天涯在线书库《www.tianyabook.com》 《Burning Your Boats》 Back Cover: Burning Your Boats The Collected Short Stories by Angela Carter with an Introdu by Salman Rushdie Back Cover: One of our most imaginative and aplished writers, Angela Carter left behind a dazzling array of work: essays, criticism, and fi. But it is in her short stories that her extraordinary talents -- as a fabulist, feminist, social critid weaver of tales -- are most peingly evident. This volume presents Carters siderabl９9ｌib?t>e legacy of short fi, gathered from published books, and includes early and previously unpublished stories. From refles on jazz and Japan, through vigorous refashionings of classic folklore and fairy tales, to stunning snap.99lib.shots of modern life in all its tawdry glory, we are able to chart the evolution of Carters marvelous, magical vision. "A treasure chest of literary ahetic experience. . . mysterious, glamorous, beautiful." -- Carolyhe Washington Post "Carters ability to probe the secret places in the human psyche, where mysterious erotigings and unaowledged links with the uhly l
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ie buried, verges on the supernatural." -- The Philadelphia Inquirer "Her imagination was one of the most dazzling of this tury." -- Marina Warner "An amazing plum pudding. . . you should not miss this book." -- Margaret Atwood, Toronto Globe & Mail Contents Introdu by Salman Rushdie?9９ｌib? EARLY WORK, 1962-6 The Man Who Loved a Double Bass A Very, Very Great Lady and Her Son at Home A Victorian Fable (wit..h Glossary) FIREWORKS: NINE PROFANE PIECES, 1974 A Souvenir of Japan The Executioners Beautiful Daughter The Loves of Lady Purple The Smile of Winter Peing to the Heart of the Forest Flesh and the Mirror Master Refles Elegy for a Freelance THE BLOODY CHAMBER AND OTHER STORIES, 1979 The Bloody Chamber The Courtship of Mr Lyon The Tigers Bride Puss-in-Boots The Erl-King The Snow Child The Lady of the House of Love The Werewolf The pany of Wolves Wolf-Alice BLACK VENUS, 1985 Black Venus The Kiss Our Lady of the Massacre The et of Edgar Allan Poe Overture and In藏书网tal Music for A Midsummer Nights Dream Peter and the Wolf The Kitc..hen Child The Fall River Axe Murders AMERI GHOSTS AND OLD WORLD WONDERS, 1993 Lizzies Tiger John Fords Tis Pity Shes a Whore Gun for the Devil The Mert of Shadows The Ghost Ships In Pantoland Ashputtle or The Mhost Ali Prague or The Curious Room Impressions: The Wrightsman Magdalene UNCOLLECTED STORIES, 1970-81 The Scarlet House The Snow Pavilion The Quilt Maker APPENDIX Afterword to Fireworks First Publications Introduction-1 The last time I visited Angela Carter, a few weeks before she died, she had insisted on dressing for tea, in spite of being in siderable pain. She sat bright-eyed a, head cocked like a parrots, lips satirically pursed, and got down to the serious teatime business of giving and receiving the latest dirt: sharp, foulmouthed, passionate. That is what she was like: spikily outspoken -- once, after Id e to the end of a relationship of which she had not approved, she telephoned me to say, "Well. Yoing to be seeing a lot more of me from now on" -- and at the same time courteous enough to overortal suffering for the gentility of a formal afternoon tea. Death genuinely pissed Angela off, but she had one solation. She had taken out an "immense" life insurance policy shortly before the cer struck. The prospect of the insurers being obliged, after receiving so few payments, to hand out a fortuo "her boys" (her husband, Mark, and her son, Alexander) delighted her greatly, and inspired a great gloating blaedy aria at which it was impossible not to laugh. She planned her funeral carefully. My instrus were to read Marvells poem On a Drop of Dew. This was a surprise. The Angela Carter I knew had always been the most scatologically irreligious, merrily godless of wome she wanted Marvells meditation on the immortal soul -- "that Drop, that Ray / Of the clear Fountain of Eternal Day" -- spoken over her dead body. Was this a last, surrealist joke, of the "thank God, I die an atheist" variety, or an obeisao the metaphysi Marvells high symboliguage from a writer whose own favoured language was also pitched high, ae with symbols? It should be hat no divinity makes an appearan Marvells poem, except for "th Almighty Sun". Perhaps Angela, always a giver of light, was asking us, at the end, to imagine her dissolving into the "glories" of that greater light: the artist being a part, simply, of art. She was too individual, too fierce a writer to dissolve easily, however: by turns formal and eous, exotid demotic, exquisite and coarse, precious and raunchy, fabulist and socialist, purple and black. Her novels are like nobody elses, from the transsexual coloratura of The Passion of o the music-hall knees-up of Wise Children; but the best of her, I think, is iories. Sometimes, at novel length, the distinctive Carter voice, those smoky, opium-eaters ces interrupted by harsh or ic discords, that moonstone-and-rhione mix of opulend flim-flam, be exhausting. Iories, she dazzle and swoop, and quit while shes ahead. Carter arrived almost fully formed; her early story, "A Very, Very Great Lady and Her Son at Home", is already replete with Carterian motifs. Here is the lov9９ｌｉb?e of the gothic, of lush language and high culture; but also of low stinks -- falling rose-petals that sound like pigeons farts, and a father who smells of horse dung, and bowels that are "great levellers". Here is the self as performance: perfumed, det, languorous, erotic, perverse; very like the winged woman, Fevvers, heroine of her penultimate novel Nights at the Circus. Another early story, "A Victorian Fable", announces her addi to all the ara of language. This extraordinary text, half-Jabberwocky, half-Pale Fire, exhumes the past by exhuming its dead words: In every s and ginnel, bone-grubbers, rufflers, shivering-jemmies, anglers, clapperdogeons, peterers, sneeze-lurkers and Whip Jacks with their morts, out of the picaroon, fox and flim and ogle. Be advised, these early stories say: this writer is -and-potatoes hack; she is a rocket, a Catherine Wheel. She will call her first colle Fireworks. Several of the Fireworks stories deal with Japan, a try whose tea-ceremony formality and dark eroticism bruised and c藏书网hallenged Carters imagination. In "A Souvenir of Japan" she arranges polished images of that try before us. "The Story of Momotaro, who was born from a peach." "Mirrors make a room uncosy." Her narrator presents her Japanese lover to us as a sex object, plete with bee-stung lips. "I should like to have had him embalmed. . . so that I could watch him all the time and he would not have been able to get away from me." The lover is, at least, beautiful; the narrators view of her big-boned self, as seen in a mirror, is distinctly uncosy. "In the department store there was a rack of dresses labelled: For Young and Cute Girls Only. When I looked at them, I felt as gross as Glumdalclitch." In "Flesh and the Mirror" the exquisite, erotic atmosphere this, approag pastiche -- for Japaerature has specialised rather in these heated sexual perversities -- except when it is cut through sharply by Carters stant self-awareness. ("Hadnt I go thousand miles to find a climate with enough anguish and hysteria in it to satisfy me?" her narrator asks; as, in "The Smile of Winter", another unnamed narrator admonishes us: "Do not think I do not realize what I am doing," and then analyses her story with a perspicacity that rescues -- bri.９9ｌｉb.ngs to life -- what might otherwise have been a static pieood-music. Carters cold-water douches of intelligeen e to the rescue of her fancy, when it runs too wild.) In the non-Japaories Carter enters, for the first time, the fable-world which she will make her own. A brother and sister are lost in a sensual, malevolent forest, whose trees have breasts, and bite, and where the apple-tree of knowledge teaches not good and evil, but iuous sexuality. I -- a recurring Carter subject -- crops up again in "The Executioners Beautiful Daughter", a tale set in the kind of bleak upland village which is perhaps the quintessential Carter location -- one of those villages where, as she says in the Bloody Chamber story "The Werewolf", "they have cold weather, they have cold hearts". Wolves howl around these Carter-try villages and there are maamorphoses. Carters other try is the fairground, the world of the gimcrack showman, the hypnotist, the trickster, the puppeteer. "The Loves of Lady Purple" takes her closed circus-world to yet another mountainous, Middle-European village where suicides are treated like vampires (wreaths of garlic, stakes through the heart) while real warlocks "practised rites of immemorial beastliness in the forests". As in all Carters fairground stories, "the grotesque is the order of the day". Lady Purple, the dominatrix marioe, is a moralists warning -- beginning as a whore, she turns into a puppet because she is "pulled only by the strings of Lust". She is a female, sexy ahal rewrite of Pinocchio, and, along with the metamorphic cat-woman in "Master", one of the many dark (and fair) ladies with "unappeasable appetites" to whom Angela Carter is so partial. In her sed colle, The Bloody Chamber, these riot ladies i her fial earth. The Bloody Chamber is Carters masterwork: the book in which her high, perfervid mode is perfectly married to her stories needs. (For the best of the low, demotic Carter, read Wise Children; but in spite of all the uv, brush-up-your-Shakespeare edy of that last he Bloody Chamber is the likeliest of her works to endure.) The novella-length title story, or overture, begins as classic grand guignol: an i bride, a much-married millionaire husband, a lonely castle stood upon a melting shore, a secret room taining horrors. The helpless girl and the civilised, det, murderous man: Carters first variation oheme of Be..y and the Beast. There is a feminist twist: instead of the weak father to save whom, in the fairy tale, Beauty agrees to go to the Beast, we are given, here, an indomitable mother rushing to her daughters rescue. Introduction-2 It is Carters genius, in this colle, to make the fable of Beauty and the Beast a metaphor for all the myriad yearnings and dangers of sexual relations. Now it is the Beauty who is the stronger, now the Beast. In "The Courtship of Mr Lyon" it is for the Beauty to save the Beasts life, while in "The Tigers Bride", Beauty will be erotically transformed into an exquisite animal herself: ". . 