POST 8

BOOKS

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

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

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

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

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

"It makes me frightened," I protested.

"Worse things happen at sea."

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

"No worst, there is none."

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

POST 7

THE BUSINESS OF "TALKING TO AUNT MOLLY"

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

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

What about me?

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What?" I said.

"I said Matthew is getting married again."

I could not believe it.

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

Post 6

A STOLEN LETTER: NOT THE FIRST

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

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

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

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

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

Post 5

MORE HOT DAYS

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

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

"Constance!"

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

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

I mention the weather.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Post 4

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Post 3

MARKS OF FAVOUR

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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'.

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.

Lord keep us safe this night
Secure from all our fears
May angels guard us while we sleep
''til morning light appears. Amen.

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.

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.

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.

`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.

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.

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'.

"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.
"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.
He laughed. "I think your Aunt was referring, in a roundabout way, to God."
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.

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.

Post 2

I went straight to Aunt Molly's room for her Gallop and Gallop: British Birds.
"Have you seen my reading spectacles?"
"You've got them on. I've just seen a pair of jays. Fed them with breadcrumbs."
"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."

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.

"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.


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.

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.

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.

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.

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.


"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.

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.

"They were probably feeding on the flying ants. There has been a swarm here this afternoon, hateful things."

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.

Aunt Molly brushed her hand fastidiously across her lacklustre greying hair, and knocked her glasses off. I picked them up.

Post 1

Dear Tom,
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I look at my own children nervously. When say we meet? Answer me. I am setting up my Yokeham File.
The first question: read, and then say: Do you want me to go on?

As ever,

Susan