turn, our turn, to be alive. As Constance turned to go away, Philip got up, took her hand. "I need your company," he said, and brought her back to sit down by him. The others had not stopped talking. It was a beautiful moment. She would like to have told him how much she admired him, how strange and beautiful he could be to her. But there was no opportunity. Anyone would think there was a limitless number of fine summer nights in a life-time.<br /><br /> "I wouldn't say that," said Philip. "As a matter of fact, I don't understand quite ..."<br /><br /> Constance listened to the silence, much of it her own, as it exploded into the present. Philip arguing, Matthew analysing. No general conversation.<br /><br /> "The limiting political fact is this - no, listen for once. There is at the 38th parallel in Korea, a frontier between the East and the West; it has been attacked; it must be stabilised. We don't have to go any further into good and bad, metaphysics, abstractions, old labels, or ill-used words. This fact is so economic and limited that it has nothing to do with what you call `the needs of the Koreans themselves', leave them aside."<br /><br /> As Matthew Kellory came up formidable, Constance felt her own significance in the world and all the joy of her own thoughts and insights evaporating.<br /><br /> "Ha! That's a good admission anyway. Nothing to do with the needs of the Koreans!" Philip laughed. Nobody else did.<br /><br /> "Not at all." Matthew was quiet and strange. "You make the mistake of thinking you're God. You think that the needs and aspirations of Korea are simply, in one sticky clutch, easily accountable or dismissable by you as you choose."<br /><br /> "The history of the Koreans after four hundred years of waiting, and now we've pushed the Japs off their backs, suggests to me," said Philip, "that they should be united after all this long time; have a chance to re-identify themselves as a nation. We might make that possible if we went flat out against the North." Philip shuffled, went red and stubborn and obviously knowing only what he had picked up that week in the papers, was reluctant to argue but reactively bent on it. He was nowhere near as sure of what he thought as he wanted to sound. He just passionately resented Matthew's authority.<br /><br /> "I suppose you may say that the same thought has occurred to the North from their side. North attacks South. Unification. What's wrong with that?"<br /><br /> Constance sat up, looking anxiously from Philip to Matthew; she was being worked upon to take a side. <br /><br /> "Only your cynicism. Because to unite them from the South in a free-voting democracy is better than unifying them under North Korean Communism. I believe that. I ought to support my beliefs in action." Philip felt himself going much too far; what, after all, did he mean by `in action'? He noticed with relief he had been generally taken to have polemical rather than literal intentions.<br /><br /> "You may be wrong to fight Koreans for what you believe is best for them," said Matthew.<br /><br /> "But I may fight them for what is best for me?"<br /><br /> "That's right. That's the only such moral reason. And for that they will fight you. War as an extension of politics only means the most economic, limited war possible; war as an extension of ideals is limitless and hideous."<br /><br /> Fully-roused men talking; there was more violence than the talk of war in it. More in their voices than in their words. Constance put her head in her hands and looked at them through her fingers. It seemed just possible that she was going to lose one of them. Even Tom was quiet.<br /><br /> "You surely believe that democracy is right? If we can make it possible for everyone, every person in Korea to have his say then we ought." Philip leaned forward squarely, his well-built frame, elbows on thighs, keeping his ground for him.<br /><br /> "It's none of your business."<br /><br /> "War is hideous," said Philip. "We shouldn't go into it except on the most serious provocation, not for politics or power, but only for the highest ideals, and to win outright. If we believe it's a righteous war, we ought to put all our heart and force into it."<br /><br /> "Go ahead," said Matthew. "The old `one response possible'." Matthew sometimes got angry with Tom, but Constance had never heard Matthew speak like this to anyone else.<br /><br /> "The one response possible?" Philip felt all the advantage taken of him; his being put down. Constance felt that too from Frances blushing and leaning away from him.<br /><br /> "`Force to the utmost. Force without stint or limit. The righteous and triumphant Force which shall make Right the law of the world...' Woodrow Wilson, as it happens, but also the consoling and self-flattering satisfaction of tyrants and ideologues everywhere. Lenin. To make a clean sweep. How very self-ennobling, not to have to face the compromising complexities of facts that go against the pure idea. To be so easily able to give up the moderate, the fitting, the thick difficult reality for the emotional ease of your pure plain little abstracting idea of absolute right."<br /><br /> Well, damn Matthew, Constance thought.<br /><br /> Philip, who did not believe in absolute right or unlimited force, but only in unlimited moral courage and his own will, lost his temper and his line of argument. "I suppose one does not have to apply unlimited force even in a righteous war for a pure idea; but only so much as will conclusively win. I'm not inane..."<br /><br /> "Well, pure ideas and, likewise, ideas of purity have always been voracious feeders on flesh and blood. They are also pretty choosy feeders as I personally found out in Dachau five years ago. You may have a chance to judge for yourself, Philip. I agree, if the Americans can turn this into an anti-communist crusade they must. It puts the war on to a false premise, but a crusade will look better for the administration in next year's November elections. You can't put forward a war policy as subtle as limitation and peace-keeping and get away with it in America in election year."<br /><br /> "Because that would be thought to be immoral. Precisely." Philip's mind was working, and so of course his mouth and eyebrows were working and now his eyes were lighting up with ridiculous determination. He didn't know how ridiculous he looked. Constance loved him. Come on Philip. "It's you who's dealing in abstractions," he said. This direction seemed right to him at last and he let out at Matthew with violence and triumph. Frances looked at her feet and away up at the curtain rail. "Stand on the parallel you say. A parallel is an abstraction if anything is. A pretty new one too. And probably indefensible, or why the trouble? You can't have armies teetering on a rationalised imaginary line, on an abstraction like that ..."<br /><br /> "Oh yes, you can have armies teetering on an abstraction as you call it." Matthew took a huge breath. "Forever if you like. But it requires two things. A moral commitment to the stoic endurance of constantly unconsoling affairs, flux; and a deep conviction of the immorality of waste, and the immorality of the clean sweep, oh, and much else," he gasped and held his throat, breathing deeply. He wiped his forehead with the red silk and returned it to the hip pocket of his jacket out of sight.<br /><br /> Frances on account of the deep feeling generated was white now with rage, or was it embarrassment? Against Philip, of course, although she could not possibly have enjoyed Matthew's crack about Lenin. And yet Philip is right, right, right for me. Beowulf in person. The strength of thirty. Only listen to him, full-flood. Your one huge limitless effort. The sinews of your heart. The total heroism for the one right thing. "War is so hideous, how can you be half-hearted?" he asked again, after a moment, and with a visible conviction of it's being really unanswerable. "How can you fight without ideals?" And as if he had half-answered against himself, there was uncertainty and a plea there now.<br /><br /> Matthew smiled wryly and half-admiringly at Philip, and at that smile. Constance felt a rush of love for them both. Whereas Matthew with Tom was of small interest, except anthropologically, Philip and Matthew wrestling together were enormously fascinating, now that Matthew had smiled. As lovers, it would be almost impossible to choose between them. Mouths, those mouths full of words, are for kissing. Those hands, Matthew's teasing out his sense in fine small movements, Philip's freely chopping the air, how they would come to life on your back or your breast or your face, penetrators, love-makers, begetters of children. Her thoughts were not reckless, they were induced quietly now by a blissful, luxurious feeling brought on by just their company in the same room and by the contemplation of everything, mouths, legs, shoes, hands, that was masculine about these living, breathing, jewels of men.<br /><br /> She was offered, by Tom, and accepted, another glass of champagne. But it was impossible to accept the actual reality of the matter: that these men were blind and bound and uncaring of her, bound furthermore to ideas that totally denied her significance to them, wasting her life, while she was blooming for them. It was Frances now who sat on the arm of Matthew's chair.<br /><br /> "My dear Philip," Frances said. "You haven't a leg to stand on."<br /><br /> "So be it," he said mildly and stood up. "Come on, Cam. Camilla!" She was asleep on Tom's shoulder once more. Philip gently stroked her hair. Tom grinned.<br /><br /> "I'm inclined to agree with you, Phil, about all that," he nodded his head in his father's direction.<br /><br /> "Good," Philip said. "Wake her up. It's time we left. I must find Sarah." He left as Aunt Molly came in.<br /><br /> "I see some pleasure in the one huge limitless effort has touched his imagination," Matthew said slowly, gasping a little for breath.<br /><br /> "It might just turn out to be a war for principle," said Tom to his father. "You wouldn't understand that."<br /><br /> "How dare you speak to your father like that. He fought a long and bloody war for your thick hide," Aunt Molly said. "How you stand for it, Matthew, is a mystery to me..."<br /><br /> "I fought a war for him and myself. But I did not bring him up. And I came back a hero. He resents that quite rightly...Ah, hush Tom."<br /><br /> "Can't you see your father's not well. Matthew, my dear, Patricia would like you to telephone. She could not get away. Your car has come back."<br /><br /> "Ah, I see...Thank you. Philip's going to be all right."<br /><br /> "But there's such a thing as being killed," Molly said. "We lost his brother Jim."<br /><br /> "Jim," Matthew closed his eyes. "Ah, Molly, don't remind me." He got up. He was very tired.<br /><br /> "Matthew, are you stuffy? Shall I open more window?"<br /><br /> "I'm fine. I'm fine," he said brusquely, but nobody was fooled. "The Army will bring him back from wherever it sends him if its humanly possible. He pretends not, but it's Korea that's finally done it. Well. That's done all of us. Completely out of the blue."<br /><br /> "It's not just Korea," Molly said impatiently.<br /><br /> "He won't go to Korea," Tom said. "Or stay in the Army. It's just talk. I can tell. Fran agrees."<br /><br /> "He'll get there if he can, don't worry. I don't want him to go, but I understand him," Matthew said.<br /><br /> "One waits for it. In children. I suppose. The decisive act. The I-must-Go."<br /><br /> "Yes. Yes. And I must go Molly. Get some air and some sleep."<br /><br /> "Aren't you going to telephone Patricia?"<br /><br /> "When I get home."<br /><br /> "Go along with your father, Tom. And give him some peace."<br /><br /> Constance kissed Matthew goodnight kindly, but he could hardly wait to get away. His desire to get away restored some of her confidence in his self-hood, but he was a tired old man. She was unhappy now that Patricia had not come. Tom reluctantly went with him.<br /><br /> "Are you coming Philip?" Tom wanted to know.<br /><br /> "We'll follow you. Won't be long."<br /><br /> Constance was sorry to see them go because the evening was not yet at an end with Philip and Camilla still in the house.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5340588203906676587.post-20307581718736477532011-01-05T09:42:00.002+00:002011-01-05T09:46:21.946+00:00Post 14All wasted on Philip. He had disappeared. So had Aunt Molly.<br /><br /> Despite company, Aunt Molly had gone to her reading and wireless and television in her own room. Mine! she described these evening hours and forbore even to answer the telephone, once she had settled. She did not gladly endure interruption even during those hours not defined as Mine! Those given over to gardening and writing letters to the newspapers and chatting to her helpers. (In many ways, Constance and her Aunt Molly understood each other perfectly.) However, she had never been proof against Philip whom, as Constance knocked and opened the door, she was castigating wrathfully not, as might be expected, on the follies of what she called `the American intervention in Korea,' but on the follies of his Uncle Matthew.<br /><br /> "People expect too much of marriage, I agree. Whatever they expect, a great deal is what they'll get I dare say," said Philip pleasantly. He beckoned Constance over to the little sofa to sit by him. Aunt Molly allowed this interruption.<br /><br /> "In the mild, civilised life," she said, "marriage and family is where all the difficult personal learning and subtlety is. I'm talking about the vital personal discoveries, the relationship between trespass and forgiveness. The relationship, er, do you see, between the victim and the victor in ourselves, and how to live with those two invaders."<br /><br /> "I can believe that. I've met them."<br /><br /> Aunt Molly looked up. "Marriage really is to do with learning. You can believe that. Oh yes. It's a life-time's job."<br /><br /> "But not necessarily to do with happiness," said Philip.<br /><br /> "Exactly!" said Aunt Molly.<br /><br /> Sitting on the sofa with Philip listening to a lecture on marriage was nearly as good as getting married to him and Constance was more than prepared, comfortable, and satisfied, to make the most of it.<br /><br /> "The marriage home is, after all, for most of us, if we are lucky, the place where, where we practise indulgence and are indulged. Where we practise wickedness, ah yes! And are corrected. If we are lucky. Where the sins of the two are not only worst indulged, but best contended with. Our badtemper and violence, our greed for attention, and the world's goods, our jealousy, our petty lies and bad choice of friends, our self-hatred and envy, our wastefulness of talent and good fortune and... do you see, the marriage home is where we turn to teach and learn understanding of ourselves, constancy, and kindness, and not to be frightened. Of course it has to be learned! Because we are all born spiritually blind. Who can know self, who only self knows? The sentimental education, no less. And what an easy, busy, impersonal life some of us unattached settle for. I can tell you one thing, a good marriage, whatever it is, is not being half-dead."