藏书网. each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after skin, all the skins of a life in the world, a behind a patina of hairs. My earrings turned back to water. . . I shrugged the drops off my beautiful fur." As though her whole body were being deflowered and so metamorphosing into a new instrument of desire, allowing her admission to a new ("animal" in the sense of spiritual as well as tigerish) world. In "The Erl-King", however, Beauty and the Beast will not be reciled. Here there is her healing, nor submission, but revenge. The colle expands to take in many other fabulous old tales; blood and love, alroximate, underlie and unify them all. In "The Lady of the House of Love" love and blood unite in the person of a vampire: Beauty grown monstrous, Beastly. In "The Snow Child" we are in the fairy-tale territory of white snow, red blood, black bird, and a girl, white, red and black, born of a ts wishes; but Carters modern imagination knows that for every t there is a tess, who will not tolerate her fantasy-rival. The battle of the sexes is fought between women, too. The arrival of Red Riding Hood pletes and perfects Carters brilliant, reiing synthesis of Kinderund Hausm?r. Now we are offered the radical, shog suggestion that Grandmht actually be the Wolf ("The Werewolf"); or equally radical, equally shog, the thought that the girl (Red Riding Hood, Beauty) might easily be as amoral, as savage as the Wolf/Beast; that she might quer the Wolf by the power of her owory sexuality, her erotic wolfishness. This is the theme of "The pany of Wolves", and to watch The pany of Wolves, the film Angela Carter made with Neil Jordan, weaving together several of her wolf-narratives, is ?9９lｉｂ?to long for the full-scale wolf-novel she never wrote. "Wolf-Alice" offers final metamorphoses. Now there is y, only two Beasts: a ibal Duke, and a girl reared by wolves, who thinks of herself as a wolf, and who, arriving at womanhood, is drawn towards self-knowledge by the mystery of her own bloody chamber; that is, her menstrual flow. By blood, and by what she sees in mirrors, that make a house uncosy. At length the grandeur of the mountains bees monotonous. . . He turned and stared at the mountain for a long time. He had lived in it for fourteen years but he had never seen it before as it might look to someone who had not known it as almost a part of the self. . . As he said goodbye to it, he saw it turn into so much sery, into the wonderful backcloth for an old try tale, tale of a child suckled by wolves, perhaps, or of wolves nursed by a woman. Carters farewell to her mountain-try, at the end of her last wolf-story, "Peter and the Wolf" in Black Venus, signals that, like her hero, she has "tramped onwards, into a different story". There is oher out-and-out fantasy in this third colle, a meditation on A Midsummer Nights Dream that prefigures (and is better than) a passage in Wise Children. In this story Carters linguistic exoticism is in full flight -- here are "breezes, juicy as mahat mythopoeically caress the Coast of andel far away on the porphyry and lapis lazuli Indian Shore". But, as usual, her sarcastion-sense yanks the story back to earth before it disappears in an exquisite puff of smoke. This dream-wood -- "no where near Athens. . . (it) is really located somewhere in the English midlands, possibly near Bletchley" -- is damp and waterlogged and the fairies all have colds. Also, it has, sihe date of the story, been chopped down to make room for a motorway. Carters elegant fugue on Shakespearean themes is lifted towards brilliance by her exposition of the differeween the Dreams wood and the "dark neantic forest" of the Grimms. The forest, she finely reminds us, is a scary place; to be lost in it is to fall prey to monsters and witches. But in a wood, "you purposely mislay your way"; there are no wolves, and the wood "is kind to lovers". 9９lｉｂ?Here is the differeween the English and European fairy tale precisely and unfettably defined. Mostly, however, Black Venus and its s, too, is out there now, out there in Literature, a Ray of the clear Fountain of Eternal Day. Salman Rushdie, May 1995 EARLY WORK-The Man Who Loved a Double Bass The Man Who Loved a Double Bass All artists, they say, are a little mad. Thbbr>is madness is, to a certaient, a self-created myth desigo keep the generality away from the phenomenally close-knit creative unity. Yet, in the world of the artists, the sciously etric are always respectful and admiring of those who have the ce to be genuinely a little mad. That was how Johnny Jameson, the bass player, came to be treated -- with resped admiration; for there could be no doubt that Jameson was as mad as a hatter. And the musis looked after him. He was never without work, or a bed, or a packet of cigarettes, or a beer if he wanted ohere was always someoaking care of the things he could never get around to doing himself. It must also be admitted that he was a very fine bass player. In this, in fact, lay the seed of his trouble. For his bass, his great, gleaming, voluptuous bass, was mother, father, wife, child and mistress to him and he loved it with a deep and steadfast passion. Jameson was a small, quiet man with rapidly reg hair and a huge pair of heavy spectacles hiding mild, short-sighted eyes. He hardly went anywhere without his bass, which he carried effortlessly, slung on his back, as Red Indian women carry their babies. But it was a big baby for one so frail-looking as he to carry. They called the bass Lola. Lola was the most beautiful bass in the whole world. Her shape was that of a full-breasted, full-hipped woman, recalliain primitive effigies of the Moddess so gloriously, essentially feminine was she, stripped of irrelevancies of head and limbs. Jameso hours polishing her red wood, already a warm, chestnut colour, to an ever deeper, ever richer glow. On tour, he sat placidly in the bus while the other musis drank, argued and gambled around him, and he would take Lola from her black case, and un the rags that padded her, with a trembliion. Then he would take out a special, soft silk handkerchief ao work on his polishing, smilily at nothing and blinking his short-sighted eyes like a happy cat. The bass was always treated like a lady. The band started to buy her coffee and tea in cafés for a joke. Later it ceased to be a joke and became a habit. The extra drink was always ordered and placed before her and they ig when they went away and it was still oable, cold and untouched. Jameson always took Lola into cafés but never into public bars because, after all, she was a lady. Whoever drank with Jameson did so in the saloon and bought Lola a pineapple juice, although sometimes she could be prevailed upon to take a glass of sherry at festive occasions like Christmas or a birthday or when someones wife had a child. But Jameson was jealous if she got too much attention and would look daggers at a man who took too many liberties with her, like slapping her case or making facetious remarks. Jameson had only ever been known to strike a man once when he had broken the nose of a drunken, iive pianist who made a coarse jest about Lola in Jamesons presence. So nobody ever joked about Lola when Jameson was there. But i young musis were hideously embarrassed if ever it fell out that they had to share a room with Jameson while on tour. So Jameson and Lola usually had a room to themselves. Away from Jameson, the trumpeter, Geoff Clarke, would say that Jameson was truly wedded to his art and perhaps they ought to book the bridal suite for the pair at some hotel, sometime. But Clarke gave Jameson a good job in his trad group that was called the West End Syncopators. Ign the august echoes of the hey dressed themselves up ioppers and tail coats when perf and their souped-up version of "West End Blues" (plus new vocal) had peed to the lower reaches of the top twenty. They all looked grotesque ioppers and none mrotesque than Jameson; but the band still made money. Making money, however, meant day after day spent in a verted Green Line bus travelling up and down the try from one one-night-stand to the . It meant dates at exges, town halls, grimy bas in pubs. It meant stant bone-weariness and stant cash and credit and the band all loved it. They all shared a crazy jubilation. "The trad boom aint going to last for ever, so lets enjoy it!" said Len Nelson, the clariist. He was an incible fornicator, whose idea of profiting from the trad boom was to lure star-struck young girls from the provincial clubs and certs up into his hotel bedroom and there copulate with them. He loved success. And, to a lesser extent, they all exulted. Except, of course, Jameson, who did not even notice that trad was booming. He played just whatever he was told to play. He never really cared what it was as long as the quality of the sound he produced did not offend Lola. One night in November, they were eo play at a small town in the Fenland wastes of East Anglia. Darkness came with the afternoon, dragging mist with it to fill the dykes and shroud the pollard willows. The band bus followed a straight road with never a turn or dip and when they reached the pub where the jazz club at which they were to perform was held, and climbed from the bus, the darkness fell around their shoulders like a rain-soaked bla. "Are they expeg us?" asked Dave Jennings, the drummer, anxiously. Not a light shone in the pub. A frayed poster pio the closed main door annouheir ing. But the iland rain had so softehe paper that the slogan: "Friday night is rave night -- with the raving, rioting, hit parade happy West End Syncopators" was almost indecipherable. "Well, its not opening time, yet," forted Len Nelson. "Mores the pity," grunted Jennings. "Of course theyre expeg us," said Geoff firmly. "The club booked us up months ago, before the record even. Thats why ted a date in this God-forsaken hole, isnt it, Simeon?" The manager eripatetic Jew named Simeon Price, a failed tenor sax man who travelled with them out of nostalgia for his swinging days. Simeon was staring at the pub with bright, frightened eyes. "I dont like it here," he said and shivered. "Theres something in the air." "Bloody lot of wet in the air," grumbled Nelson. "Bet the dollies round here all got webbed feet." "Dont e the mysterious East," Geoff urged Simeon. Simeon shook his head agitatedly and shivered in spite of the great, turned-up collar of his enormous cashmere coat. He always dressed like a stage Jew. His race was his gimmid he always affected a strong Yiddish at although his family had been respected members of the Maer beoisie for nearly 150 years. But then the landlord appeared and thewo sixth frammar school boys who ran the club and there was beer and chat and warmth and laughter. Jameson was very worried in case the damp should hurt Lola, her, rot her strings. He allowed one of the grammar school boys, they called him the Boy David at oo buy her a rum and e, for her healths sake. Nelson and Jennings had to take the w Boy David off into the Gents and explain about Lola, quietly. But Simeons slender, delicately pointed nose was almost aquiver with sensibility, smelling something wrong, trouble i air. The East Anglian air was bad for his weak lungs. The Boy David was talking about his club. "Bit old world, the membership, really, though we get people in for the club from quite a way away -- art students, even, and a fe youngsters, aher jackets who e from miles on their motorbikes. But the local teds, well, they still even have sideboards a collars to their jackets!" There was a chorus of incredulous mirth and the boy at once became embarrassed and bought more drinks to cover his fusion. The bao stay the night at the pub, which hid a number of bedrooms behind its unimposing fa?ade. Simeo away from the bar to feel the sheets on his bed. They were damp. His throat immediately set up a sympathetic tig. Jameson, humping Lola, also crept away, to the ba where musid dang were permitted. He uned his instrument and sat huddled over it in the cold, caressing with his silken rag. The room.. around him waited for the club to open, the shabby lines of quiet chairs waited, the little platform for the musis waited. But there otent unease in the night. The musis se and their laughter became defiant as they tried thten the uneasiness away with their merriment. And they failed. Their young hosts caught the silent, depressed iion until they were all just sitting around, drinking for want of something else to do. But Jameson was happy; he was the only one happy, sitting away from them all, with Lola between his knees. As the band assembled on the cramped platform, the first ers arrived and stood around with their first half pints of bitter. Music began; the ers waited passively for the first extrovert couple who would start to dance. They were an easily reisable type, these early ohe boys wore pale, loose sweaters with paisley silk scarves tucked casually into the vee necks and the girls were tricked out in pseudo beat style, black or heavy mesh stogs, loose dresses heavily frihey were the children of local doctors, clergymen, teachers, retired soldiers, probably students in their last school year. They wore duffel coats and drove battered old cars and had a tendency to collect those little a ashtrays with veteran cars on them. Just before the first break, a black-legged girl in a short little pleated skirt and a youth in cavalry twill trousers ventured, giggling, on to the floor to dahey did so in a peculiarly self-scious way that made the musis wink and grin at one anradually the room began to fill. Art students from a nearby town, sniggering at the beois ed them; a party of crop-haired modernists, who had also travelled some distahe modernists had sharp, pointed noses and Italian suits. Their girls dressed with studied formality, faces stylised, pale cheeks and lips, vividly painted eyes, hair immaculate, stiff with lacquer. The modernists chaffed Simeon, who lingered by the pay desk because the boys in charge were so young that he worried for them. The modernists joked about the grey top hats and the striped trousers and were patronising about "West End Blues" and, in fact, the whole trad setup altogether; they were here, they implied, just because there happeo be nothing else doing that night. Simeon smiled with professional warmth and wondered whether he dare slip away to spray his throat. But his eyes slitted with suspi when he saw a group of youths were parking motorcycles outside the pub; he could see them through the open door. They took off their crash helmets ahem uheir cycles, where they gleamed whitely, like mushrooms or new laid eggs. Then the boys approached, plastic jackets creaking. Simeon personally tore off their jackets for them and watched them anxiously as they fought for brow the bar. "Now, those chaps are really far less potential trouble than those modernist friends of yours," admohe Boy David. Simeon sighed. "You wouldnt have, by any ce, such a thing as an aspirin -- and perhaps, might it be possible, could I get a glass of hot milk?" Ihe club room, a thick smoke haze dimmed the already low lighting and the room was in semi-darkness. Arms and legs flailed, beer slopped. The music was so loud it seemed almost a tangible, brazen wall. The West End Syncopators were half-way through another successful date. But the leatherjackets kept apart from the main, happy crowd. They had taken over one particular er for themselves and were not dang but standing up to their beer, laughing and grinning. The boys in the band played and sweated and gulped restorative bitter between choruses. They undid their silk waistcoats and their black ties and mopped the red iions made on their foreheads by their top hats. It was just like any other date. Just like any other date until one of the leatherjackets spilled his beer all over the olive green buttocks of a thin girl in a sheath dress who jived backwards into him. She turned, angry. He apologised with profuse irony and that made her more angry still. The girl plaio her sharp, short-jacketed escort and the leatherjackets stood all round and leered. "And arent you going to say sorry to this young lady, then, mate?" the girls dang partner shouted above the music. The leatherjackets closed ranks like a snapped clasp-kheir indistinguishable, pallid, slack-jawed faces all gri once. "And what if I aint particularly sorry? Wasted all my beer, I have." A group of Italian youths deserted their girls to gather behind the olive-sheathed girls defender. And that was how it started. The quarrel boiled u>p into a fine ragout of cries, shouts, blows and the dim interior whirled with thrusting limbs and crashing bottles as the eager youths met in fight. A bottle smashed the single, red-painted electric bulb and there was a horror of darkness. In the chaos, a pair of leatherjackets launched an atta the musis who were moaning and terrified and striking little matches to see something of the battle. "That such a thing should happen when were iop twenty!" gasped Simeon. The Young servatives came scurrying past shepherding frightened Susans, Brendas, and Jennifers. But the art students clustered safely at the door to giggle. The tight-skirted teddy girls dropped their impassivity; like valkyries they rode the battle, cheering the fighters on. Their exalted faces flickered in and out of the light that trickled through from the public bar. Now the musis cast aside their top hats, their instruments and their rality. Simeon saw Len Nelson -- as jerky and uain iermittent light as a man in an early film -- leap from the dais and seize an Italian youth by his narrow and immaculate lapels and shake, shake, shake him until the boys mouth gaped open, howling. "Nothing like it ever happened before!" the Boy David kept exclaiming in an apologetic frenzy. There were crashes and splinterings and the landlord appeared, trembling. Simeon took him into the private bar to soothe him with his own Scotch. "Quite like the old days, before we got famous," panted Nelson, defending the microphone. But it was all over very quickly, when someone shouted something about the polid the room emptied like a bath when the plug is pulled out. The musis heavy breathing and little exclamations of triumph and sighs were the only sounds in the room. "Would I be such a fool as to call the police?" demanded Simeoorically. So they all laughed a for a drink. "Here," said someoer, "has anyone seen Jameson?" "Not sihe lights went out." "Well, what does it matter? Im going to bed," said Simeon. "Ive a dreadful cold ing, I feel it. Not that going to bed will do me much good; wringihe sheets are . . ." Then they all of them fot about Jameson until very much later, when all but Geoff and Nelson had finally followed Simeon up the stairs to bed. Geoff and Nelsoly happy, decided to go and have a look at the damage in the club room. They took a light bulb from the bar and plugged it into the socket where the red light had once been. And into focus leapt all the shattered glass and broken chairs and brown beer puddles soaking into the floor. Sobered at once, Geoff climbed on to the stage and poked anxiously among the instruments remaining. Miraculously, the drum and its accessories had survived and -- he sighed -- there seemed not a casualty on the dais. Then he found a terrible thing. Where Jameson had sat with Lola, there remained nothing on the floor but a heap of chestnut-coloured firewood. "Oh, Christ," he said. Nelson looked up, startled at the tone of the others voice. "Jameson, how are we going to tell Jameson, Len? His bass. . ." They stood together and gazed at Lolas pathetic fragmented corpse. Both were touched with a cold finger of awe and dread and a superstitious sorrow; the lady who did not go into public bars was suddenly no more than a few graceless splinters. "Do you know if he knows?" whispered Nelson. It did not seem right to talk in a loud voice. "I havent seen him sihe trouble began." "Even if he does know, well, he ought to have a bit of pany, at a time like this, a few friends around him. . ." "Maybe hes up in his room." They found out from the landlord that Jameson had been lodged in an atti high at the top of the old rabbit-warren of a place. Fenland mist had crept into the pub and it blurred their vision as Geoff and Nelson climbed flight after flight of stairs. It was very late, now, and cold, with a bone-chilling, wet, cold. Then, without warning, every light went out. Stri, Nelson clutched at Geoff. "Len, its all right, dont take on. It must be a fuse, or something, perhaps the wiring -- rotten old wiring they have in houses as old as this." But he himself was badly scared. They both felt an alien, almost tangible something in the darkness, felt it in the damp kiss of the mist-soaked air on their cheeks. "A light, Geoff, now." Geoff clicked his cigarette lighter. The tiny flame only intensified the darkness around them. They reached the topmost landing. "Here we are." The door swung open. Geoff held his lighter high. They saw first a chair, overturned on the floor. Then they saw the opey case of a double bass on the cheap taffeta bedspread. The case was shaped for all the world like a coffin. But Lola would not lie in it, although it was her own. And iill circle of light, swung a pair of feet, gently, backwards and forwards, forwards and backwards. . . Geoff raised his lighter above his head until they could see all of Jameson, hanging from a disused gas bracket, his gentle face blad twisted. Bedded deep in his neck was a brilliant silken rag, the rag he had used for so long to polish his bass. Something glinted on the floor beh him -- his glasses, dropped, broken. A sodden wind came in through the open window and swallowed the lighter flame at ohen there was engulfing darkness and in the darkness no the slow creak, creak, creak. And the two men grabbed at each others hands like frightened children. In a room beh them, the same little wind trickled through an ill-fitting window frame and tickled Simeon Prices throat so that he coughed and stirred a little, uneasily, in his sleep. A Very, Very Great Lady and Her Son at Home "When I was adolest, my mother taught me a charm, gave me a talisman, handed me the key of the world. For I lived in terror, I, so young, so shy of so many people -- i.e. those who spoke with soft voices and souhe h in which; ema usherettes who, in those days wore wide satin pyjamas which mocked my unawakened sex with unashamed lasciviousness; suave men who put cold hands on my defenceless, barely formed breasts oops of lonely November buses. So many, many people. "My mother said: Child, if such folks awe you, then picture them on the lavatory, straining, stipated. They will at once seem small, pathetic, manageable. And she whispered to me a great, universal truth: the bowels are great levellers. "She was a rough woman, my mother. She picked her teeth ceaselessly with a fork and she would take off her felt slippers, in the evenings, and probe out the caked, flaked skin and dirt from betweeoes with a sensual, inquisitive finger. But she ossessed of great wisdom -- the brutal, yet withal vital, wisdom of a peasant." The womans voice, high and clear as the sound of a glass rapped with a spoon to summon a waiter, ceased iation for a moment. Only two endlessly long miraculously slender legs emerged from the pool of coagulated shadow in the er where she sat. Petals dropped from a red rose in a silver bowl on to the low, round, blood-coloured mahogany table with a soft, faint, exhausted sound, as of a pigeons fart. The woman recrossed her legs; rasping planes of silk flashed out as they caught the light, like the blades of scissors, slig all that came between them. She resumed her narrative. "I had been a shy child. A lonely child, lost in the middle of a large family -- twenty-three children, of whom eighteen reached maturity! -- cooped up in a meagre dwelling, the loft above my fathers stable. Ah!" she cried, "how often I lay awake at night forted by the gentle whickering of great, grey Dapple, with the ruffs over his hooves, like a pierrot!" Again she paused for a moments recolle; then resumed her narrative. "By tragic paradox, so crowded was our home, so tinual the to-ing and fro-ing, that my isolation was total. I was alone, so alone; so tentative, uo grasp the fayself as ay, a personality. "I was introverted to the point of extin, and in that great, surging melee of humanity -- my family -- only behaviour extroverted to the point of sheer exhibitiotention to oneself. "I remember how one of my brothers -- or perhaps it was a sister: one fets, one fets -- plunged his little bare feet in the suppertime soup one night, t to my parents attention how great his need was for new boots. Or shoes. Or sandals. Or socks. . ." The voice died away and then welled out again in passionate regret: "The signifit detail -- one fets it! One fets it!" But soon she resumed her narrative. "Poor little fellow, he -- or was it she -- was scalded almost to the khe suppertime soup, the cabbage leaves bobbing in it -- I remember, though, the suppertime soup. And the faces round the table, so many, many faces. And such meagre soup that many a time, my small stomach sonorous as a pair of maracas, I would creep down in the silence of the night to scoop up a little of Dapples steaming mash on my fingers, for myself. "Ihough one would scarcely credit it, for many years my mother, in error, called me by the name of an elder sister who had died in infancy. My father, oher hand, a grey, precise man who smelled of horse dung a a list of all our ogether with brief descriptive notes) sewn to the inside of his black greasy hat, bbr>99lｉｂ?scrupulously referred to me by my baptismal name whenever he ced to see me, removing