<br /><br /> As she looked down at her little hands, Constance was moved and could see, suddenly saw, that her Aunt had had a good marriage, was grieving for her husband, after all these years. For the personal loss to her own life of all her husband had meant to her. Constance did not want to see that grief, she had seen it often, but she softened her heart and let the sight of her aunt's old , memorous face join up with her own huge, constant sense of loss.<br /><br /> "I don't suppose you, dear Constance, will ever undertake anything half so adventurous as your marriage."<br /><br /> Constance sat up. University for Fran, Music and Art for Sarah, Marriage for Constance. At last!<br /><br /> "Why are you frowning?"<br /><br /> "Ah, but that isn't all, is it?" Philip was lying; but he had become irrelevant, and thereby captured the conversation.<br /><br /> "Ah! The comforts of the body? You mean? Do you mean? But that's the whole essence of course. Without the comforts of the body the rest simply wouldn't work, and vice versa..."<br /><br /> "And vice versa, sex by itself is so unsatisfying of the longings," Philip laughed.<br /><br /> Silence settled, discomforting only to Constance.<br /><br /> "Catholic priests don't get married" she said at last.<br /><br /> "Of course. And quite rightly. But one doesn't go so far as to presume to discuss the work and vessels of the Holy Ghost."<br /><br /> "Telephone, Aunt Molly. Labour Party." Frances put her head swiftly round the door and out again.<br /><br /> "You...you don't believe in the Holy Ghost!" It was rather a questioning uncertainty, for in previous discussions on such matters as related to the Holy Trinity for example, Aunt Molly had always used a dismissive tone which Frances had been, from childhood, quick to copy.<br /><br /> "My dear Constance, however that may be, I am not up to tackle more than one subject at a time." She went to the telephone.<br /><br /> Constance had seen the energy of grief on Aunt Molly's face and it softened her heart and reminded her how hard she was against her own grief. The business of not being known by or belonging to anybody special. She was suddenly very tired of the stiff upper lip. Molly went to the telephone.<br /><br /> "Marriage as the most important school for learning the most subtle intimacies of the moral life? Well I'm damned! That's how she's seen marriage for herself. And yet, you know, I can see that view of marriage turning its face, can't you? Then it not only seems like a little box where you might go insane, but I can hear Molly saying, `Insane? Perfectly possible!'" The image came too close to private places for Constance. It reminded her of her mother. "And yet," she said quickly and shyly, "there's a sort of adventure in the idea of marriage as she sees it, with all its risks. I've never thought of that." In case he thought she'd gone soft she dashed on. "She's jolly inconsistent, though. Before you came, she was damning marriage up and down. I think. Or perhaps...perhaps it was just Matthew's new one..." It was half a question.<br /><br /> "Oh that! More than likely..." He smiled to himself.<br /><br /> She was startled. His tone seemed absolutely to dismiss Matthew. She just stopped herself there from saying outright a very silly thing. Sarah had once said that Aunt Molly had been in love with Matthew and that was why she was so terrible to him.<br /><br /> "She is inconsistent, but probably not to her own meaning. All she's saying, I think, is that to her mind, there never was or will be a marriage as good as hers." But Constance was not ready to be so sure. "And the power in her experience of marriage, even after all these years, it's still living in her. You can imagine how intense her life was for her in those days. And now she's under a shadow."<br /><br /> "She's going to die." She gritted her teeth and said it. "She's getting ready to die." She looked hard at her hands. "I've noticed."<br /><br /> "No. You're wrong there. It's not the shadow of death. It's the shadow that settles over people when they are not full alive because they're no longer fully realised."<br /><br /> "Known, not realised. Not fully known." <br /> <br /> "Yes maybe it's the same thing, better word. They are no longer fully known; don't live in a real world ..."<br /><br /> "Or perhaps because they never have been? known, realised."<br /><br /> "Perhaps, but not in her case."<br /><br /> "I wasn't only thinking of her case."<br /><br /> "In old age, to be in shadow is to be no longer intensely known by any other human being but only, perhaps if you're lucky, yourself. If you're lucky. But, your own knowledge is no longer self-enlightening, I can imagine that, unless you pray. If you wife or your husband is dead, or simply dead to you, your only human knower, your toucher, your quarreller, your listener, your lover, is gone. I suppose that's how it is. I suppose that's part of what bereavement means."<br /><br /> As a young girl with no parents, Constance reflected, to be in shadow is never to have been known. I mean, fully known. I do not mean understood, but known by a, how shall I say, by a loving and expectant curiosity. I did not know my parents and it is a great grief to me. But what is an inconsolable grief is that my parents did not know me. Who will know you, if not your parents. Who will expect of you? Who will touch and caress you, if not your parents. Who knows me? "A special kind of loving notice would do. But it must have curiosity in it," she said. <br /><br /> "Yes. A special kind of loving notice. Yes friendship is a sort of facade of fondness when there's no curiosity... that's right. Some kind of loving curiosity about her would bring her out of the shadow, you're right; but she has no intimates any longer."<br /><br /> I might go in and under, unnoticed, she reflected, drown with the weight of it all, life, and nobody might know, be curious enough, be intimate enough, love me enough to know that inwards I am dying. Aunt Molly is in the shadow and I have never been in the sun. That's it! That's what I want. To be in someone's sun. Frances and Sarah, is that what they want? She was so sure it was that she wanted to go to them at once. But he had used the word pray and had by that made her free with her thoughts and hold in what she could say. Funny thing that, like a door opening into an inner chamber.<br /><br /> "I suppose if she believed in God, she would know that she was known in the mind of God."<br /><br /> "Perhaps that's it. But that's knowledge not easy to submit to when what you want are other human hands."<br /><br /> "No, it isn't. But one thing God is, He is my knowledge that I am known in His mind. God is all the reality of people nobody knows. In God's way nobody knows anybody else. That's why wise people pray."<br /><br /> She hoped he would not argue with that, for she was convinced that it was true in her blood and bones, but had no words to defend it with.<br /><br /> "Con, we're talking about sexuality. Aren't we? Really? Not sex, but sexuality. You cannot love yourself with your own hands." He took her hands and placed them together. She had gained his hands but not his curiosity; his own thoughts had won that. "Richard St. Ains, a friend of mine said to me not long ago that Marriage is a door to reality. Mere appetites, you can satisfy them; there's the whole world. But marriage is a terrifying invitation to be introduced to yourself. He was thinking of getting married."<br /><br /> "And did he?"<br /><br /> He released her hands. "He sounded like St. George considering quietly what he'd do to the dragon, depending on its size." He laughed.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5340588203906676587.post-76138129572483301052010-09-17T10:53:00.002+01:002010-09-17T11:02:33.035+01:00Post 13Matthew present (how could I have forgotten?), Philip present and Frances hanging about Tom Kellory. This thickset youth, fresh-faced, mop-headed was arguing with Matthew his father who was entirely at home, body and mind complete. Infuriating, really; just because he'd met his son.<br /><br /> "Your kind of socialism won't stand up to the 1950's I can tell you. You're not scientific enough," said Tom.<br /><br /> "There's no need to shout your head off," Matthew said pleasantly. "I don't have a kind of socialism. All I said was, to repeat an old cliché, that British socialism is founded more on Methodism than Marxism." Politics. Boring.<br /><br /> "Ugh!" said Frances, taking Tom's arm, tossing her gold-brown hair and pulling a mature grimace. "Face it! Certainly that's the job. It's exactly what's got to be changed," Frances insisted.<br /><br /> Frances looked as if she was going to be brilliant with Matthew once more. Philip's presence had obviously increased Fran's creed-uttering on the flirting potentiality. Isn't life absolutely full of sexual interest? Such abundant and challenging sexual interest? Constance sighed with nervous delight.<br /><br /> "It's all right for your feelings," Tom, attacking, red in the face, "you know, doing it, the Welfare State, for example, because it's painful and Christian and good for you. But a real socialist state isn't just a perfectly natural extension of the great British Constitution ..."<br /><br /> "Well, if it's not going to be that, even in your mind, you may as well ditch the idea..." said Matthew. "It won't work either way."<br /><br /> "Anyone would think silence was a dirty word..."<br /><br /> "That's no way to speak to your father, Tom. I don't mind your views but your tone of voice leaves a lot to be desired..." Molly Absecond who rather agreed with Tom's stand was not mollified by Tom's radiant smile. She was tired. She was preceded into the room by the new evening lady, Mrs. Laver, bearing a fresh tray of bottles and glasses.<br /><br /> "Science is a misunderstood word. Like a good many of the words you use." Matthew filled his pipe, glancing sideways to see in passing why he should give Constance so much food for thought. He paused a moment with the lighted match, surprised by her smile. "Um," he said, "You get a word, capitalism, science, appeasement, you release it from all its contexts and complexities, you kill it, and you use the corpse to drive yourself witless..." he laughed.<br /><br /> "Besides which, Tom's theories are always two or three steps behind whatever's happening," Frances added fondly. Tom smiled.<br /><br /> Politics bored Constance, but Frances and Tom interested her enormously. As she understood it, the North Koreans had over-run the South Koreans last Saturday, and Frances wanted them to stay: `no interference with the aspirations of nationhood' (whatever business it was of hers). Tom wanted the North Koreans out at once; and the South to over-run the North. Frances is a socialist. Tom is a democrat. They had hotly announced that to each other in her hearing recently. Thereafter there had seemed more reason than usual for them to quarrel. Up to this moment, they had been for two or three days very unfriendly indeed about their differences. Now here was Tom talking about `real socialist states' and challenging his father, and here was Frances ogling Tom, humouring Matthew and ignoring Philip. Constance gave them up.<br /><br /> Sarah, because the music was lying there, started to play, very quietly, Scarlatti, on the sitting-room piano, and Philip had joined her there.<br /><br /> Aunt Molly had invited Patricia Raleigh Kenys to come, if she cared, to meet the family and enjoy Matthew's company at Golden Square Gardens for half an hour. Matthew's car had gone to pick her up. Bottles had been opened. Constance was drinking champagne. Delicious on such a hot evening. It, or something, was lending Matthew (no effort now required on her part) that acute sexual interest, with which her imagination always so flatteringly provided him but only in his absence. She had high hopes that Mrs. Kenys would be undisposed to turn up.<br /><br /> But on the whole, Constance's old passion for Matthew seemed slightly boring to her in the presence of Philip's dark red head bent to Sarah's silvery beige, Sarah's mind intently elsewhere reading the music. Matthew, if duller in Philip's presence, seemed human once more. He was indeed, awfully nice. In fact, said a Presence, the masculinity of Tom and Matthew was enhanced, was it not, in Philip's masculine company? Curious, agreed Constance. Delicious. For what the heat and the last of the acacia blossom promised, in the gathering shadows of the evening, was the future again. Enough men to go round.<br /><br /> "Chamberlain..." Tom said, and off they went again. Constance was now sitting on the arm of Matthew's chair. His hands were smooth and not fat, like Tom's. Not a bad tie. Constance felt just the tip of it, and a bit further up for a real feel. Silk. She watched his mouth while he was speaking. He moved over a little away from her to get a better view of Tom. Nobody in their right senses could possibly like Tom Kellory better than his father, who smelt nicer and looked more like the male of the species in all circumstances. Constance was half-tempted to lean her arm against Matthew's shoulder.<br /><br /> She wished Sarah would stop playing, especially that gay and sad tune.<br /><br /> One of the few things Constance remembered about her father was his playing the piano when her mother was out of the house. Toy Town Parade and Happy Days Are Here Again and short twiddly things like the Scarlatti, to amuse them. She had heard him described as having once been a `useful pianist' who had `faded'. Apparently, there could not be two pianists in one house.<br /><br /> "Effort of thought indeed!" Tom shouted emphatically so that Constance jumped. "It all comes to you through some divine law of pragmatism by osmosis. Thought indeed. All we need is our old inarticulate political traditions and no troublesome straight words, appeasement and such, to remind us of our past..."<br /><br /> "Your words aren't straight, Tom. They're bent crooked and double under the weight of the system they have to carry for you. They're starving. Thinking is something you cannot possibly use them for..."<br /><br /> "Not the thinking you mean! You mean amateur thinking, vain-glorious thinking, a sort of passing remarks on the day, a sort of a...of a...of a...total inability to f...focus a precise image of yourself or anyone or anything else, inability to name things as they are..." Tom became a proper little madman.<br /><br /> "That's a damn curious way to talk. Amateur thinking. You prefer professional, ready-made, thinking, propaganda, advertising, and pornography perhaps? Your own lousy jargon? The sort that collapses as soon as you examine its strong stout clichés, its tiny little vocabulary of fully-paid-up words?"<br /><br /> Constance turned to Philip and Sarah at the piano. "You should take up music," Philip said masterfully. "You've always been much above average."<br /><br /> "I have taken up music," Sarah said. "Aah, Philip, be yourself."<br /><br /> "No. Seriously, I mean."<br /><br /> "Seriously. I'm serious now. I'm playing seriously."<br /><br /> "Yes. I believe you are."<br /><br /> "I'm seriously playing at St. Botolph's Church Hall tomorrow evening. Want to come? You'll be the only one of my friends if you do."<br /><br /> "Why's that?"<br /><br /> "It's just that St. Botolph's Church Hall is not a serious enough place for some people."<br /><br /> Constance thought about that, it was undoubtedly true.<br /><br /> "Come the revolution", Tom said to his father, "You'll find you'll be the first one up against the wall."<br /><br /> "Tom! You're so angry. I don't understand one word of your meaning any more..." Tom was angry but indulged in rhetoric. Frances, recognising only the anger, was earnest and quiet when she said this, as if to understand Tom's meaning was the highest aim in her high world. She really was very beautiful with a look of blue-eyed unselfconscious concern shining out of her, her fine brown arms and dark gold hair set off by the blue linen dress. Constance could feel the truth and weight of Frances's presence. She looked round for Philip. Frances had not failed to understand Tom; she had become contemptuous of his temper. Or was it nervous? Frances had unexpectedly nervous feelings about certain things. Much attention now focused upon her. She was stunning. Stunningly; it was a way Frances had. Confronting, controlling somehow, Tom's anger, out of her own purest fear of violence. Not that way.<br /><br /> Ah well, it was all disagreeable and none of her business.<br /><br /> Frances looked round to find Philip.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5340588203906676587.post-81567100562666409242010-06-29T08:38:00.002+01:002010-06-29T09:03:41.170+01:00POST 12Two days later in the early evening Constance went into her Uncle's old office with the intention of inspecting it thoroughly. <br /> <br /> It was a desirable, cold, out of the way place on the ground floor, dusty, furnished, and uninhabited. She intended to write her book here some day. She examined the large unused desk. It was sideways on to the front window, giving a view of the front steps. That would have to be changed. She studied the shabby sofa upon which she and Matthew had once been accustomed to unload their second-hand books on Saturday mornings. It stood before the farther grate empty but for a fall of smelly soot in it, at the other end of the room. The whole place was lined with bookshelves, from which Frances had had first pick leaving all the very old leatherbound law books, but plenty of room for books. Coming back to the sofa, it occurred to her that if ever Matthew were to say of herself, `You are so like your mother,' somehow the need she felt and could not describe might disappear.<br /><br /> The last meeting with Matthew had been inconclusive when one had been so sure one was ready for conclusions. Much the same as ever in fact. She had had it in mind to look at him as her mother's lover, to see him as her own father. She had forgotten to do that. No matter. She felt energetic. It even crossed her mind that she might in this place, if she could purloin it, do some homework. A room to her very self. Notes needed to be made, and an approach to Aunt Molly worked out.<br /><br /> She sat down at the dusty desk in the swivel chair and took up an unpainted wartime pencil, untouched for years. She looked at it idly in the rays of evening sunshine. The wood had gone grey round the still sharp point. Her uncle had one day laid it down for the last time without knowing it was the last time. A glimpse of mortality on the end of a pencil. <br /><br /> Impatiently, she opened all the drawers as she often had. Empty. These two unused desks constituted an engine of creation. Typewriter space, work space. The bottom drawer she had never been able to open. It was returned on its runners too far in. Now, this is what she had come to inspect. Unlike the empty drawers it seemed to have something heavy in it. It would repay work to get it open. She lay on the floor to see what might be done from underneath.<br /><br /> Feet pounded heavily up the front steps. The door-bell rang. Feet pounded heavily down. Although slightly curious it was not her policy to allow her self's self to be interrupted by door-bells, phone-bells or imperious calls from the human voice. Besides, she needed leverage, or a screw-driver, or another pair of arms. At last, lying on the floor and with the use of one foot underneath she got a good push and pull on the offending thing. The drawer opened stickily, crammed with scrumpled paper. Underneath the spoiled top sheets, Absecond, Millbrow, Hayter and Fade. Solicitors, stacks of it, dryish, brownish, never gone to salvage. She knelt up and took the reams of paper lovingly from the drawer and put them on the desk. It surely was a sight. At the bottom, a few paper clips and a key. She picked up the key, studied it, and pocketed it. Stationery, especially a pile of good clean paper hitherto always someone else's had an awesome effect on her, a sexual excitement in the pit of the stomach. This huge pile! It was as if Uncle Paul Absecond had left it to her in his will. An inheritance.<br /><br /> Write something on it. She picked up the old pencil.<br /><br /> <span style="font-style:italic;">Others, I am not the first,<br /> Have willed more mischief than they durst,...<br /></span><br /> She shivered and scribbled it out.<br /><br /> No Matthew, no Ludlow. She had loved Ludlow with Matthew there The happiest days of her life. Matthew was to be married. He was to belong to somebody else exclusively. Constance wondered whether God, in creating the world, really had intended this exclusiveness. For, how exactly, would it get populated if... She chewed the end of the pencil, it was bitter with age. Matthew, finished. Supposing she had answered him truthfully when he asked what was wrong? She sat listening to the quarrelling swifts.<br /><br /> Astonishingly, the door opened. This room was never used except for the purpose of keeping Aunt Molly's missioners from the Labour Party waiting. Matthew dashed in, smiled, and went straight to the telephone of the smaller desk opposite. Constance sat up and watched him.<br /><br /> "Just putting off Patricia for half an hour," Matthew said. "Philip's outside. He wants a bed for the night."<br /><br /> Constance was digesting the significance of putting off the one when the other's image, and in want of a bed, came bolting to life. <br /><br /> "Philip?" She stood up. "Here? He can have mine. He can have mine...."<br /><br /> "Does this damn thing work?"<br /><br /> "What? It doesn't work. Sorry."<br /><br /> "Useless child!" Matthew hurried out. Constance followed and put her nose to the crack in the door. Tom Kellory, carrying his weight equally balanced fore and aft, bounded past and up the stairs, with Camilla Harisonn and her brother Philip behind him. Front door open. More to come? Camilla stopped suddenly at the bottom of the stairs, Philip swerved to pass and she caught his arm.<br /><br /> "Tell me! Tell me now. I wish to know."<br /><br /> Constance, astonished, studied Camilla's dark passionate face but Philip's was out of eye-range.<br /><br /> "Well, am I a girl, or not?"<br /><br /> Constance was about to rush out and say, Certainly damn silly old Camilla you are a girl, when a Presence, thus delaying the rush, pointed to the interesting fact that it is possible to be sincerely contemptuous and at the same time sincerely envious of such incredible comfortably-at-home stupidity, with Philip of all people, as just displayed by the ravishing Camilla.<br /><br /> "If you were going to be in London, they'd let me live here with you. I don't want to go to New York." Camilla said this with an absence of reticence that could be heard all over the house.<br /><br /> "Well, I'm not going to be in London." No. He's going to Korea. As to explosion of voice and force of leg on the stairs, that was much better. Air cleared.<br /><br /> "I shall go home."<br /><br /> "That's a very good idea," he called back.<br /><br /> Camilla jumped off the stairs and made promptly for the front door. Constance saw her safely gone, and came out beaming. "Philip!" She could feel herself glowing all over.<br /><br /> He leapt down the stairs. "Con. Connio..." and then he stopped.<br /><br /> Camilla had shouted from the front garden. There was a sudden squawking hissing on the path outside. Constance saw the yellow-blackish crouched tabby on the young thrush. When she caught up with Philip he was struggling with the huge yowling mass of fur, its back legs pinioned under his left arm.<br /><br /> The mother thrush had hopped on to a low branch of the lilac and was giving off distress signals in between flying out and back again, all claw and vertical flutter, in the direction of the imprisoned cat. The thrush lay faintly squirming, heaving, and at last quite still. A half-gulleted little worm wriggled its pointed end an inch unconsumed out of the prostrate, probably dead, bird's mouth.<br /><br /> Philip was having a bit of trouble with his catch. The huge round male head with little pricked back ears set back now into massive chest and shoulders, had a full fine set of teeth and appeared to be hissing from a gargling position. Camilla was hanging over the animal looking into its eyes unable to capture its gaze and not improving its temper.<br /><br /> "He's got you," she said slowly and laughed. She was incredibly beautiful, quite radiant. A pink flush had come upon the pale brown silk of her face.<br /><br /> "I wonder why we never let nature take its course? We must be programmed!" Philip looked down into the amber cat-eyes giving him so spiteful and absorbed an attention.<br /><br /> "It's our lovely culture."<br /><br /> Camilla, Anglo-Indian, praising or blaming?<br /><br /> "Why can't I let big cats eat little birds, you damn great bag of starvation?" The cat gave out a gargle and hiss from its open throat. If it was frightened, its green eyes still glittered with revenge. All its ancient past, the past of its primeval ancestors was in the present gleaming promise it made of revenge in the immediate future. Thereto its hind legs sprang back against Philip's hip and it almost gained its freedom. "Cam, don't stand there making eyes at it, go and get the devil something to eat."<br /><br /> "What shall I get you?" Camilla crooned to the cat.<br /><br /> "Hop it, girl. Find something. Find Fran." He sat down on the edge of what had once, but not in living memory, been a lily pond. It was now full of clumps of violet starlike flowers. Constance lay on the seat behind him. She had never seen anyone sitting with their legs over the side of the old stone pond under the faded lilac in the front garden. He stroked the cat firmly and gently, but not entirely full of attention for it. After a while it no longer hissed, but looked at him, open mouth like a trap, teeth and eyes full of hatred. He went on stroking it. The evening was quiet and hot. Philip watched or looked in the direction of the parent bird in the lilac giving out signals of distress.<br /><br /> Camilla and Frances came down the front steps and stopped short by the bird. <br /> <br /> "Oh." She turned her eyes full on Philip. "I think...I think, I think you're disgusting," she said. They were remarkably the first words she addressed to her long-absent supposed to be lover as Constance understood. "Why didn't you attend to the bird? It's nearly dead."<br /><br /> "Died of fright. Where is it?"<br /><br /> "Here, where you left it, of course." She pointed behind her. "Where'd you expect?"<br /><br /> "Pick it up then. Or are you afraid of the worm?" he laughed. <br /><br /> "You did nothing," she accused them all. Philip, Constance, Camilla. "And now you're rewarding that flea-ridden brute with food."<br /><br /> "Hang on, Cam. Put the stuff down somewhere, and then you young ladies dash off and attend to the bird."<br /><br /> Camilla bent down and picked the bird up gently in thin brown gold-wristed, heart-melting hands, her almond-green and gold-threaded sari round her feet like a pool of water. Frances turned stiffly, gracelessly, on her heel. Philip's presence could make Frances very cross, stiff and graceless. "You'll be covered in fleas as well," she said. "And I dare say that'll suit you too."<br /><br /> "Frances! How can you possibly bring yourself to talk to Philip like that?" Camilla wanted to know following her warder into the house.<br /><br /> Constance stayed, lounging on the seat. She was disinclined to be one of anyone's 'young ladies', especially Philip's. The cat stretched its neck and Philip stroked the not very fine fur under its chin and on its chest. "Bad time for cats. In company, you must behave in a well-bred way. Even when you're very, very hungry," he said softly. All this passion and emotion over a cat. Its name was Barny. It was not hungry. It was a hunter and a thief. A cat of vulgar cat character. It belonged to Mrs. Trent, across the Square. It raided her neighbours' kitchens for their choicest unattended morsels. It ate pigeons, crouched on them under cars; and it had once caught a duck. And here was Barny elevated to portent and mystic source of ethical dissension. What a joke. The cat gave a yawning yowl. "Come on." He held it loosely now under his arm and stood up.<br /><br /> "Oh," he said when he saw Constance. "Pass over the meat." Constance got up and gave him the little plate full of fat, gristle and pieces of string, and he set it down and put the cat on it. His wrist was bleeding from a long puffy scratch across the vein. The animal immediately backed away from the food, went cautiously towards it sniffing all round the plate, and then with a sudden dart, it pulled one of the pieces away. Under the hedge it settled flat on its haunches and started to worry the small gristly chunk with sharp little jerks of the head. Philip beamed. "Milk," he ordered. Constance went reluctantly to do as she was bidden.<br /><br /> In the kitchen, Camilla masterfully took from Constance the saucer of milk and departed with it. Constance knelt down by the bird. It was in the knife box, the knives were all over the table.<br /><br /> "Don't you start frightening it," said Frances. "Get away."<br /><br /> "It's all right now. It needs a rest." But the little fat thing was agitated and getting up and toppling over again. "It's in a state of great anxiety," said Frances, squatting down at a fair distance, her sad gold eyes inviting the little bird to enter them, but a distaste in every limb for going any nearer to it.<br /><br /> "It's not all right. It's choking on the worm. I'll just ...."<br /><br /> "Get away."<br /><br /> Philip came into the kitchen, took his jacket off and started to wash his hands. He stood behind the stooping Frances, drying them on his handkerchief.