his hat and running a gnarled finger down the ns until he came to the thumbnail sketch which tallied with the wide-eyed, pigtailed child before him. Those were the only occasions on which I recall him taking off his hat. "Jason, cigarettes." The boy, cross-legged at her feet, leapt into darkness; came the sound of an unsnapped case, a clicked lighter. The red tip of the cigarette glowed in the shadows like a warning traffic-light -- STOP -- and the petals on another full-blown rose trembled but did not fall. "Forced into myself, I became bookish, walking five miles to the free library in my cracked clogs. I read, I read, I read. Anything, everything. . . My father, dipping the quill in the penny bottle of ink, laboriously added steel-rimmed spectacles to the note beside my name in his directory. Charity spectacles. I was so ashamed. "But I was a helpless addict; so precious were those books to me that I carried them arouo my heart, beh the ragged liberty vest from the parish poor-box but above the layer of neer that, for warmth, my mother sewed around us, renewing it each autumn. "My mind grew in the darkness like a flower. But my isolation increased. I could not unicate my love, my wonder, my veritable lust for things of the spirit, the intellect, with my parents -- nor, indeed, with my teachers, for them I hated. They bound my fa iron: first my eyes, then my teeth. " Teeth in brace, my father amended by the guttering light of the farthing dle. Or was it a penny dle? Or a halfpenny rush dip? One fets -- one fets." Again the brief cry; then she resumed her narrative. "Life went on. The years passed. The bright peonies of the menstrual flow blossomed. My breasts grew like young doves. I had a fever and they cropped my hair. To my wonder and delight it grew again in little soft curls. "I stared at my refle in Dapples trough. I took off my spectacles and pulled the brace from my mouth. I dimly saw this white fad this golden topknot and I was afraid, for the child I had been was dead; dead and replaced by a beautiful woman whom I did not know. "Jason, the dles." He -- the boy; slight, fair, delicate -- struck matches, and the branched dlesticks sprang to life. Her face ainted mask of beauty. Eyes bluer than their blue-stained lids, precise discs of scarlet on her white cheeks, lambent hair piled above the winking lights of her tiara. And the diamonds burned with no more dangerous fire than did her white breasts, exposed to the nipples by the black chiffon robe that fell away from her thighs. She was as beautiful as Venus rising from the waves in the celebrated picture by Botticelli, only more so. She was as beautiful as the celebrated bust of i in the Louvre, only more so. She was as beautiful as the statue of the young David by the celebrated Michelahat gazes ohroraffiilan with such serenity, only more so. Slowly she ground out her cigarette in the wounded onyx of an ashtray on the arm of her chair. She resumed her narrative. "At fifteen, I went walking in the park. I glowed with beauty on the boating pond, in a oe, at half a an hour. I disputed about Plato, whose books I read deeply, with a small brown man in a loin cloth, and all the time I gazed on my refle in the rippling water. "When I trated on my refle, I was that lovely being. Je suis un autre. Dizzied, drunk on the miracle of arriving at a perso?nality with the suddenness of epiphany, I turned from the pool to make some brilliant point to my panion -- and my new self fell away like a cloak. I wept, stammered: ten years old again. "I ran, stumbling, back to the familiar warmth of the stable, to weep saltily into Dapples warm mane. And there my mother, ing from the streets with her hands full of potato peelings that she gleaned from the ashs of our neighbours (when no one was looking; she had a fierce pride), to enrich Dapples mash. . . my mother, returning, saw me. " Susan, she said, hush your moitherings. And then she paused, bewildered, laid her burden on a nearby tea chest and came close to me, so close that I could t the grey hairs growing from her nostrils. Her rheumy eyes filled, overflowed. " But you be not my Susan! she cried. My Susan didnt live to be as old as you! And she buried her head in her apron and her shoulders heaved with sobbing. But, selfishly, I dried my own tears on Dapples tail, for my mother had at last reised my true identity and I perceived a glimmer of hope. "Jason, my knee." He k at ond began to massage her khe bones clicked under his long fingers. A dle flame flickered, casting a momentary shadow over the lower part of her face resembling a small black moustache and imperial. " Mother, I said, I am so shy. It was the first remark I remember addressing to her in my whole life. Mother, I repeated; the word tasted wholesome as bread and milk in my mouth. "She gazed at me thoughtfully, rolling a er of her apron into a probe and ing wax from her ear with it. Then she gave me the formula, irradiating my life. " If you picture them all on the lavatory, stipated, straining, then all the toffee-nosed bastards will seem defenceless and pathetic, she said. " THE BOWELS ARE GREAT LEVELLERS. "It was a revelation. I rushed out into the world, o returing those words, living by them. "Jason, the world was my oyster!" Her voice rang like a sudden, brass-throated trumpet. The full-blown rose at last allowed itself to collapse, almost with the quality of muffled applause. The womay was so intehat it seemed to have the quality of a deformity, so far was it from the human norm. The bones in her knees jostled one another with a faint mumbling. As if recolleg vague, soft, fragrant, long-ago things, she murmured (more to herself than to the boy): "Ah, Jason, the childish thighs and baby buttocks of great men. You stop massaging." He drew away. She lit anarette at the dle flame. Blinking, he drew a hand through his hair. The dle light shone along the bra his teeth, made blinding pools ieel-rimmed spectacles over his eyes. He backed, bumping against the mahogany table where the petals pooled redly. "Jason," she asked sharply, "why are you staring at me? Jason?" He coughed. He fidgeted, the toes of his bare feet curling and uncurling ihick carpet. "Jason?" more urgently. "And do you look patheti the lavatory, mother?" The cigarette fell from nerveless fingers; she opened and closed her mouth but not a sound came out. She crashed forward on to the carpet and lay there, a tree felled, motionless. The boy went to the door and vanished, laughing, into the night. A Victorian Fable(with Glossary) The Village, take a fright. In the rookeries. Here the sloops of war and the dollymops flash it to spie a dowry of parny; there the boers cooled their longs and shorts in the hazard drums. In every s and ginnel, bone-grubbers, rufflers, shivering-jemmies, anglers, clapperdogeons, peterers, sneeze-lurkers and Whip Jacks with their morts, out of the picaroon, fox and flimp and ogle. A Hopping Giles gets a bloody Jemmy on the cross of a cut-throat; the snotters crib belchers, birds eye wipes, blue billies and Randals men. In a boozing ken in the Holy Land, a dunk-horned cutter -- a cock-eyed clack box in flashy benjamin and blood red fancy -- shed a tear by the I desire. But whe the water of life down the on sewer, he bullyragged so antiscripturally that the barney hipped and he rust. "This shove in the mouth makes me shoot the cat! Me dumpli is fair all-overish!" He certainly had his hump up. He absquatulated. The bung cried: "Square the omee for the cream of the valley!" But the splodger had mizzled with his half-a-grunter. At his ruggy carser, his poll -- a killing, ginger-hackled skull-thatcher -- kept on the nose for her jomer. She had faked the rubber for her mendozy and got him up an out and out glorious sihere was an alderman in s, a Ben Flake, a neddy of Sharps Alley blood worms, with Irish apricots, Joe Savad storrac. &quod," she said, "that he be her beargeared, bleary, blued, primed, lumpy, top-heavy, moony, scammered, on the ran-tan, ploughed, muddled, obfuscated, swipy, kisky, sewed up nor all mops and brooms! Or that he hasnt lapped the gutter, t see a hole in a ladder or been to Bungay Fair and lose both his legs!" But what a flare-up in the soush! He dropped into her on the spot. Hed got a capital twis９9ｌiｂ?t for a batty fang and he showed her it was dragging time; she was sick as a horse. He was a catchy fancy-bloke. "You mouldy old bed-fagot, you rotten old gooseberry pudden, you ugly old Gill, you flea-ridden old moll!" he blasted. "Ill give you jessie, you Mullingar heifer!" A barnacled cove (a spoffy blackberry swagger with a e fringe) from the top floor back sang out: "K, you head beetler! Stow faking!" But got a stunning fag owopenny that sent him half-way to Albertopolis. She had bought the rabbit with that slubberdegullion. He peppered her and clumped her ahered her till she went flop down on the Rory OMore and theepped it for the frog and toad, to go to Joe Blake the Bartlemy. He hopped the twig on her. "He ought to go to the vertical care-grinder!" sh..e chived. "He ought to be marinated! Ill never poll up with a liver-faced, chatty, beef-headed, cupboard-headed, culver-headed, fiddle-faced, glumpish, squabby dab tros like him again! "Im fairly in half-m -- it wont fadge, it just wont fadge. He gives me the Jerry go Nimbles. Ill stun him -- Ill streak. Ill pick up my sticks and cut." So she bolted and took a speel on the drum to the top of Rome. On Shitten Saturday, the worms pihat scaly shaver of hers in a Tom and Jerry for starring the glaze; he went over the stile at Spike Park and got topped. Glossary Village, the London take a fright night (rhyming slang) rookeries a slow neighbourhood inhabited by dirty Irish and thieves sloop of war, a whore (rhyming slang) dollymop, a a tawdrily dressed maid-servant, a streetwalker flash it, to show it, to display ones wares dowry of parny, a a lot of rain boer, a one who induces ao gamble cool, to to look, to look over (back slang) longs and shorts cards made for cheating hazard drum, a gambling dens, where the ho escape penniless, if at all s, a low alley way ginnel, a still lower alley way bone-grubber, a a person who hunts dust-holes, gutters, and all likely spots for refuse bones, which he sells at the ragshops, or to the bone- merts ruffler, a beggar pretending to be an old, maimed soldier shivering-jemmy, a a begger who exposes h?imself, half-naked, on a cold day to obtain alms. This occupation is unpleasant but exceedingly lucrative angler, an a thief who goes about with a rod, having a hook at the end, which he is into open windows at night on the ce of a catch clapperdogeon, a a beggar who uses childreher of his own or borrowed, in order to stir the sympathy of the charitable shed a tear, to to take a dram lass of spirits; jocular phrase used, with a sort of grim earness, by old topers. The in may have been that ardent spirits, take by younger persons, usually bring water to their eyes I desire fire (rhyming slang) water of life gin (from aqua vitae?) on sewer the throat bullyrag, to to abuse or scold violently; to swi of money by intimidation and sheer abuse antiscriptural adj - applied to oaths when they are posed of foul language barney the pany hip, to to be offended nab the rust, to to take offence shove in the mouth, a glass of spirits shoot the cat, to vomit dumpli belly all-overish adj. -- sick, unwell, out of order have ones hump up, to to be in a fearful rage absquatulate, to depart from aablishment without paying ones score bung landlord square, to to settle a bill omee man-in-charge; governor; landlord (when used by a landlord about himself) cream of the valley gin splodger lout mizzle, to to depart with great speed; to vanish half-a-grunter sixpence ruggy adj. -- frowsty, un carser house, home poll young lady with whom a gentleman is having an irregular relationship killing adjective of high endation; outstanding; unique ginger-hackled adj. -- having auburn or flaxen hair skull-thatcher a straw-bo maker on the nose, to be on the look-out jomer sweetheart fake the rubber, to stand treat in aravagant manner mendozy dear, darling; a term of endearment probably from the valiant fighter, Mendoza out and out adj. -- first-rate; splendid glorious sinner dinner (rhyming slang) alderman in s, an a turkey hung with sausages Ben Flake, a a steak (rhyming slang) neddy, a a large quantity of odity, as in "a neddy of fruit", "a neddy of fish" Sharps Alley blood worms black puddings. Sharps Alley was very retly a noted slaughtering plaear Smithfield Irish apricots potatoes Joe Savage cabbage (rhyming slang) storrac carrots (back slang) beargeared bleary blued primed lumpy top-heavy moony scammered on the ran-tan - adjectives and phrases denoting various stages of ploughed drunkenness muddled obfuscated swipy kisky sewed up all mops and brooms lap the gutter, to not be able to see a hole in the ladder, to / go to a Bungay Fair and to have reached the ultimate degree of intoxication. In the lose both legs, to A Egyptian language, the determinative character of the hieroglyphic verb "to be drunk" has the signifit form of the leg of a man being amputated flare-up, a row soush house (back slang) drop into somebody, to give them an unprovoked beating twist appetite, e.g. "Wills got a capital twist for a Ben Flake" or, in the case of the hero of our ae, a capital twist for. . . batty fang, a a souing, a drubbing dragging time the evening of a try fair day, when the young fellows begin pulling the wenches about sick as a horse ?99liｂ?popular simile denotireme ennui catchy ined to take undue advantage fancy-bloke gentleman friend bed-fagot bed panion gooseberry pudden woman (rhyming slang) Gill terms of disapprobation applied to females Moll blast, to to curse give jessie, to to it assault and battery upon someone Mullingar heifer said of a lady whose ankles are "beefy", or thick. A term of Irish in. It is said that a traveller passing through Mullingar was so struck with this pecularity in the local women that he determio accost the first he met . "May I ask," said he, "if you wear hay in your shoes?" "Faith, an what if I do?" said the girl. "Because," says the traveller, "that ats for the calves of ys ing down to feed on it." barnacled adj. -- applied to a wearer of spectacles (corruption of Latin binnoculi?). Derived by some from the barnacle (Lepas Anatifera), a kind of ical shell adhering to ships bottoms. Hence a marine term fgles, and for which they are used by sailors in a case of ophthalmic dera cove or covey; a man or boy of any age spoffy adj. -- officious, intrusive blackberry swagger a person who hawks tapes, bootlaces, etc. e fringe, a the collar of beard worn uhe ; so called from its indig the position of the rope when Jack Ketch operates sing out, to exclaim in a loud voice k, to to stop, t to a halt stow faking, to to cease evil activity stunning adj. -- astounding fag blow twopenny head Albertopolis a facetious appelation given by Villagers to the Kensington Gore district buy the rabbit, to make a bad bargain; obtain a deal of trouble and invenience by some a slubberdegullion worthless wretch pepper, to clump, to - degrees of beating leather, to / flop down, to go to collapse totally Rory OMore floor (rhyming slang) step it, to absd frog and toad main road (rhyming slang) Joe Blake the to visit a low woman in a house of ill-repute Bartlemy, to go to hop the twig, to to run away; to leave someone in the lurch vertical care-grinder treadmill chive, to to shout mario be transported; from the salt pig herrings undergo in wall poll up, to to live with a member of the opposite sex in a state of unmarried impropriety liver-faced adj. -- mean, cowardly chatty adj. -- ied with lice beef-headed adj.-- stupid cupboard-headed an expression designating one whose head is both wooden and hollow culver-headed adj. -- weak and stupid fiddle-faced adj. -- applied to those with wizened tenances glumpish adj. -- of a stubborn, sulky temper (our hero certainly fits the bill here!) squabby adj. -- fat, short and thick dab tros bad sort (back slang) in half-m, to be to have sustained a black eye, or "mouse", in the course of a tussle fadge, it wont expression meaning "it just wont do", or "it just wont work" Jerry go Nimbles diarrhoea stun, to to astonish streak, to to absd pick up oicks and to collees possessions and leave aablishment cut, to without notice; to do a "moonlight flit" bolt, to to run away, escape a speel on the to take a trip to the try drum, to take top of Rome home (rhyming slang) Shitten Saturday corruption of "Shut-in Saturday"; the day between Good Friday aer Sunday worm poli pin, to to arrest, to apprehend scaly adj. -- unpleasant, disgusting shaver young person Tom and Jerry, a a drinking shop star the glaze, to to break the window or show-glass of a jeweller or other tradesman, and take any valuable articles and run away. Sometimes the glass is cut with a diamond, and a strip of leather fasteo the piece of glass cut out to keep it from falling in and making a noise. Another plan is to cut the sash go over the stile, to to go for trial (rhyming slang) Spike Park the Queens Bench prison topped, to be to be executed. Which the brute richly deserved UNCOLLECTED STORIES-The Scarlet House-1 I remember, Id been watg a hawk. There was an immense sky of the most i blue, blue of a bowl from which a child might just have drunk its m milk a behind a few whitish traces of cloud around the rim, and, imprinted on this sky, a single point of perfect stillness -- a hawk over the ruins. A hawk so still he seemed the tral node of the sky and the source of the heavy silence which fell down on the ruins like invisible rain; an immobile hawk so high above the turning world that I was sure he would see a half rotating hemisphere below him; and, over this hemisphere, scampered the plump vole or delicious bunny that did not know it had been pinioned already by the eyebeam of its feathered, taloned fate immi in the air. M, silence, a hawk, his prey and ruins. If I try very hard, I also add to this landscape with my little tent, my half-trad, piece by piece, all my naturalists equipment. . . I must have go to collect samples of the desolate flora of this empty place. Above the green abando of the deserted city, where the little foxes played, a rapt hawk gathered to himself all its hauillness. Hawk plummets. Hes unpremeditated and precise as Zen swordsmen, his fall subsumed to the aerial whizz of the rope that traps me. I am sure of it -- beat me as much as you like; I remember it perfectly. Dont I? The t sits in a hall hung with embroideries depig all the hierarchy of hell, a place, he claims, not uhe Scarlet House. Soon, everywhere will be like the Scarlet House. Chaos is ing, says the t, and giggles; the t ends all his letters "yours entropically" and signs them with the peacocks quill dipped in the blood of a human sacrifice. Why did you e to these abandoned regions, my dear, surely youd heard rumours that I and my fabulous retinue had already installed ourselves in the ruins, preparing chaos with the aid of a Tarot pack? But I had no notion who the t was when his bodyguard captured me. They stood around me as I writhed on the ground and they showed their fangs at me; they all file their es to a point, it is a sign of machismo among them. They wore jackets of black leather brightly studded with cabbalistic patterns; tall boots; snug leggings of black leather; and slick black helmets that fitted closely over the head and over the mouth, too, leaving only their pale eyes visible. Their eyes glittered like pebbles in a brook. They were armed with hand-guns and their belts bristled with knives. Each carried a coil of rope. A silence so perfect that it might never have been broken resumed itself after the hawk fell. They hauled me off at the end of the rope they tied to the back of one of their motorcycles and made me run, tumble, bounce behind them on my way to the Scarlet House, though I must admit they drove quite slowly, so I was not mujured. The Scarlet House was built of white crete and looked to me very much like a hospital, a large terminal ward. A few days ihere, and the gravel rash, the grazes and bruises healed. I remember everything perfectly. I know the rui; at nights, I hear the foxes barking in New Bond Street. That sound firms the existence of the ruins though, of course, I see nothing from the windows. Meanwhile, in this blind place, the t sults maps of the stars with the aid of his adviser, whose general efficy is hindered by the epileptic fits with which he is afflicted. Though at the best of times his wits are out of order; he drools, too. His star-spangled robes are dabbled with spittle and spilled food and other randomly spattered bodily effluvia, for hes quite shameless in his odd little lusts and pleasures and the t lets him indulge them all. Hes the lised fool and may even pull out his prid play with it at mealtimes, and woe betide you if you flinch from one of his random displays of sl affe, for thats a sure sign you arent in tuh chaos. But Im not sure if hes a fool all the time; sometimes his eyes foe with the assessing glint of a used-car dealer. Then I am afraid he may be w what I remember. When hes been a good fool and made the t chuckle, the t tells Madame Schreck to give him access to one of the you of the girls. There are girls as young as twelve or thirteen and Fool likes his women just out of the shell. The Fool takes his present down to the dungeons. We wont see her again. But was she not almost as good as dead the moment she set foot ihe Scarlet House? The moment of capture had sealed her fate. As for myself, I am sure I was captured by the bikers, in the ruins. I am perfectly fident that is how I came to the Scarlet House. Yet the t assures me, with equal, if not superior fidehat I am mistaken, so that I am not sure which of us to believe. The t is dedicated to the obliteration of memory. Memory, says the t, is the main differeween man and the beasts; the beasts were born to live but man was born to remember. Out of his memory, he made abstract patterns of signifit forms. Memory is the grid of meaning we impose on the random and bewildering flux of the world. Memory is the line we pay out behind us as we travel through time -- it is the clue, like Ariadnes, which means we do not lose our way. Memory is the lasso with which ture the past and haul it from chaos towards us in nicely ordered sequences, like those of baroque keyboard music. The t grimaces when he says that because he hates music even more that he hates mathematics but he loves to listen to screaming. "The entropic rhetoric of the scream", he calls it. Madame Schreck screeches for him sometimes at night, to augment his pleasure if we girls have screamed ourselves hoarse and ake any more noise. Memory, in of narrative; memory, barrier against oblivion; memory, repository of my being, those delicate filaments of myself I weave, in time into a spiders web to catch as much world in it as I . In the midst of my self-spuhere I sit, in the serenity of my self-possession. Or so I would, if I could. Because my memory is undergoing a sea-ge. Though I am certain I remember, I am no longer sure what it is I remember nor, ihe reason why I should remember it. Everyday, the t attempts to erase the tapes from my memory. He has perfected a plex system of fetting. Although I passionately assert how I was seized by the bikers in the ruins of New Bond Street, I know this assertion is no more than my last, paltry line of defence against the obliterations of the t. He has already implanted in me a set of pseudo-memories, all of whietimes play in my head together, throwio a dreadful fusion so that, though I remember everything, I have no means of ascertaining the actuality of those memories, which all return to me with shimmering vividness and a sense of lived and quantified experience. All of them. Dear god, all of them. Remembering is the first stage of absolute fetfulness, says the occult t, who goes by traries. So I have been precipitated into a fugue of all the memories of all the women in the Scarlet House, where I live, now. This is his harem. We are left in the cruel care of