<br /><br /> "Why don't you do that sort of thing in the bathroom?" she asked without looking at him.<br /><br /> "Do this for me," he said. He held out his wrist, purple swelling scratch; and a piece of sticking plaster. So he still knew where to find that, after all this time, that was pleasing. Constance thought that Frances wasn't ever going to get up. In the end she did, her shoulders raised round her ears somewhere.<br /><br /> "It's bleeding. It needs a proper dressing. It needs some antiseptic," she said. But she did not touch him.<br /><br /> "God damn it. Stick it on."<br /><br /> "It's not dry."<br /><br /> "I'll do it," Constance said.<br /><br /> "Oh, buzz off. I'll do it." He dabbed his wrist drier. "Give me the thing."<br /><br /> Constance took it from Frances. "I'll do it," she persisted.<br /><br /> Frances stood by, burdened with messages so heavy she was having a hard time hauling them to the surface.<br /><br /> "You've no business feeding ghastly carnivorous cats."<br /><br /> Frances hated cats. So cruel. And this particular cat. So unbrushed.<br /><br /> "And you've no business comforting ghastly carnivorous birds, in that case." Frances's eyes opened hard gold shafts. "I bet that worm thought some ghastly carnivorous thrush had got hold of it. What do you want to do? Take charge of the food chains? Rearrange the food webs? Dismantle the carbon cycle?" Philip laughed. "You want to rule the world? What a silly girl you are."<br /><br /> Constance fixed the plaster wordlessly. They were in the middle of some old familiar argument it seemed, probably exactly where they'd left off in Wales.<br /><br /> Constance was working up a generous amount of pure contempt for both of them when Frances left and Philip buttoned his cuffs. How just a man simply buttoning his khaki cuffs could be so moving, dispelling all contempt, unless it was that his hands were so shining and brown, Constance could not think.<br /><br /> "You smell awfully nice," she said.<br /><br /> "Natural odour of sanctity," he said. But it was not. It was the laundering in his shirt. She fell instantly in love with his shirt; the whole sensation suddenly reinforced by memories of Matthew in uniform during the war.<br /><br /> "That bird is dead," he said. He picked the little body up. He consigned it and the worm to the bucket. "It's cold." He and Constance were alone.<br /><br /> She was paralysed with caution and pleasure and guilt. Their eyes met. Philip Harisonn. She had a shock from not having remembered how lively and enquiring his eyes could be.<br /><br /> He came over to her and kissed her on each cheek twice, "Con, Connio, Constance, Con." As he had done so often in the old days when he came home. He was familiar, and a stranger. She was shy. He had her by the shoulders.<br /><br /> "I haven't seen you for ages. Far, far too long." He hugged her.<br /><br /> After a fleeting moment in contact with her, he almost immediately set her back again and looked at her properly for the first time. "You've changed," he said. He dropped his hands to his pockets, looking at her. He really did seem pleased to see her. "You've grown, or something...How are you?" She became a bit withdrawn. She was not up to that negative kind of question going with that positive kind of look.<br /><br /> Any development of this little scene was fortunately interrupted by a business-like Frances. She had expected, she said, to find Mrs. Laver here making a salad.<br /><br /> Something had happened on their holiday in Wales where Philip was stationed that had not improved Fran's manner face-to-face with her lover. Face-to-face it had always seemed distinctly cool to Constance's way of judging lovers. A Philip-visitation of this quite unpremeditated kind, so totally unprepared for mentally, spiritually, physically, domestically, though, thank God, everyone was at least dressed top and bottom, let alone a cat incident on top of it, set Frances, that rock of ages, unbelievably on edge. For more minutes, she would be going round the house, cursing and excited, like a spinning top, at a loss to know where her undivided attention might settle, and control of the world be gained once more.<br /><br /> However that might be, Fran's eyes, whatever the occasion or difficulty of the emotion, if she looked at you at all, never looked away from you to left or right if straight at you would do. And then you would think of topaz and gold and furze-moors and honey and pools of water with the sun on them, and the offer to enter her at her eyes was there, except that, with her eyes still on you, any of that nonsense and she would lock you out instantly, and then you could ponder on abysses, ice and fire, on her vulnerability and defiance and generally get your thoughts in a muddle. Poor Fran. Constance had now got her thoughts in a muddle. But Philip had not.<br /><br /> "Fran!" he said, stopping her in her purposeful twirl of concentrated but haphazard domesticity in the salad-making line and holding her by both hands. "I get such a picture of you from your letters," he did not say damn letters, "that I forget how very beautiful you are." And all this quite openly and as if one, Constance, did not exist.<br /><br /> Reluctantly, tactfully (though what did they care) Constance left the kitchen, but could not forbear to ease her ill-humour, call it jealousy, by crumpling in the corridor at the crack of the door. Silence.<br /><br /> An intention to listen-in had not quite fully formed when, embarrassingly, the door flew back and Frances, followed by Philip, made her way past her sister causing considerable draught in the various acts of skirt-swinging, breath-taking, hair-swirling, and breast-raising, together with various cancellation movements with her hands.<br /><br /> "Ah-ha!" Philip stopped to say, in a ridiculous caught-you voice as he was passing Constance.<br /><br /> "Ah-ha yourself!" Constance said, habits of speech slipping back to those old days when the one was always meeting the other carelessly in these corridors and landings.<br /><br /> Constance dismissed the sulks, together with conceived but unborn plans to make salads, and followed them.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5340588203906676587.post-60561460450551034482010-04-24T09:41:00.000+01:002010-04-24T09:44:11.215+01:00POST 11She was still not helping Sarah to sing the orchestral parts. Wordless at Constance's interruption, Sarah had started again, doing it all, the whole thing including the singing, for herself. All save that acute appreciation which Constance, now watching her from a position lying on the old sofa, was giving to every nuance of the performance. How did she do it? The piano's first taking that plunge of the right hand, throwing up birds, water, splashes of joy, and desperation, the left hand driving up on the right a strong, warning, independent story. The strength of hands reminds the orchestral singing voice of things other than its joy and glory; hands, voice, music; Sarah in claim and counter-claim. Constance thought she would cry, she was in love with this enchantingly pretty, pink and silver sister of hers. Unbearably pathetic, Constance found it - the glissandos and trills and Sarah's voice deeply baying the brass statement. In the music she heard Frances and Philip and Matthew, her mother and father. She heard all their hidden lives; they were brave and sad. At last the door opened. Frances, intent on interruption, looked at Sarah, who at once stopped playing. In the silence Constance watched them. She experienced the gradually accumulating assemblage, the triangular being, absolutely still, of herself and her sisters. Pale, brown, pink. Watching. Waiting. Time expanding.<br /><br /> "Please don't stop," Matthew said.<br /><br /> (Why come in then?)<br /><br /> Sarah got up.<br /><br /> "At her spiritual exercise again," Aunt Molly said in a congratulatory manner. "Amusing herself. Practising her music; not eating. The child doesn't eat, you know. Celibacy, fasting and toil. That's Sarah's motto. She seems to be training Constance in the same economic habits."<br /><br /> Sarah had never borne piffle gladly. She had been too old for that from birth. Constance looked at her anxiously.<br /><br /> "Sarah doesn't play anything seriously," Frances smiled.<br /><br /> Constance in a flash saw Frances's stupidity. Her actual standing there, as monumental stupidity. A large immovable block of stone hewn to celebrate some socially-acceptable platitude.<br /><br /> "Absolutely unmoved by her own talents. She'll do nothing with them," Aunt Molly added.<br /><br /> Every time! All her life. This stupidity about Sarah. Sarah was glacial.<br /><br /> "But she plays all her life has been I mean all the time," Constance burst out.<br /><br /> "Aha! Speech restored!" Matthew looked at her. He should be looking at Sarah.<br /><br /> "But only to you, and at School, and at St. Anne's. And there are scholarships and competitions going begging for her."<br /><br /> "St. Botolph's, not St. Anne's" Constance put in, outraged. All this concern and Aunt Molly couldn't even get that right!<br /><br /> "I play. And I just let that be enough." They were aware even without looking at her of her huge sullen resistance to all of them.<br /><br /> "Goodbye." Matthew kissed Sarah.<br /><br /> "Goodbye."<br /><br /> "She is very gifted, Molly," Matthew said thoughtfully, quietly, politely, in the hall; and then he stopped. "But I'd let her go her own way." He put his hand to his head, over his eyes and straight back over his hair. "My God, she is so much like her mother." Then they all moved on.<br /><br /> After a moment he said, "Philip seems to be bent on staying in the Army another four years. I wonder what his mother would have made of that? Ah, Lisette! He's like his mother, too. Put Sarah and Philip together and you have those two formidable young women again!"<br /><br /> "Four years?"<br /><br /> "We've been to Grodust to see what he can do. He might do something for Tom when he's called up, too."<br /><br /> "Grodust? Which Grodust?" Molly Absecond's attention was quite fully worked up.<br /><br /> Constance herself was quietly astonished. Grodust. Her own private word. One she had annexed. Along with some others. The Silver Street Baths bomb-site had a notice set up with a word or two on it. Grodust. Site Developers.<br /><br /> "General Grodust. General Gerald Christie-Grodust, the brother of the shipowner," Matthew said. "Barbara's uncle."<br /><br /> "Why in God's name should Philip want to stay in the Army?"<br /><br /> "I don't suppose he would thank you to ask him. But he's a thoughtful chap. The Army seems to have opened his eyes. One or two of his latest poems are very good indeed."<br /><br /> "He sent me one from Wales," Frances said, sulkily, joining them. "The Man Who Fell Off Snowdon."<br /><br /> "Addressed to some unfortunate female writer who said that Nature was passé," Molly said. "What has poetry got to do with the Army?"<br /><br /> "It was addressed to me," Frances said. "It was brutal. Let the sun set on Frances, it said. Morbid. Nothing to do with the Army. I hate the Army. Everything out of the rule book. I hated his horrible mountains. I threw it away."<br /><br /> "A collection of his poems is going to be published. Barbara's behind that."<br /><br /> "What?" Constance thought Frances would choke with disbelief and fury.<br /><br /> "Who's Barbara?" Constance whispered to her, but there was no answer.<br /><br /> Barbara? Some old lady Grodust?<br /><br /> "I'm very glad to hear that. I've got quite a collection of his poems myself. He's always flattered me," Aunt Molly said.<br /><br /> Fallen behind, Constance smiled. No. Aunt Molly would not miss all those poems she had been so flattered to receive and not careful enough to retrieve from the letter cupboard on the landing. Constance now had quite a collection.<br /><br /> "My opinion is that Philip is hoping to see some service. Action abroad," Matthew said, coming to the heart of a preoccupying thought.<br /><br /> "But he can go abroad any day he chooses, and for as long as he likes! What a very extraordinary thing..."<br /><br /> Frances stood by. She came slowly to what was clearly a fresh shock. "He's said nothing to me about even staying in the Army. At least, nothing one could possibly take seriously." She had almost recovered her poise, but her tone suggested, and quite blatantly, that Matthew had got his information wrong.<br /><br /> "I know you take ideas seriously. Perhaps you should try taking people seriously," Matthew said, but pleasantly.<br /><br /> Beethoven's Fourth with vocal accompaniment had started up once more after several small rehearsals and experiments. Frances went to her room.<br /><br /> Molly and Matthew, followed by Constance because Philip Harisonn had now been thoroughly mentioned, made a slow procession down into the hall. Philip was her hero. She did not presume to be in love with him. In any case, Frances had chosen Philip early in life. And even if she had not Constance still would not have presumed to be in love with him because he was real and formidable to her in a way that Matthew was not.<br /><br /> "One must speak to Philip. Matthew, you must give my love to Patricia. I think she is a very brave girl to marry you especially as you have both had such disconcerting previous experiences. You were a sad case of rebound the first time. It mustn't happen again. We have of course been kept very faithfully informed by Tom, you know; we are not surprised. Goodbye, my dear." Molly kissed Matthew, and it was as if he had not heard a word she had said.<br /><br /> As he bent to kiss Constance, she felt the nervous tightness in him again. "As for you," he said, "you have hardly said a word to me. Are your thoughts taboo, or something?"<br /><br /> She put her arms round his neck, for she had no words. She kissed him very fervently, disarranging the red silk handkerchief as she turned her head on his breast. But the precautionary tightness in his arms did not want that. She stood back. He put on his coat. She was not ready for him to go.<br /><br /> "You mean Philip wants to fight? In this new war?" Curiously difficult sentence to make; and not only because it was made to inhibit the tears of Matthew's going for ever.<br /><br /> He looked at her for the first time fully-present. The light in his eyes said that she had keenly interested him. She had exclusively engaged his mind.<br /><br /> "Exactly!" he said, admiringly almost, and as if that told all. He even put his hand, carelessly it is true, but relaxedly, on the back of her neck. "He's coming home for a night to see his father soon. Geoffrey's going to be terribly disappointed, I think. Whether Philip's going to the war or not, and it won't be easy to get him there, that's why I've been in touch with Grodust, he's certainly enamoured of the Army and means to stay in it."