Madame Schreck, who eats small birds such as fig-peckers and thrushes; she puts a whole one, spit-grilled, inte, red mouth as lusciously as if it were a liqueur chocolate and then she spits the bones out like the skin and pips of a grape. And shes got other, extravagant tastes as well; she likes te upon the unborn young of rabbits. She acquires the foetuses from laboratories; she has them cooked for her in a cream sauriched with the addition of the yolk of an egg. Shes a messy eater, she spills sau her bare belly and one of us must lick it off for her. She throws open her legs and shows us her hole; the way down and out, she says. The t es personally to the Scarlet House to give us our lessons. He always brings with him a brace of pigs on silken leashes which we girls must caress. The t believes the pig is the prime example of perfected evolution, the multivorous beast that lives in shit, most entropic of substances, and es its own farrow, if it gets half the ce. Like time, says the t; like time. Time, which is the enemy of memory. The past is .very much like the future. I desded at dusk from a train on which I had been the only passenger in a dank, chill partment lit only by one greenish, meagre gas mas pair, oher side of a mirror so scratched and defaced I could not see my own refle in it, was broken. A mess of sandwich ings and e peel littered the grimy floor. It had been a gloomy journey, across a fen shrouded in mist of autumn, an unpeopled landscape, flat, waterlogged, dotted here and there with pollarded willows with their melancholy look of men whose arms have been lopped off or mutilated women with whips upon their heads. I desded from the train at that lonely halt as night was falling; a man with a seamed, shuttered face came to take my ticket and, without a single word, humped my little tin trunk for me out of the ramshackle, wooden station to a shabby carriage in the laside, a shabby carriage with, between its shafts, a starveling pony whose ribs poked out us drab, glossless coat. On the drivi sat a thin, dark man in black livery who, to my shocked horror, I perceived possessed no mouth at all. I started back; but the station master grabbed my hand and all but forced me into the carriage, then slammed the door on me. As the poor beast began painfully t the carriage forward, I glimpsed the last of the world in which, until that aghast moment, Id spent twenty-two years of girlhood; into the darkness before me I took the grinning face of the station master, pressed in farewell at the smeared window, transformed by a sudden rush of malevolent glee to a mask of pure evil. I knew I must try to escape and tussled weakly with the door but it was locked fast. The inexorable carriage, lurg, ponderous, took me into the deepening shadows of the night, which seemed to be moving across the fen to engulf me. I lay back upon the leather seat and gave way to helpless tears. At last we entered a dark courtyard virtually enclosed by tall, black trees; the gates shut immediately after we were inside. When the pony halted, the macabre an came to let me out. He reached for my hand to help me down with a certain courtesy and I had no choice but to touch him. His flesh felt as dank as the wet, night air of the fens which surrounded us. Yet when I brought myself to look at his ghastly fa order to thank him, I saw his eyes speak though he had no mouth nor none of the necessary appendages of lips, teeth and toh which to do so, his grave eyes, the colour of the inside of the o, told me I was a young girl much to be pitied and, in luminous depths, I perceived the most dreadful intimation of my fate. At the door of the rambling, brick-built, red-tiled place, half farmhouse, half try mansion and now, had I but known it, wholly dedicated to the ts experiments, Madame Schreck waited to greet me in the scarlet splendour of her satihat laid open to the view of her breasts and the unimaginable wound of her sex -- Madame Schreck, whom I would learn to fear far more thah itself, since death is finite. Now you are at the place of annihilation, now you are at the place of annihilation. Yet this version of my capture, in which despair settles slowly like a fall of grey snow upon the landscape through which I travelled towards the moment when hope vanished, sometimes seems to me to have altogether too literary a flavour -- too much of a eenth-tury quality, with its railway trains, its advertisment in the personal n of The Times foverhat drew me, like a Bronte heroine, on a spool of fate over the bleak flat-lands. Theres the inky, over-written smell of pseudo-memory about the gas lights and the mute an, though my skin still shudders from the remembered touch of his skin and I will never be able tet his eyes. But the t, the Morpholytic Kid who presides over the death of forms, assures me that now the process of fetting is well under way so that I remember both the past and the future with equal facility, sih are illusory. Ive made up a past out of some e once read on a train, perhaps; and Ive guessed at a future. For there are no foxes in New Bond Street. Nor will they froli New Bond Street until the cards fall in such a way that the foxes will bound out, barking, from beh them. Time past and time future bio distort my memory. But I have one memory I sometimes think must be the most authentic, si is by far the most ghastly. My beloved father has a straight bad a gait in spite of the seventy summers that have turned his hair to a spume of white foam. We sit at a rouable with a red plush cover in our pleasant apartment, the windows open on to a baly where a little breeze stirs the heavy heads of my fine show of geraniums, white, salmon pink and scarlet, all baogether, exuding a delicious, spicy odour. How I loved that room. . . the slippery horsehair sofa with the paisley shawl throw and the piles of cushions my mother had embroidered with all manner htly coloured butterflies and flowers; the rosewood et filled with a shepherdesses and bird-catchers, all covered with a fine bloom of dust -- Im not the best of housekeepers; there is a stain on the Persian carpet which marks the spot where I spilled a bowl of hot chocolate when I was six years old. There is a a bowl filled with pot pourri on the mantlepiece. My mother used to make pot pourri every summer; she would bring back the flowers from our house in the try. Now she is dead but she still presides over our tea-table; there on the wall she smiles at us from a birds-eye maple frame, a tinted photograph taken shortly after she and my father were married. Shes still very young, not much older than I am now; she wears a wide straw hat decorated with pink ribbon and a bunch of daisies. Its brim gently shades her eyes, of which the long lashes are so dark they look like the fringed tres of anemones. Her eyes are a mysterious, darkish green. They say I have her eyes. Some women take their eyes out, says the t; he is alarticularly angry if when he is engaged in erasing the tapes of memory, I begin -- as I sometimes, quite helplessly, do -- to repeat, over and ain, as if oape were stuck: "They say I have my mothers eyes, they say I have my mothers eyes." Then he beats me with a knotted whip until my shoulders bleed; when visiting his women, he never fets a whip. Then he hands me over to Madame Schreck for a spell in the sensory deprivation unit, I must crawl into the oblivion of her hole for a while. My father and I sit under my mothers photograph in an old-fashioned room in which everything is loved because it is familiar. Twenty-two years of my life have unfurled in this room like a slow, quiet fan. I pour tea for my father from a silver pot with a spout like the neck of a swan. The cups have narrow stems and are made of fine, white porcelain with scrolls of faded gold around the rims. My own cup cracked us weight of years long ago; I remember how my father carefully riveted it toget藏书网her again, until it was as good as here is a glass saucer taining a sliced lemon oable, its sharp, st refreshes this sultry July afternoon. The light falls in regular parallelograms through our slatted blinds so we know we are in trol of the weather. In the park outside, a few birds cheep the exhausted songs of high summer. The staccato click of bootheels. The peremptory barrage of gloved fists on the panels of the door. When the old man reaches for the revolver he always wears in the holster under his armpit, they gun him down. His white hair floods with blood as red as the painted house of Madame Schreck, who is waiting for me in the subterraorture-chamber deep at the heart of the maze of my brain, the Minotaur with the head of a woman and the orifice of a sow. My father tumbles across the tea-table. Cups, saucers fly apart in shards as he crashes down. His fingers grasp at the empty air to cate last, lost handful of world between them before it slips away from him for ever. Then they seized me, stripped me, raped me on the silk birds of the Persian carpet under my mothers picture, threw a coat over me, thrust a gun in my bad forced me down the eg staircase to the armoured car waiting outside. I had been a virgin. I was i pain. Madame Schreck, in a smart uniform of drab olive, with sheer black stogs and those six-inch heels of hers that stab the linoleum as she walks, took my particulars at the mahogany desk. When I refused to tell her where my brother was, she made me lie down on the camp-bed in the er of the room, under a propaganda poster of the t riding upon a winged snake and, with judicious impassivity, she applied the lighted end of her cigarette to the interior membrane of my labia minor. Through the open window, I remember, I saw a hawk immobile at the tral node of the blue sky of the midsummer. From his spread wings dropped a silehat stunned me more than the pain she inflicted. The Scarlet House-2 An orderly took me to the Scarlet House, a block-house with red-painted doors. He had almost to carry me because I could scarcely walk. There was no mouth in his fao mouth. His eyes were feral, wild, scarcely human. "Aha!" says the t in a great good humour; "Your memory is playing tricks on you!" He himself, such is his magnanimity, received me in a vast, eg hall hung with extravagant tapestries. I retain only the most fused recolles of its exterior but I know the inside perfectly well, now. It is a maze of cells like the inside of a braiook away my old coat that was still bundled around my shoulders and dropped it into an ior. Then he showed me the sacrificial knife, which is made of black obsidian, and said to me: "As of the present moment you inhabit the world no longer sihe least impulse of my will cause you to disappear from it." But his methods are more subtle than the knife. Dedicated as he is to the dissolution of forms, he intends to erode my sense of being by equippih a multiplicity of beings, so that I found myself with my own profusion of pasts, presents and futures. I am eroding, I am wearing away. I am being stroked as smooth as stone is by the hands of the sea; the elements that went to make up my uniqueness fall apart as he erases the tapes of my memory and makes his own substitutions. For, if my first capture incorporates within it ruins that do not yet exist and my sed capture resonates with too many echoes of books I might have read, then my third and by far my most moving capture might only recapitulate a Middle-European nightmare, an episode frue or Vienna seen in a movie, perhaps, or told me by a plete stranger during the exposed privacy of a long train journey. For sometimes I ot believe Ive suffered so much. If only I could remember everything perfectly, just as it happehen loaded with the ambivalent burden of my past, I should be free. But in this brothel where memorys the prostitute there is no such thing as freedom; all is governed by the fall of the cards. Madame Schreck, of course, is the High Priestess or Female Pope. The t has given her a blue robe to wear over that terrible red dress that reminds us all, every time we see it, of the irresoluble and animal part of ourselves we all hold in on, since we are women. She is the paradigm of sexuality. At her hairy hole ay homage as if it were the mouth of an oracular cave. When we play the Tarot Game, Madame Schreck sits on a small throhey bring down the ts special book, the book in blak on purple paper that he keeps hanging from a twisted beam in his private apartments; they open it up and spread it out on her open lap, to mimic her sex, which is also a forbidden book. The Tarot Game is like those games of chess that medieval princes performed on the blad white marble chequered floors of their palaces, using men for pieces. Theyd dress oeam in blad oeam in white; the knights would be mounted on suitably caparisoned chargers who sometimes unloaded a freight of dung as they stepped delicately sideways, to prove the game was real. The bishops would be properly mitred; the pawns, no doubt, dressed as ilitia. The t plays the Game of Tarot with a major ara of fourteen of his retinue. If Madame Schreck adopts the emblems of the Papess to the manner born, the Fool remains himself, of course. They mask themselves and perform random dao sounds not unlike screaming that the t extorts from aronithesiser. He reads the patterns the halluated pack make at random and so he invokes chaos. He has methodology. He is a stist, in his way. Now, altogether Ive been erased and substituted and played baany times my memory is nothing but a palimpsest of possibilities and probabilities, there are some elements he ot rid me of and these, iingly enough, are not those of blood on an old mans hair or his leather-clad minions closing in oh mineral menace of eyes like stones; no. There is a hawk, drawing towards it in a still sky all the elements of which a plex world was onposed. And some man haunts the labyrinths inside my head and he was born without a mouth. And there are certain kinds of eyes, those eyes that, once seen, ever be fotten. When I helplessly repeat, "I saw a hawk, I saw a hawk, I saw a hawk. . ." or, "They say I have my mothers eyes", the t half flays me alive. His anger is a nervous reflex, like the crazy ce of a coward in arms against his own weakness; that still, in my extremity, I should persist in remembering reminds him of the possibility, which is appalling to him, that there might be a remedy for chaos. I need hardly tell you that we, the women of the Scarlet House, live in absolute isolation, although the planned interpeion of all our experience gives us a vague but pervasive sense of closeo one another. When on a pilloith tears, I live aial moment of capture, it might be your dread I feel, or yours, or yours -- a different kind of dread than mine whievertheless, I experience as though it were my own and so I draw o you all. Yet our lives have tracted to the limitations imposed upon us by the grisly maery of the ts harem. We are not ourselves; we are his playing cards, a shifting chorus to the t, to Madame Schreck, to the Fool and to the others I do not know but only see on the nights he plays the Tarot Game, hieratic figures like apparitions from a fotten theogony who rise and fall at the random dictates of whim. "God is random," says the t who believes in the irresolute triumph of time over its owifiemory. We whisper among ourselves, of course, like toys might in the privacy of the toy cupboard after the little master is tucked up in bed for the night. Our whispers are soft, awed by the predit in which we find ourselves. In the night-time darkness of our quarters, we ake out one anothers features. Our disembodied voices rustle like dead leaves and sometimes we stretch out our hands to toue another, lightly, to lay a finger on one anothers mouths to assure ourselves a voice issues from that aperture. Like drifting cobwebs, the insubstantial caresses linger for a moment upon our skins. We ma ourselves in a ghostly fashion for are we not already shadows? Phantoms of the dead, phantoms of the living, there is little to choose between two states of limbo. heless, I have certain prenemonics. A hawk; a man without a mouth; and eyes without a face. As long as I retain them in my memory, even if I fet any kind of text for them, then I keep baething of myself from the ts dissolving philosophy. He may beat me as much as he pleases; Im not afraid of enterihs grisly skeleton in the gavotte of the ara, and thats something. (If you do find yourself partnering the skeleton, you vanish, of course.) The Fool never says a word but only screeches and babbles; hes growing perfect, hes quite fotten how to speak. When the t beats me and I scream, he says: "Now youre talking! Who needs words?" We are his harem and also his finishing school. The curriculum is divided into three parts. First, we learn how tet; sed, we fet how to speak; third, we cease to exist. There are no mirrors in the Scarlet House because mirrors propagate souls. A mirror shows you who you are and not one single one of us pirls has the slightest notion of what that might have bee, when the t beats us, we feel pain and so we know we are still living, not yet quite annihilated, and the anguish that overes me when I remember I am no longer myself is quite real and persists all the time. Yet the fugue of our emory is also a kind of solation. Though I am not myself, sometimes, when we are forced to play at the Tarot Game, I and the rest of the minor ara, I sense I may be, in some as yet formless and i way, almost a legion of selves. When we lie in our sleeping quarters and toue ao firm that the ripped envelopes of our bodies are still there, even if the tents have all been misdirected, it is almost as though my body had been transformed into one of those many-limbed and many-headed effigies sculptured in Indian temples -- no point, any longer, in trying to ascertain the inal from my bewilderment. The more the t scrambles the tapes, the more the harem bees one single woman with a multiplicity of hands and eyes and no name, no past, no future -- first, a being in a void; and, soon, a void itself. Chaos is like a vat of acid. Everything disies. heless, I g to my mnemonics like a drowning man to a spar. As time passes and wears me away, I meditate upon them more and more. I am beginning to recile myself pletely to the fact that they may not tain any element at all of real memory. It was hard to bear, at first, but soon I uood how the hawk, the face without a mouth, the eyes without a face, are all the residue of the world I still carry with me that does not elude me and, if they are not precisely memories, then they may be, in some sense, like those odds and ends that all refugees carry with them, from which they refuse to be parted, although theyre quite insignifit -- a spoon with a bent handle, say; or a tram ticket issued by a city that no longer exists. Small items, meaningless in themselves, a keys to aire system of meanings, if only I remember. . . The hawk, now. If I think about the hawk long enough, I remember that I do not remember it. Thats a painful beginning; but one must begin somewhere. There was a sky, certainly; theres plenty of sky outside the Scarlet House, though we see none of it inside. Sky. Now, the hawk -- down! he es, like a butchers cleaver thwag through meat. The hawk drops on the plump, careless bunny romping through the clover and young grass; the hawks eye, like a telescopis, zooms in on me as I lie in the sun with the smell of fresh grass in my clothes. Yes. I remember the gree of a summers day, not uhe spicy odour of crushed geranium leaves. (trate of fleshly impressions, any fleshly impression; reef it in from the past, from the time before my time in the Scarlet House. St of grass, of geraniums, of slivered lemons. All these sts bring back the world.) As I lie in the fresh grass I have restructed out of memory, I begin to perceive some element of paranoia in the image of the hawk. For I did not know that I was watched. I was ignorant of my clawed, feathered fate. And so I will be seized by force. Capture; and rape, from the Latin, rapere, to seize by force. . . thats a curious pedantiny to hunt out from the back alleys of memory. I must have studied Latin, ohough for urpose I t imagine. So the capture and the rape elide. Man is an animal who insists on making patterns, says the t ptuously; all the world you think so highly of is nothing but pretty floral aper pasted up over chaos. The t prepares chaos in his crucible. When he plays his Tarot Game, he makes an institution out of chaos. He signs himself, yours entropically, with the quill of a hawk dipped in the blood of ruptured virginities. The hawk drops. They throw me down on the silk birds of the antique Persian carpet and rape me. And, to my amazement, a pattern emerges, although it is stylised as those woven birds I may once have walked on. For the hawk is nothing more and nothihan the memory of my capture, preserved as an image, or an i. I ot tell you with what inexpressible relief I greeted the cretisation, not of a memory, but of an inter-e that made some sense in my plight to me. It was as if Id goo the fused jumble of limbs and hands and eyes scattered promiscuously on the floor of the harem and unerringly been able to piy own hand, screw it ba to my wrist ahe blood flow bato it. Or pull out my mothers eyes from the mess, wipe them carefully on my sleeve and slip them bato my own eye sockets, where they belong. Now, these are my mothers eyes that jumped out of the old photograph into my head; and there are also the eyes of the mute an that were full so full of pity for me that my heart stopped momentarily, out of fear for my own predit. Those eyes, too, are rimmed with endless black lashes, theyve been put in with a sooty fihey move me as only the mute language of the eye do and I do not know if, ihey are my own eyes, because there are no mirrors here, or if they are the eyes of somebody I loved, once, before they dissolved in my memory. However, I must slip these eyes bato some head or other; any head will do, to make sense of those eyes which will tio speak even if the mouth is sealed up. Those eyes hold all the speech which will be deo me when fetting fes my lips together and I ot speak at all, like the mute an, like the mute orderly whose eyes had been excised and replaced with those of a beast of prey. Or else with stones, like the bikers, whose mouths were hidden by their leather hoods so you could not tell whether they had mouths or no. And so I established the desion of my undoing, from capture to annihilation: the hawk, the face without a mouth, the eyes without a face. After that will e nothing. I shall be perfectly silent. When I perceived Id ahese disparate elements into a grid, or system of es, I felt for the first time I ehe obscure portals of the Scarlet House, a flood of joy. I examihe abused flesh of my breasts and belly a, not sorrow Id been so mauled, but ahe t had mistreated me; and what if its only that the puppet turns against the puppet-master: Isnt the puppet-master depe on the submission of his dolls for his authority? t I, in the systematidomness of my es, trol the Game? The ghost reassembles the events that re into non-being. As it does so, hourly it grows more substantial. And where theres no hope, theres no fear, either. Not even fear of Madame Schreck, through whose hole we must all crawl to extin, one day; unless it is the way to freedom. This m, the t busily erased all the tapes of my Viennese apocalypse; I am glad of it, it was a vile memory and I am heartily sorry for whoever it was among my panions to whom it belonged. He tittered with his habitual beastly glee when at last hed rid me of the pulsion, that nervous, that hicg reiteration; "They say I have my mothers eyes." But that was because he does not know I no longer o remember it, whether it were true or no; I know all that I o know to enable me to ehe time of the torturers and all its sedhand furniture of fear -- the magic robes, the book of pretend-spells, the silence of the fool, the extin of the whore. This worlds a vile oubliette. Yet in its refuse I will find the key to free me. The Snow Pavilion-1 The motor stalled in the middle of a snowy landscape, lodged in a