<br /><br /> The fact of having all this addressed to one, personally, by Matthew was a heady experience that instantly added years to one's age, and pounds squared horsepower to one's sense of importance. The accommodating of this flattering notion cost her an advantage, however, in the presence of such as Aunt Molly to whom Matthew's attention now passed again.<br /><br /> "You don't mean this outrage in Korea?" Molly was outraged. "I do not believe you can be serious."<br /><br /> Matthew at this point took his hand off Constance's neck and put it fair and square on Molly's shoulder, speaking to her quietly as if she were a child. "Molly, I have to go. It's now going to be a United Nations effort and the Foreign Office and the government has been taking it all absolutely seriously I assure you. I've hardly been home, or seen Patricia, since it started. There will certainly be a British or Commonwealth Brigade, if not two."<br /><br /> "The United Nations. What a farce! No wonder you've been so quiet this evening."<br /><br /> "It's my night off," he smiled.<br /><br /> He kissed Molly, and after arranging his silk handkerchief more to his liking went down the front steps and was helped ceremoniously into his waiting car. Molly departed, but Constance lingered.<br /><br /> "Goodnight," he called and waved.<br /><br /> Trustee or not, Foreign Office or not, another's lover or not, godfather or not, unfaithful to the Yokehams or not, Constance pined. She should have said "please, please don't go." And he should have said, Would you like to meet me for dinner one evening? Ring me at the office. Or, better, he should have taken her hand and they would have run into the summer breeze that was pushing and teasing a newspaper along the pavement in a most accusatory manner. That they did not, she realised at that moment in a striking revelation, was a pure waste of her life, and all it might hold for him. Accustomed to such revelations having repercussions in the physical world she nevertheless held her breath as Matthew's car came to a sudden halt. A small white sports car had come head-on to it round the corner. Yes. He might just have been killed; but he's not he's still alive. Curses were properly exchanged between drivers then both cars passed on into the fine early evening.<br /><br /> As Constance closed the door, Frances was shouting from her room: "If Sarah doesn't stop that noise I shall die." Constance picked up the pineapple bag, screwed it up and flung it up high, higher than the second bend in the staircase. As high as the top of the great stained window. He is still alive. It was almost enough. But it was an impermanent moment of celebration. She looked at the bag returned swiftly to her feet, all screwed up and rocking gently in one of the hall's permanent draughts. She went into her dead uncle Absecond's old office, shut the door, and turned the key in the lock.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5340588203906676587.post-31600011046250502472010-04-16T23:12:00.002+01:002010-04-16T23:22:35.482+01:00Post 10MATTHEW'S ANNOUNCEMENTS<br /><br />One early evening at the end of June 1950 Matthew Kellory called to tell Mrs. Absecond that he was going to be married again. Not that 22 Golden Square Gardens did not know. Constance, who had planned to be found on the graceful bend of the staircase when he came, in fact met him in the hall and he kissed her on her forehead. She watched him as Mrs. Laver took his coat and he leaned back from his knees to smooth his hair and straighten his tie in the glass of At the temple of Dharma Sabha. <br /><br /> `Perhaps after all Berenice should have married Matthew'. The magic in the sentence naming the name of her dead mother did not work. Light as a stick for a big man, all knees and elbows, in equable temper, bright eyes, the crisp whiff of the cooling evening air still with him (it had been raining a shower at last), and a ridiculous piece of red silk waving out of his top pocket; her searching regard was short and turned out to be her last studied act of the visit. He was not just good-humoured, he had his grand manner on.<br /><br /> For her part, she was dressed for the occasion in a clean white blouse and one of her sister Sarah's brightest batik skirts. Now he had come she felt all the unhappiness she had guarded against. She just stood there. Painfully in love with him.<br /><br /> "Where are we, where are we?" He went to his pockets. "At last! The end of years' of search!" You knew for a certain he had just picked it up. "A first edition. Don't say I don't love you. I do." He kissed the top of her head. He opened the book.<br /><br /> "On Wenlock Edge the wood's in trouble;<br /> His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves;<br /> The gale, it plies the saplings double,<br /> And thick on Severn snow the leaves."<br /><br /> If nothing else did, his voice which had so often made her laugh, would break her heart. He gave her the poem to read. "I was going to keep that for myself. Truer love hath no man, eh? What's the matter, old thing? Aren't you pleased?"<br /><br /> "You know I am," she whispered.<br /><br /> "What?!" He turned on Sarah hanging over the banisters. "You too?" He took the parcel from the floor and threw it up to her. Sarah gave him a beautiful smile and a shout of thanks as she caught it, high up. It was a pineapple and the bag slowly floated down to the floor of the hall as she ran upstairs with it.<br /><br /> He put his arm over Constance's shoulder to shepherd her up after Sarah. "I can't stay long. Look after that!"<br /><br /> "I always do look after books," she chided him.<br /><br /> "Yes. I know you do."<br /><br /> "Thank you very much for it." A Shropshire Lad. "That's what you were," she whispered.<br /><br /> "That's very much what I was. And I knew the man who wrote it. You don't seem too happy about it. Something up?" They stopped on the stairs. "What's the matter Connie?"<br /><br /> "Nothing. It's nothing." She was angry that he could ask such a big question with so little time left for an answer. She ran upstairs ahead of him.<br /><br /> "Oh, come on, now. Buck up. You don't see me every day. You haven't seen me for weeks."<br /><br /> By the time he reached the sitting-room, his grand manner was perfectly restored. Enquiries about health were exchanged. It was a manner that had to do precisely with the disguising of health, spiritual, physical, meteorological. He would come in, as now he did, and maintain a persistent and unrelenting cheerfulness, his health when asked after was always excellent, the state of the weather always suited him exactly, whatever his eyes said his lips smiled that his soul was serene and the state of the nation was wonderful. It was as if he sent a counterfeit person to stand in for him, one full of aggressive good humour vouching not only for his own great good health but for the great good health of the universe at large, let anyone deny it at peril of being put down, powerfully because so cheerfully, as a moaner. Sometimes it stymied even Aunt Molly Absecond. (It never occurred to me at that time that it was Aunt Molly it was meant to stymie.)<br /><br /> Molly Absecond had an attitude to Matthew in those days which Constance could only describe to herself as `unknowing'. Given the chance, Molly treated him high-handedly, off-handedly, and sometimes more brutally than she ever treated anyone else. Constance felt, nervously, that it was only his superior kindness that kept him from giving back as good as he got. Molly was like a child with a familiar, wild, family-pet, but a child who had not realised that the quiet mangey old beast was still a lion, heart and claws. It was Aunt Molly's attitude that Frances had learned. Neither of them, Constance thought, knew him for what he was.<br /><br /> Molly smiled at him now her sweet old lady's smile, the one she had smiled all her life when there was no smiling matter behind her eyes, congratulated him on his coming marriage.<br /><br /> "I am surprised you men can still get women to do it," she said bright eyed. Then they all smiled at him, save Constance who was not at all surprised that Matthew could get women to do anything; but before tonight she had never begrudged him that. "Of course, the wish to become intimately involved in such a relationship, that probably has to be satisfied in some cases in the way of marriage. With all that burden of loving, the sacrifice of excitement, people have to learn how to do it."<br /><br /> Learn how to do marriage? What does she mean by that? Constance held her breath; her Aunt's discourtesy being so somehow intimate and pointed.<br /><br /> "Twaddle, Molly. If not marriage what do you want for these girls?" Matthew laughed at Molly at the same time as he squeezed Sarah round the shoulders to himself. His grand manner made him uninteresting. His laugh made Constance feel earnest. It reduced her self esteem. He no longer knows who I am. He had accepted the offer of a drink and perched now on the back of the sofa, waiting for Frances to bring it, and ready to leave almost as soon as it came. He stood up as Frances came in. She refused to let him take the tray she carried.<br /><br /> "No Tom tonight? I thought I might catch at least a glimpse of the son and heir."<br /><br /> "He's at a meeting."<br /><br /> "Oh? A meeting?"<br /><br /> No information forthcoming on Tom. Matthew advanced to kiss Fran. It was, if anything, of slightly longer duration and of keener pressure than the kiss to Constance.<br /><br /> "How was Wales?" He kissed her.<br /><br /> "Damn awful," Frances said. She put the tray down.<br /><br /> "Spoiled. You're spoiled." He studied his no-doubt favourite Frances, the eldest, the clear-eyed intelligence radiating out of her brown face, the strong hair a dark streaky gold "What was it, the weather?"<br /><br /> "No. The company." That would be Philip's.<br /><br /> No present for Frances. She was the adult. Sarah, slighter and silvery, swung joyously round his neck. "Darling Matthew," she said. "Congratulations. Wales was glorious." Then she kissed him. Not just easy manners either. Molly offered sherry which they all took but Sarah refused. But then she drank a sip to his health and happiness from Matthew's glass! Sarah had the most inventive reactions to the moment's spur of anyone Constance had ever met. Enviable at the best of times, in this case intensely provoking.<br /><br /> "I've just been lecturing about your grandfather to a rare society of scholar priests."<br /><br /> "Still talking about him?" And whether she referred to the talk of the scholars or to Matthew's Aunt Molly did not make plain.<br /><br /> "What did you say to them?" Frances demanded, exchanging significant looks with her aunt.<br /><br /> "I said he was a very clever clergyman who had three of the wickedest but most goddesslike grand-daughters in the world."<br /><br /> "None of whom he had the good fortune to meet, poor old man," Aunt Molly said. A buzz that crushed her ear-drums filled Constance's head. She had only recently discovered why she had never met her mother's father. His wife had killed him.<br /><br /> "Poor Berenice. Poor kid."<br /><br /> "Oh Matthew," Frances was sighing and putting her glass down. "How boring you can be!" She sat in a chair opposite to him and crossed her legs and drew attention to her skirt by arranging what did not need arrangement. She was going to give him a lecture.<br /><br /> "Have some pineapple," Sarah put in with very thin slivers of pineapple, plates, forks, napkins. Frances looked affronted and declined. Molly put an end to Fran's gathering lecture and the grandfather topic.<br /><br /> "It's a pity you're going to inherit Kenys daughters. Two more girls. There are enough girls," she said over a mouthful of pineapple.<br /><br /> "Two more women... fortune favours the brave..." Constance, at work on her own pineapple, knows nothing of the two new daughters. Two new daughters? The justice of the universe is called instantly to the bar of judgement. But the Judge to whom one naturally looks for Judgement is absent. Always absent. Constance sighed. She could not eat another mouthful.<br /><br /> Molly, in no such straits, enquired: "And what does Tom think of his two new sisters?"<br /><br /> Matthew looked at Molly Absecond, suspended a piece of pineapple and then put it down. Tom? What about me? the look, the smooth dark pointed face now said to Constance. I am too young to have a grown-up family said this talkative face. I have a son of twenty three, and now I am to be father to two very beautiful adult young women. (Constance was still seeing them. Adult. That being the deadly blow to her aspirations in any competition for his attentions.) It's all wrong. I am, after all, quite young enough to be about to be married for love again, and to father new young. And yet here are these girls also treating me like Daddy, and especially Frances who expects me to be quite immune from her attractions and flirtatiousness, who assumes she is perfectly safe with me. <br /><br /> It's true. Frances despite her flirtatious manner does think she is perfectly safe with Matthew. She is entitled one hopes, in principle, to think that. It is exactly what Frances likes. She likes to feel safe with men. Otherwise she gets very bored with them. Otherwise she does not flirt with them.<br /><br /> "Tom?" Matthew said at last. "Now what would you expect him to think? A young man of good character?" And fat, we mustn't forget, Constance smiled to herself. Like that great big wicked jolly imperious girl I've heard stories about. Tom's mother, who refused to come back to England with Matthew for the war. "He's a gift to the university, bound to be called up. He's got a life of his own. They're charming girls. Tom's charmed." So is his father. Constance studied the ceiling and did not withdrawn her gaze until they had ceased to talk of affecting matters.<br /><br /> <br /><br />Molly Absecond spoke in an absent-minded manner of plans for the education and future of her nieces. Frances was preparing herself for a life leading to professorhood [?] at the University. Sarah would turn to Music and Art. She did not mention Constance. Matthew was restive and Constance did not mind if he suffered. She turned her mind to the famous criminal-statistics Patricia of his choice. This lady was known, she had discovered, for her delightful eccentricity in never wearing any colour but green. She had green eyes and red hair. And so had Miss Green, Constance's French mistress, carroty red hair and a fierce red neck to go with her emerald green knitted woollies. Something good.<br /><br /> Constance would like to run her hands from his knees to his thighs. Possibly she would like that, she reflected. But, looked at in this particular, physical way, he was recognisably one with whom one would not care, actually in the flesh, to indulge in even perhaps back-rubbing. In the flesh he seemed rather old; well, anyway, in the presence of the actual physical flesh of the fantasy, there always was her own nervousness waiting. Still, she decided to persist in imagining she would like to run her hands and so on. The weather for one thing demanded it. The sun had come out again. She could hear the swifts, hers and Matthew's going mad round the rooftops. She looked deep into the trees in the Square and after a while they informed her of her own mind. She would like to have all the life in his eyes. Yes. More than anything she would like his eyes to shine upon her alone with that keenness they had once had. She would like to be able to say to him, `Let's take Edgar Allen Poe with us and go to Ludlow. Let's stay there for the whole summer, reading.' She would like to be known by him again, as she had been once years ago. She would like exclusively to engage his mind.<br /><br /> Hopeless!<br /><br /> The direction Molly was now giving to Matthew's mind was towards certain prosaic economic arrangements which had to be attended to in providing the girls with funds to give them `an absolutely unqualified start under their own steam'. As a trustee of their funds he would be concerned with this. Her mother had arranged that.<br /><br /> <br /><br />He had sat upright at first at the other end of the large wing sofa and pulled down his waistcoat self-satisfyingly flat a boring number of times, he had looked complacently at his polished toe-caps for minutes together, but now he had given all that up and lay lounging as usual, his old self, into the sofa's cushiony embrace, his legs taking up the floor, his body home again, his mind elsewhere. But not, as it turned out, and as Constance was holding against him, on his Mrs. Raleigh-Kenys. <br /> <br /> "Constance! Where's your tongue. You've been asked a question!"<br /><br /> "Never mind," Matthew said and smiled at her. "She's reading. Which one is it?"<br /><br /> Constance was dumbfounded. Sarah came over her shoulder and took the book and recited.<br /><br /> "Others, I am not the first,<br /> Have willed more mischief than they durst:<br /> If in the breathless night I too<br /> Shiver now, 'tis nothing new."<br /><br /> "What morbid rubbish, Connie. Where on earth did you get that book from?"<br /><br /> "I gave it to her."<br /><br /> "Her head is full enough of nonsense already, as you'd discover if you had to live with her," Molly eyed dismissively the outraged Constance and the giggling Sarah and expanded on the immorality of providing an education for girls which opened horizons beyond marriage without preparing also for some small financial independence to allow of job-fulfilment and training in a man's world. Provision for this was to come from what Molly always spoke of as "the mother's money". <br /><br /> The mother's money. Matthew looked about the room from under his eyebrows in a slightly grim-faced way and Constance was aware that he was conscious that, as ever, the girls were spoken of to their faces as if over their heads and that they were all ears. Constance usually enjoyed that kind of collusion with Aunt Molly and the way it foxed even a friend as close as Matthew. Tonight she felt like crying. She went over and sat next to him. He had folded his arms tightly round his chest, she could feel the tightness in him. Something had passed between him and Molly that she did not understand.<br /><br /> "How is the asthma Matthew? Quite cleared up for the time being, is it?" His grand manner was fading; submerged secrets were surfacing in his eyes.<br /><br /> Constance, who now, definitely - her flesh borrowing a little of her fantasy's boldness - wanted them to run away together, wanted never to leave him, had put up her feet and had her head on his shoulder. Aunt Molly ordered her off as `lolloping all over' him in a voice that said she was too big for that sort of thing. Constance immediately jumped up. But Matthew caught her hand.<br /><br /> "No, no. Let her stay. I like it." And so he did, and a change of subject as well. He could not pull her back. It is much worse to be treated as a child by the man you love than to be treated so by your aunt.<br /><br /> "Con, let's go," Sarah said. "Bring your sherry."<br /><br /> "Yes. Go and eat your suppers, and Connie go to bed early. You look terrible." As if Molly Absecond cared what time anyone went to bed. She was showing off.<br /><br /> "That's the least of her deceptions," Frances said amusingly. "She looks terrible. She could probably swim a mile!"<br /><br /> "You couldn't swim a mile in the prime of health," Sarah said nastily. Frances hated swimming because, Constance was convinced, she had to get undressed.<br /><br /> <br /><br />"This house hasn't the faintest idea what a celebration is supposed to be," Sarah went straight off, but Constance lingered outside the sitting-room door, half-minded to go back in.<br /><br /> "Do you get the impression sometimes that Constance does not pay attention?"<br /><br /> Aunt Molly! Constance was transfixed. Matthew answered.<br /><br /> "Why do you always call on Fran to answer for her sisters as though she were their parent? I have the impression Con pays an unusual amount of attention". He laughed in a way flattering to the ear and heart of the listening Constance.<br /><br /> "One doesn't know about Constance at all. What's in her head? I ask myself. Sometimes she hardly says a word for days together. Occasionally asks an irrelevant question. She simply doesn't attend. When moved she'll go on giving a lecture long after everyone has stopped listening. Sarah one knows about. Will of iron. But sometimes I think Constance is not very... perhaps one is over-sensitive about the family history?"<br /><br /> Frances laughed. One could not be sure from this laugh how Frances had come to see and take hold of what Molly Absecond referred to as `Fran's responsibilities' or exactly how much she, Frances, really knew about `the family history'. There was clearly more to it than the generally accepted story that her mother, Berenice, had been very ill when she and Charles Yokeham had been killed in the Old House in Terminus in 1942.<br /><br /> "Family myth, perhaps," Matthew said firmly and with the intention of being disobliging.<br /><br /> Constance remembered a remark her Aunt had made in the middle of recalling an expedition made to a botanical garden before the war. `Your father and Matthew were students together. They were friends first and last and despite everything.' Constance imagined you had only to be Frances, and stop the anecdote right there, and ask Aunt Molly, and she would tell very precisely what this `everything' was. Constance, although she wanted to know, had a principled preference to leave the knowing to Frances, given it entailed `responsibilities'.<br /><br /> "Matthew, I wish you would have a word with Connie. She thinks a great deal of you. I think she of them all misses a father most."<br /><br /> Upstairs Sarah was playing her own variations on the wedding march at a volume which suggested a touch of temper. Outside the door Constance was beginning to feel very sober. Oh God! That tune and what it meant, and Sarah ignoring, as always, Aunt Molly and Frances, and she herself `missing a father most'. All of it coming together. Constance rubbed her face very thoroughly.<br /><br /> Inside, Frances that well-read goodlooking young woman was now challenging Matthew, as women will challenge men they find for the passing moment attractive, treating him to a bit of pure synthetic talk, woman to man, as a celebration of his coming marriage. On the Position of Women, of all things. You would think she was eighty. Matthew did not think, he was now saying, looking frankly no doubt upon Frances's beauty in that bright-eyed predatory way of his, that certainly the position of Frances Yokeham vis-a-vis the position of women in general had had enough attention. Some rot.<br /><br /> "You are constitutionally incapable of treating women seriously," Frances said (and good for her), for now her heart was set on having her say and she had not yet learned how to do that and flirt at the same time. "All over the world," she was going on, bearing up under one of her heaviest anti-climaxes, "women's work in the house," and here followed much information about domestic machinery, suburbia, the domestic Arts of the Household, and the whole `concept of culture through personal care and hearthside' "is being dangerously reduced in social significance. Boredom is setting in among intelligent women."<br /><br /> "What? Are you bored, Frances?" Aunt Molly asked accusatorialy, and herself only half-listening as usual, as if enquiring after the possibility of a bad cold.<br /><br /> "I? Oh certainly not!" Frances said dismissively.<br /><br /> "I hope at least," Matthew said insincerely, lazily, "that you will keep all this away from Patricia until I have her safely married."<br /><br /> "Yes. I'm sure you do. But there are many things an intelligent person is honour-bound to say," Frances replied.<br /><br /> "Well, that's a noble, old-fashioned view of the world," Matthew said. "And upon it I must leave you."<br /><br /> "She is naturally a pleasant and good young woman," Aunt Molly came in. "She may even prevail against what the world will want to teach her."<br /><br /> Especially, Constance stretched her stiff eyes, in that relationship between Frances and Matthew's son Tom, that, that, that world's representative, that fleshy youth of extreme good humour, pomposity, complacency, sureness. Yes, Tom Kellory had never been unsure of self, opinions, rightness, facts, feelings, in his young life. Tom adored Frances, understandably. But could Frances possibly adore Tom? She could control him, but that was different.<br /><br /> Not necessarily, said a Presence, Frances adores, loves, controllable things.<br /><br /> "As to Constance not being very bright, that's ridiculous," Frances suddenly, out of the blue, said with defiance and feeling. "She always knows what she's doing!"<br /><br /> "She's lucky to have you," Matthew said. They were walking towards the door where Constance stood, still transfixed.<br /><br /> "A missing father enters too much into a young girl's wanting. I always think so. And then heaven knows for what very curious reasons they will feel impelled to get married, and to whom; or not to get married. These girls have never seen a marriage at work, first-hand, of course. They've nothing to go on. They're quite free in that respect. I always do say marriage is a very chancy thing. These days it's become a sort of artificial sex-baited trap. Sex to end all sex, and yet you are to be in it today and out of it tomorrow." Molly Absecond would be smoothing her smooth hair (notably smooth this evening) absentmindedly. (She had also polished her finger-nails. Good heavens!) "Of course, I grant you, it can be a great legal, social, economic, domestic, emotional convenience; but naturally, one would not speak here of convenience."<br /><br /> Or of artificial sex-baited traps, one hoped!<br /><br /> Aunt Molly, in there, was hammering shafts into Matthew's breast-bone and depriving him of speech apparently.<br /><br /> It seemed to Constance obvious, although her senses gave but reluctant assent, that Matthew must be marrying for convenience. Still, she hoped her aunt's giving out her reservations was wasted on him. They would not be wasted on Frances. She would become unsure once more whether she herself was in love, or not in love, and with whom. Certainly Fran's feelings about Philip Harisonn did seem to mitigate against her better self. Love him she might. But did she really more than half like him? Would Fran recognise Aunt Molly's `ready to die' as a misquotation from one of Philip's poems? (Smugly, Constance thought not.)<br /><br /> "Are the men you encourage here, then of a special unmarriageable kind?" Matthew enquired pleasantly, as if reviewing his memories. "You brought up Tom and Philip (no mention of James), and partly in this house for six years; they won't be immune!"<br /><br /> "Tom and Philip?" Aunt Molly said with sudden, sharp attention. Perhaps she had never before seen those two as sex-bait trappers?<br /><br /> "I haven't seen Tom at home all week," Matthew said. "Give him my love."<br /><br /> "We've been working, Tom and I," Frances said severely; and then she giggled.<br /><br /> "Philip's due back very soon, I believe. But I agree, he's not going to give any of us much trouble in the marrying way just yet. Well, I must go. I've been working very hard indeed and I haven't seen Patricia all week."<br /><br /> "Philip is coming home?"<br /><br /> Constance flushed for Frances's puzzled and uncontrollable vivacity. It was a flush reinforced by a second flush for herself. Very soon. Philip!<br /><br /> "It is to be hoped at least that he will spare us any more nonsense with the wretched Camilla," Aunt Molly said regardless of the feelings Frances must be having, and mentioning the unmentionable, which was that Camilla was Philip's half-sister and uninhibited in her loving attentions towards him. And then she added something so that, as was very often the way, Constance could have no idea how seriously affronted, in this case of Philip, Aunt Molly really was. "Exactly like you used to be with your sister Lisette. I didn't approve of that either."<br /><br /> "Oh my god, Molly. You are irresponsible."<br /><br /> Molly laughed and Constance was aware, that very moment, that Matthew's disgust and pain, and Molly's funny sort of laughter, came out of the past; and that the Past, alive, was going to be walled up in Matthew's marriage.<br /><br /> "Oh! Listen!" Inside they all listened. Certainly Constance outside holding her breath listened. Aunt Molly humming. "Sarah is playing Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto and Constance is helping her to sing the orchestral parts. You must come up." But Matthew protested.<br /><br /> Constance crept off in a silent frantic rush.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5340588203906676587.post-20040513007919539622010-04-16T22:58:00.002+01:002010-04-16T23:11:50.552+01:00Post 9SPOUTING<br /><br />Matthew handed me the book back. I wiped my eyes. He winked at me. <br /> <br /> "I don't suppose either of you were aware that there was an attempt to make the son of Lucy Waters King of England?"<br /><br /> "What is that, she's got?" Tom wanted to know.<br /><br /> "I sent you a set last summer. I don't suppose for a moment you've ever opened it."<br /><br /> "Haven't I? No, I suppose I haven't. But I've got one, so that's good. Is lunch ready?"<br /><br /> 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?"<br /><br /> "`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.<br /><br /> 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..."<br /><br /> "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.<br /><br /> "God spare us," Aunt Molly put in.<br /><br /> "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?"<br /><br /> "Have you asked her what it all means?" Aunt Molly enquired severely. <br /> <br /> "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.<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> 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.<br /> <br /> <br />*Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5340588203906676587.post-78361157490248692682010-03-23T21:09:00.002+00:002010-03-23T21:11:29.147+00:00POST 8BOOKS<br /><br />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.<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> "This author," he said, "wishes to seize upon and frighten you out of your living daylights."<br /><br /> "Does he?" I sobbed. I was nonetheless very impressed.<br /><br /> "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."<br /><br /> "It makes me frightened," I protested.<br /><br /> "Worse things happen at sea."<br /><br /> "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,<br /><br /> "No worst, there is none."<br /><br /> Nothing to my purpose. "Has anything so bad ever happened to you?" I tried another way.<br /><br /> "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!"<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> "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'.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5340588203906676587.post-70583808996007628032010-03-19T23:14:00.002+00:002010-03-19T23:17:20.095+00:00POST 7THE BUSINESS OF "TALKING TO AUNT MOLLY"<br /><br />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.<br /><br /> "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.<br /><br /> What about me?<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> 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."<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> "What?" I said. <br /><br /> "I said Matthew is getting married again."<br /><br /> I could not believe it.<br /><br /> "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.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5340588203906676587.post-46713783236776960302010-03-19T22:59:00.001+00:002010-03-19T23:01:42.969+00:00Post 6A STOLEN LETTER: NOT THE FIRST<br /><br />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.<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> 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...'<br /><br /> 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!<br /><br /> 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.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5340588203906676587.post-31232212668989822282010-03-12T12:31:00.001+00:002010-03-12T12:38:27.624+00:00Post 5MORE HOT DAYS<br /><br />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.<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> "Constance!"<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> I mention the weather.<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> 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.)<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> I did not go to the Silver Street Baths to swim.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5340588203906676587.post-61543603698243572192010-03-11T10:17:00.001+00:002010-03-11T10:28:38.380+00:00Post 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?"<br /> 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."<br /> "Good girl. Don't let me get any more letters."<br /> 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.<br /> <br /> <br /><span style="font-style:italic;">COMPOSITION<br />Write an account of a very hot day you have enjoyed.<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> 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.<br /> </span><br /> <span style="font-style:italic;"><span style="font-style:italic;">In the royal parks, bleached, unpainted deckchairs support bodies lifeless to this world.</span> [From the particular to the generalised] <span style="font-style:italic;">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.</span><br /><span style="font-style:italic;"></span><br />Four o'clock and in the dark green clubrooms, </span>[What do you know of gentlemen's clubs?] <span style="font-style:italic;">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." </span>[Please see me]<br /> <br />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:<br /> "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."<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> 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.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5340588203906676587.post-66760017531381975352010-02-23T11:02:00.001+00:002010-02-23T11:05:23.409+00:00Post 3MARKS OF FAVOUR<br /><br />As a small child, the first time I ever heard the phrase, I was intensely interested in marks of favour. Aunt Molly asked Father Horbark one day in my hearing how somebody had come by `that mark of favour'. And as she always ignored the presence of children up to about the age of twenty five and had a masterly habit of speaking over our heads without ever giving the impression that she imagined we did not hear what she said, we had the best of the silent world. So I had learned to be quiet and listen; even in young days it never occurred to me to butt into an adult conversation with a question. Personal questions were for one to one where they could not be put aside. I was delighted with this new idea. I turned it over and over, testing it on the senses. I never wanted to ask what a thing `was'. I took this particular gem of a phrase to be a mark left by `Favour', whoever Favour was, so the first time I ever saw a disfiguring but fascinating bright red mark almost covering the face of a crisp old soldierly man with clawlike hands buying carrots in the Birley Fine market-place I knew without being told that it was a Mark of Favour.<br /><br /> Whatever that mark might have told me about Favour I was never to know, being dragged hastily along by one of the young nurse-maids who came and went at that time during the first days of the war to help the Nanny to look after us (five or six of us, sometimes more). They were very carefully brought up these girls, much at home with horses - which I was already by that time in desperate fear of; and they came from families living in the country town where my grandmother, Sarah Yokeham, lived. They were also very young, as even I could tell by their being much inclined to argue gravely with us children, paying the homage of earnest attention to our childish sins of assertion and proposition.<br /><br /> "That gentleman has a birth-mark, and it is something that nice people do not notice," said this very young woman dragging me inescapably after her by reason of having my arm under a painful form of propulsion restricting to the backward stare. That Favour should be implicated in birth did not surprise me; as to `nice' the idea that I was not was disobliging to my sense not of my good manners but of my private self. This young person could have no slightest idea how extremely `nice' my private self was. I was greatly indignant. I concluded that I probably had a special kind of eyes that ordinary nice people had not got. I was most puzzled, perhaps, on account of the young lady herself seeing it only not to notice it. <br /><br /> Before it achieved clarity, my mind fell into a condition of prodigious density in the matter of `marks of Favour'. I had checked with the eager assistance of my sister Sarah that, disappointingly, I had no birthmark - without telling her, of course, what the result of the search might mean to me. After that a Mark of Favour had come by sequent stages to mean any eccentric mark which might be construed as `a sign' providing it took my fancy. A satisfactory image of Favour I could not arrive at. Favour's job in life I could not delineate for myself any further than that it was, at least, to give secrets and pleasure to me and my special eyes.<br /><br /> For example, there was in Birley Fine a tremendous tower. As you came down a paved alley-way, with cottages and little front gardens on one side which were threateningly overpowered by a pale brick wall of tremendous height and length on the other, you turned out then on to a fine piece of common land that lay between my grandmother's house and the town-houses. There was The Tower. It stood decorating and retaining the prodigious brick wall as it came round the corner and rushed through the open space and down into the town to meet there an identical tower, of no significance to me. My tower at the corner of the alley-way had upon its common-facing face one high wide aperture or slot from the sill of which fell, like a beard, a very long black smoky lop-sided stain. It gave the entire edifice a disturbingly vital look as of a being hungry to be fed, despite the number of birds it appeared constantly to swallow and regurgitate, or of a mouth uttering mournful prophecies to a careless because absent multitude; or, of some huge Moloch demanding horrible sacrifices. Sometimes its stained mouth seemed to sing dolefully over the common. And some days what I wanted, impossible I knew (and I discouraged myself on behalf of all those who would discourage me if I mentioned it), was to stand on the top of this uncommonly favour-marked tower, which spoke only to me, and look out over the common and the town, as near the sky as possible, and see what it and I could see: what Favour had in store up there. Some days the old tower wanted that too. But Favour denied it. I can remember coming down that alley-way, with one or other of my elder sisters, Frances or Sarah, full of erotic excitement and fear, to behold the mouth with its strange beard. I can remember waiting in a state of potential nerve-explosion in case either of them mentioned it. Fortunately, neither of them ever did; although it was Frances, catching me transfixed perhaps in fascinated gaze, who told me that the building behind the wall was St. Peter's Hospital. It had never occurred to me to take notice of the building or its vast ornamental gate further down, let alone ask what it `was'. Frances was always very free with information one did not need, and in this case, as in so many, she was wrong. It was St. Peter's Court, the headquarters of the county waterways board.<br /><br /> A line of one of the first hymns I learned to sing deepened the power of Favour. `To whom the lips of children make sweet hosannas ring' it ran. I saw Jesus bending down for each child to kiss him, and each pair of childish lips left on his cheek a sweet hosannas ring. I worked this out after a while to be the unlipsticked equivalent of a lipsticked kiss, a little round mark with tiny radials circling from a vacuole. In short, a mark of Favour called `a sweet-hosannas ring'.<br /><br /> Incidentally, there were several misconstructions of hearing in my head as of understanding in my mind at that time. An evening prayer which one of our Nannies taught us caused me a good deal of dreadful speculation in those moments before I eventually fell asleep, leaving my problem where it fell in the lap of God. It was a very simple prayer, sung to a simple tune.<br /><br /> Lord keep us safe this night<br /> Secure from all our fears<br /> May angels guard us while we sleep<br /> ''til morning light appears. Amen.<br /><br /> We used to sing it every evening before she left the room. To me it was badly upsetting, and no sooner had she gone than I would be at it, word for word, somewhere between prayer and exegesis. Lord keep us! This is very necessary, something very frightful might happen to us, might it? It seemed so. Save this night! Oh, save it indeed. But how would the Lord `save' the night? Why did it need `saving'? The possibility of not being able to take night and day for granted was certainly there. And suppose the Lord was not listening to our feeble pipe, and forgot to save it? Or suppose he refused to save it? What would then happen to it? If this were not terror enough, the next line was much worse. Seek cure for all our fears. The idea that even God had to seek cures before He handed them out! Who, on Earth, then, could be sure of finding one for himself? And supposing the answer to the last appeal was No, angels may not guard you while you sleep? What would happen? In our sleep would it be? (Some dreadful Archimago at work, I suppose I thought for although I had never heard of Archimago then, I recognised him at once, that giver of bad dreams having consequences in the real(ish) world, when I met him.) Or would it be behind our backs? Bombs, maybe? But there were perils much worse. Volcanoes? Earthquakes? Floods? All very much worse because although the war had started and bombs had fallen, I still retained a much greater respect for acts of God. And if angels may guard us, I pursued Him, then may they also not depart a moment earlier than morning light, please. I thought it safest to repeat, over and over again, the appeal for the angel-guardians (on the grounds, no doubt, that they at least would know their way to Heaven in the event of emergencies) and I put please at the beginning and in the middle and at the end of that diminished one-line prayer and finished off with several Amens.<br /><br /> Hymns and carols gave me great trouble. The line `Be we low or high' produced the low `beewee' and the high `beewee' to my lasting amazement, and `Joy has come for you and me' caused disgruntlement that Joy, coming as she did with a capital letter, was no further described as to hat or coat nor furnished with a good reason why you and I should go with her on Christmas morning. I settled to my satisfaction that she was Father Christmas's big wife, a replica of the old man himself without a beard but with a very bright red lipstick.<br /><br /> Gradually, egg, larva, pupa, the hosannas-ring and the beewee and the answer-do and that cruel invocation `Suffer! little children' found their way wriggling through the crevices on the outermost margins of the secret place where I had parked them and re-emerging at last shook their wings took their perfect shape and arrived in the common world, unnoticed by me. For it is only later when one recalls, accidentally, how the curious little eggs were laid in the mind that one realises that they, after all, emerged imagos and fled long ago.<br /><br /> `Mark of Favour' was in a quite different case. By the time Aunt Molly applied the phrase to me personally (and I knew not in what respect for I only noticed that I was being noticed just as the substance was disappearing) it had to its name not only kiss marks and rain stains on walls and rust speckles on books and birthmarks, but my grandfather's bookplate (I never saw that grandfather, either), the HMV trademark dog and gramophone; the Royal Standard and, to go with that, an intensely mysterious and magical sentence, bearing to me no sense whatever, which had said Swynnerton bore "Silver, a flowered cross sable", seen once in one of my grandfather's ancient journals and never since rediscovered. It did not need to be. I had copied it out so many times, the mark it made on the page, with its mysterious quotation marks (and the flag, as I took it to be, above it) was enough.<br /><br /> I suppose I had looked up at Aunt Molly very warily, considering perhaps in my mind what mark of favour she had found in me that I had been too nice to notice, and wondering if I should be pleased with it enough to admit it to the pantheon, or if I should be dissatisfied with its insignificance and disappointed in myself. I was asking myself, privately, the questions. But she read my face and she said, "A mark of favour means that you are distinguished, by someone, from the common run of people, and esteemed, by them, above others." I knew better.<br /><br /> Her answers to questions asked often raised more problems than they solved. Either because she did not understand children, having none of her own, only us three Yokehams, her nieces (which, I suppose, with Philip Harisonn, and sometimes James Harisonn, and Tom Kellory, Matthew's son, was quite an experience of children); or because she had a theory about children; or because she was lazy, as I sometimes incline now to believe; all of which are not the same thing but come to the same thing; in any case she never `talked down' to children and forbade others to do so `in her hearing'.<br /><br /> "It means you have been noticed, with interest, by someone," Matthew said, regarding me, his fingers spread out tips to tips, his legs - over which I stood astride, my ankles touching his - stretched out some yard or so in front of him.<br /> "I know. And that someone's name is Favour," I said, always eager to show off for Matthew, ready even to throw my secrets away for him. At the time he was about forty, I supposed, but the most handsome man I had ever seen. He had a lovely face.<br /> He laughed. "I think your Aunt was referring, in a roundabout way, to God."<br /> Two things I knew. One was that Aunt Molly was not interested in God, roundabout or in any other way. The other was that you could not laugh and make jokes about God. So I knew it was Favour. Furthermore, I had enough experience to know that I had been `noticed with interest' by Favour already. I was going to marry Matthew, for one thing. He had a brown triangle mark I liked by his right eyebrow.<br /><br /> By the time the jays had distinguished me and set me above others by their notice, it was Favour's powers of noticing me that I was most keen on. Of course, I still noticed the work of Favour in Marks I found about me. But I was now able to construe the process as Favour noticing me. I was a scrupulous examiner. The jays were shy, therefore I was special. I began to think well of Gallop and Gallop: British Birds.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5340588203906676587.post-28098730357978037732010-02-22T22:21:00.002+00:002010-02-23T11:07:00.389+00:00Post 2I went straight to Aunt Molly's room for her Gallop and Gallop: British Birds.<br /> "Have you seen my reading spectacles?"<br /> "You've got them on. I've just seen a pair of jays. Fed them with breadcrumbs."<br /> "Extremely unlikely." Aunt Molly smoothed the distraught cushions, violently interrogated in the glasses-search, while I described the blue flash. "Jays aren't breadcrumb birds." Buncrumbs to be accurate. "Get me the book."<br /><br /> I'd got it. Handed her British Birds impatiently. She always took longer than I did, and infuriatingly read silently before utterance. "Jays, it seems," she said at last. "If you can be trusted to say what you saw. It says here," she adjusted her reading glasses, "Jays do not tolerate any familiarity with human beings." She chuckled.<br /><br /> "Exactly what one would expect of that book." I had always disliked it for good reasons. All the browns and blacks of the birds I knew well were so very smart and paperweight on the page, the sky so very smart old vicarage drawing room blue, and there is nothing to be said, as I said then and there, for a picture of a sparrow all nicely flecked-out and spruce when the scrabbling in the dust and the tail-twitching hind-uppermost on the rail and the cavorting in the bushes - making the hydrangeas jump and shake and twitter as if they were being tickled to death by fleas - is so missing, there is not even the merest suggestion of life in bone or feather. Here the jay, garrulus glandarius, looked as timid and wistful, and just about as menacing as a willow-warbler, roughly the same size; and certainly without enough energy to pick up so much as an acorn. But the colours were rightish. Aunt Molly had settled to a good bird-read. Here the raggedy crow was hooked and fierce, but impeccably gentrified in city black, just as I remembered on the very margins of memory, my lovely Uncle Paul Absecond, Aunt Molly's husband, used to be even on Saturdays and Sundays.<br /><br /><br />I did not know much about birds, despite my occasional bird-watching walks of childhood memory with Matthew. They were as much poetry-rendering as bird-watching, and as a consequence perhaps certain birds never were mere birds for me. But I reckoned I knew more than the book about the birds I knew, which were all brown and beige or black and grey; sparrows, thrushes, blackbirds and pigeons, the kestrels on the common, and the choughs on the rocky pre-Cambrian coast of Wales; a bull-finch, a bluetit, a robin, a pheasant, a partridge, oh, and herons.<br /><br /> Once, on a steamer going up to Hampton Court, I counted seventeen shabby herons like judges, at the very least Tulkinghorns, to a man, still and silent, hunched shouldered, slit eyed, stalk legs, each giving off an aura of secrets from the charnel house, standing along the bank in the clear-water margins of an island below Richmond. They were drawn urgently to the attention of a young man opposite me and fiddling with a very large portable radio by his girl-friend who was leaning lovingly on his arm (he having taken the best seat next to the water) to get a better look at them. After a long moment, in which I feared he would miss them altogether, he glanced up at the last one of them for a second. "Some species of a penguin," he said magisterially, and went back to his radio mechanics. Oh yes, I'd seen that. I already had a deep interest in sex and its perversionary process.<br /><br /> There was a class of birds that I did not count as birds at all. They were manifestations of mysterious Ideas, immortals, each with a secret ministry; and that was thanks to Matthew. There was in me, a place where certain delightful creatures, things, people, sayings, poems, stories, lived and thrived together. I do not know by what qualification they passed into this dark sanctum (although some arrived by my faulty understanding and on declaring themselves naturally passed out of it), but at the heart of it I had in it the peacock, the swan, the skylark, and the nightingale. I had abundant evidence that all these creatures actually existed. I had seen the lot. But in my secret mind they had a life richer and of much greater significance in time and story than the feathered one.<br /><br /> I could never see the peacocks, most beautiful, most useless, most mysterious peacock, the Glory of God, hanging like strange foliage in the trees or displaying the iridescent lacy green and the blue and black of the eye feather in the grounds of the old castle, Aunt Molly's (and Matthew's as it turned out) , favourite hotel in Edinburgh; I could never see a swan open its back on the river as if it were a bride or bridegroom of goodly hue needing only to be crammed with flowers to float upriver to its wedding and back to merry London, my most kindly nurse, the air trembling against the bridal day which is not long, sweet Thames running softly, the song never-ending and my hand in Matthew's; I could never see the larks rising higher, higher, higher into the breezy summer skies over the South Downs and trilling with happiness to be so near heaven, singing hymns unbidden until the world is wrought to sympathy with hope and fears it heeded not; I could never hear fall the tiny leaflets of chased silver and gold that the nightingale sprinkled all over the beechen gardens shadows numberless of Golden Square in the small hours of summer mornings, charmed magic casements opening on the foam of perilous seas in faerie lands forlorn; never see nor hear without being captured as if rooted to the ground by my feet, without being tied by my heartstrings to whichever of those creatures it might be, without my heart aching with the loss when I and they were parted. Immortalised in the spun gold web of English poetry, birds they never were, they were not born for death. They belonged to me. They belonged to me and Matthew.<br /><br /> I was fond of the auks and parrots and storks and humming birds that belonged to the fairy tales I read, and I did not at all mind looking at Birds of Java or Birds of India for hours on end, because although they too were paperweight and spruce, I did not miss on the page the life in them because I had never seen them, they were all fairy-tales to me. But they were commonplace-mysterious and they never crept into the secret part of my life.<br /> <br /><br />"Jays are crows. They eat birds, breaking them in pieces with their claws. They eat chicks, eggs, mice, fish. Important to acorn dispersion. Go back to acorn stores in hard winters, and so on." Aunt Molly pushed her glasses back, and the cushions had better look out.<br /><br /> There was about this information much that assorted well with my imagination of the jays, a strong sort of formidable creature intelligence with plenty of backbone, fearlessness; there was something of Matthew there. So I allowed also that they were possibly stand-offish with human beings. Therefore, it followed, I belonged to the elite to whom these predators would come to eat breadcrumbs, buncrumbs to be exact. I conceded that, for that day, there was something very special about me. There are days like that.<br /><br /> "They were probably feeding on the flying ants. There has been a swarm here this afternoon, hateful things." <br /><br /> I did not care. It was still a mark of favour, the jays coming down to me like that; a visitation from the gods. I was not one of those who put a mark of favour lightly aside, or accept[ed] it without letting it do its work. It was a sign. It spoke well for the coming summer.<br /><br /> Aunt Molly brushed her hand fastidiously across her lacklustre greying hair, and knocked her glasses off. I picked them up.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5340588203906676587.post-46500390763896520322010-02-22T22:05:00.003+00:002010-02-22T22:26:02.129+00:00Post 1<span style="font-style:italic;">Dear Tom,<br /> It is a year since we first re-met and discussed this project. Many lunches and suppers between then and now have not taken us any nearer to the answer to the question: What do you actually want out of it? Publication, a private print-out? Do you simply want to slake our curiosity? I have been too busy simply enjoying myself, after all this time, in your company.<br /> Now that I have something to show, a little for a lot of labour, I have decided to write you the First Report to put into my Yokeham File. It may not thrive to grow big, I realise, but time has come to put something on paper.<br /> As you know, I accepted your assignment in the first place because I needed the money. It was also because I was flattered, and because our re-meeting after all these years exhilarated me. As you also know, you did not make clear the prodigious size of the proposed task. "Massive hoard" you said. How could I have expected nine foolscap boxes crammed with manuscripts constituting, at a fair guess, six separate books? And none of it in any order of chronology.<br /> The `first' of these, it seemed the earliest work, so far as I can disentangle it, seems to be seven hundred pages of close-typed, or close-handwritten content, mixed. That's point number one. Number two is that I now accept your assignment because I cannot leave it alone.<br /> What I did not realise, as you could not have, is the extent to which these papers have to do with very private family matters, yours, the Yokehams - the world's private and professional business. To my confounding amazement, much concerns my own young inhibited self, `the dreadful Susan Sage'. Your youthful political views are preserved intact, your father's ancient love affairs are investigated, your step-mother's love affairs (well, I never liked her), Philip's death is here, and her sisters Sarah and Frances are turned inside out, and there is a fair amount of speculation about who had, and who nearly had, whose babies. If we are going to share this manuscript on a professional basis, it is going to be, sooner or later, very difficult to look each other in the eye - and here I make only a sort of joke. If, after reading the enclosed first sample of what I take to be the first book (it seems like some sort of beginning) you still want this `sorting out' to be done and still want me to do it, then we must sit down business like and unwaylaid by our revived mutual admiration, and work out dates and relationships - why Molly Absecond is `Aunt Molly', how it is that Philip and James Harisonn are your cousins, and so on. If I ever knew I can't remember, and I can't get on without knowing.<br /> There is one slight difficulty, may be serious. It depends upon whether you would seriously think of publishing or just want a private print-out. Let me say, first: the idea that Constance Yokeham as a young girl was a bit odd, or fey, or absent-minded has to be entirely forgotten. Also that she was often mysteriously physically absent. She was writing and to that end watching, listening, judging, inventing, eavesdropping, hiding, stealing letters, diaries, papers, anything that was grist to the mill. She was writing it all down, sometimes in what seems like the bowels of the earth in the cellarage of the Golden Square House. Down there she was grinding us all exceedingly small. The trouble is that all the stolen papers, letters, all sorts of documents are enclosed with this vast undertaking: and they all belong to somebody, heirs or extants. We should have to find them all. We might even have a reunion, a general mixture of elements rather than the return of the original pairs together.<br /> Constance was merciless with titles: there are literally ten upon ten: The Grodust Construction. Daughters of the Flood. The Yokeham Files. Writing for Pleasure. Good Morrow to Our Waking Souls. Rooms of My Native Country. Contes du Temps Passe. The Meat of the Fowl. The Management of Public Dinners. Plaque Near The Dwelling. The Way She Went.<br /> I can only do my best to make sense of this `massive hoard', but for the sake of my own renewed old life I cannot put it down. I have double vision. On the other hand, if you as publisher want this seriously pursued, you cannot pay me as one of your readers. This is a full-time job as I choose to make it so on your behalf, so I should need a proper salary.<br /> I look at my own children nervously. When say we meet? Answer me. I am setting up my Yokeham File. <br /> The first question: read, and then say: Do you want me to go on?<br /><br />As ever,<br /><br />Susan</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0