rut, wouldnt budge an inch. How I swore! Id plao be snug in front of a r fire, by now, a single malt on the mahogany wiable (a oisseurs piece) beside me, the five courses of Melissas dinner savourously aromatising the kit; to plete the decor, a labrador retrievers head laid on my knee as trustingly as if I were indeed a try gentleman and lolled by rights among the tz. After dinner, before I read our ary pre-coital poetry aloud to her, my elegant and aplished mistress, also a oisseurs piece, might play the piano for her part-time pasha while I sipped black, acrid coffee from her precious little cups. Melissa was rich, beautiful and rather older than I. The servants slipped me looks of sly plicity; no matter how carefully I rumpled my sheets, they knew when a bed hadnt bee in. The master of the house had a pied-a-terre in Londohe House was sitting and the House was sitting tight. Id met him only o the same dinner party where Id met her -- hed been off-hand with me, gruff. I was young and handsome and full of promise; my relations with husbands rarely prospered. Wives were quite amother matter. Women, as Mayakovosky justly opined, are very partial to poets. And now her glamorous motor car had broken down in the snow. Id borrowed it for a trip to Oxford, ostensibly to buy books, utilising, with my instinctual ing, the weather as an excuse. Last night, the old woman had been shaking her mattress with a vengeance -- suow! When I woke up the bedroom was full of luminous snow light, catg in the coils of Melissas honey-coloured hair, and Id experienced, once again, but, this time, almost untrollably, the sense of claustrophobia that sometimes afflicted me when I was with her. Id said, lets read some snowy poetry together, after dionight, Melissa, a tribute of white verses to the iography of the weather. Any excuse, no matter how far fetched, to get her out of the house -- too much luxury on ay stomach, that was the trouble. Always the same eyes too big for his belly, as grandma used to say; grandma spotted the trait when this little fellow lisped and toddled and pissed the bed before he knew what luxury was, even. Cultural iion, I tell you, the gripe in the bowels of your spirit. How I get out of here, away from her subtly flawed antique mirrors, her French perfume deted ieenth-tury crystal bottles, her inscrutably smirking aresses in their gilt, oval frames? And her dolls, worst of all, her blasted dolls. Those dolls that had never have been played with, her fine colle of antique women, part of the apparatus of Melissas charm, her piquant inality that lay well on the safe side of quaint. A dozen or so of the fi lived in her bedroom in a glass-fronted, satinwood et lavishly equipped with such toyland artefacts and miniature sofas and teeny-tiny grand pianos. They had heads made of moulded porcelain, each dimple aung underlip sculpted with loving care. Their wigs and over-lifelike eyelashes were made of real hair. She told me their eyes had been manufactured by the same craftsman in glass who made those terribly precious paperweights filled with magiowstorms. Whenever I woke up in Melissas bed, the first thing I saw were a dozen pairs of shining eyes that seemed to gleam wetly, as if in lacrimonious accusation of my presehere, for the dolls, like Melissa, were perfect ladies and I, in my upwardly social mobile nakedness -- a nakedhat was, ihe essential battledress for such storm-troopers as I! -- patently leman. After three days of that kind of style, I badly o sit in a public bar, drink coarse pints of bitter, s double entendres with the barmaid; but I could hardly tell milady that. Instead, I must use my vocation to justify my day off. Lehe car, Melissa, so that I drive to Oxford and buy a book of snowy verses, siheres no such book in the house. And Id made my purchase and mao fit in my bread, cheese and badinage as well. A good day. Then, almost home again and here I was, stuck fast. The fields were all brim-full of snow and the dark sky of late afternoon already swollen and discoloured with the fall. Flocks of crows wheeled endlessly upon the invisible carousels of the upper air, occasionally emitting a rusty caw. A glance beh the bo showed me only that I did not know what was wrong and must get out te along a lane where the mauve shadows told me snow and the night would arrive together. My breath smoked. I wound Melis藏书网sas husbands muffler round my ned dug my fists into his sheepskin pockets; his borrowed coat kept me snug and warm although the ade the nerves in my forehead hum with a thin, high sound like that of the wind in telephone wires. The leafless trees, the hillside quilted by interses of dry-stone walling -- all had been subdued to monoe by the severity of last nights blizzard. Snow clogged every sound but that of the ironictuation of the crows. No sign of another presehe pastoral cows were all locked up ieaming byre, Clout and Hobbinol sucked their pipes by the fireside in pastoral domesticity. Who would be outside, today, when he could be warm and dry, inside. Too white. It is too white, out. Silend whiteness at such a pitch of twinned iy you know what it must be like to live in a try where snow is not a charming, sinfrequent, visitor that puts its cold garlands orees so prettily we think they are playing at blossoming. (What an aptly fragile simile, with its Botticellian nuance. I gratulated myself.) No. Today is as cold as the killing cold of the perpetually white tries; todays atrocious dour is that of those white freckles that are the stigmata of frostbite. My sensibility, the exquisite sensibility of a minor poet, tingled and crisped at the sight of so much whiteness. I was certain that soon Id e to a village where I could telephone Melissa; then she would send the village taxi for me. But the snow-fields now glimmered spectrally in ahiing light and still there was no sign of life about me in the whole, white world but for the helmeted crows creaking down towards their s. Then I came to a pair ht-iron gates standing open on a drive. There must be some mansion or other at the end of the drive that would offer me shelter and, if they were half as rich as they ought to be, to live in such style, then they would certainly know Melissa and might even have me driven back to her by their own chauffeur in a warm car that would smell deliciously of new leather. I was sure they must be rich, the try side was lousy with the rich; hadnt I flattened a brace of pheasants on my way to Oxford? Enced, I ?urned iweee-posts, on whiarled iron gryphons sp circumcision caps of snow. The drive wound through an elm copse where the upper limbs of the bare trees were clogged with beastly lice of old crows s. I could tell that nobody had e this way sihe snow fell, for only rabbit slots and the eiform prints of birds marked surfaces already crisping with frost. The drive took me uphill. My shoes and trouser bottoms were already wet through; it grew darker, colder and the old woman must have given her mattress a tentative shake or two, again, for a few more flakes drifted down and caught on my eyelashes so I first saw that house through a dazzle as of uears, although, I assure you, I was out of the habit . I had reached the brow of a hill. Before me, in a hollow, magically surrounded by a snowy formal garden, lay a jewel of a mansion in a voluptuous style of English renaissand every one of its windows blazed with light. I imagined myself describing it to Melissa- "a vista like visible Debussy". Enting. But, though lights streamed out in every dire, all was silent except for the crag of the frosty trees. Lights and frost; in the winter sky above me, stars were ing oubbr>t. Especially for my cultured patroness, I made an elision of the stars in the mansion of the heavens and the lights of the great house. So who was it, this snowy afternoon, whod bagged a triad of fine images for her? Why, her clever boy! How pleased shed be. And now I could declare the image factory closed for the day a on with the real business of living, the experience of which that lovely house seemed to promise me in such abundance. Yet, sihe place was so well lit, the front door at the top of the serpeaircase left open as for expected guests, why were there still no traces of arrivals or departures in the snow on which my footpriended backwards to the lane and Melissas abandoned car? And no figures to be glimpsed through any window, nor sound of life at all? The vast empty hall serenely dominated by an immense delier, the faceted pendants of which ked faintly in the currents of warm air and stippled with shifting, prismatic shadows walls wreathed in white stucco. This delier intimidated me, like too grand a butler but, all the same, I found the bellpull and tugged it. Somewhere inside a full-mouthed bell tolled; its reverberatiohe delier a-ti even whehiled down again, nobody came. I hauled again on the bellpull; still no reply, but a sudden wind blew a flurry of snow or sleet arouo the hall. The delier rocked musically in the draught. Behind me, outside, the air was full of the taste of snow -- the storm was about to begin again. Nothing for it but to step bravely over the indifferent threshold and stamp my feet on the doormat with enough eclat to announce my arrival to the entire ground floor. It was by far the most magnifit house Id ever seen, and warm, so warm my frozen fihrobbed. Yet all was white inside as the night outside, white walls, white paint, white drapes and a faint perfume everywhere, as though many rien iiful dresses had drifted through the hall on their way to drinks before dinner, leaving behind them their spoor of musk and civet. The very air, here, mimicked the caress of their naked arms, intimate, voluptuous, rare. My nostrils flared and quivered. I should have liked to have made love to every one of those lovely beings whose presence here was most poignant in her abse was a house built and furnished only for pleasure, for the indulgence of the flesh, for elegant cupisce. I felt like Mignon in the land of the lemon trees; this is the place where I would like to live. I screwed up suffit wing ce to shout out: "A home?" But only the delier tinkled in reply. Then, a sudden creak behind me; I spun round to see the door swing to on its hinges with a soft, inexorable click. At that, the delier above me seemed to titter untrollably, as if with glee to see me locked in. It is the wind, only the wind. Try to believe it is only the wind that blew the door shut behind you, keep a strong hold on that imagination of yours. Stop that shaking, all at oneasy; walk slowly to the door, dont look nervous. It is the wind. Or else -- perhaps -- a trick of the owners, a practical joke. I grasped the notion gratefully. I khe rich loved practical jokes. But as soon as I realised it must be a practical joke, I knew I was not alone in the house because its appareiness art of the joke. Then I exged one kind of unease for another. I became terribly self-scious. Now I must watch my step; whatever happened, I must look as if I knew how to play the game in which I found myself. I tried the door but I was locked firmly in, of course. In spite of myself, I felt a faint panic, stifled it. . . No, you are not at their mercy. The hall remained perfectly empty. Closed doors oher side of me; the staircase swept up to ay landing. Am I to meet my hosts in embarrassment and humiliation, will they all e boung -- "boo!" -- out of hidey holes in the panelling, from behind sweeping curtains to make fun of me? A huge mirror behind aravagant arra of arum lilies showed me a poor poet not altogether vingly rigged out in borrowed try squires gear. I thought, how pinched and pale my face looks; a face thats eaten too much bread and margarine in its time. e, now, liven up! You left bread and margarine behind you long ago, at grandmas house. Now you are a house-guest of the Lady Melissa. Your car has just broken down in the lane; you are looking for assistance. Then, to my relief but also my increased disquiet, I saw a face behind my own, reflected, like mine, in the mirror. She must have known I could spy her, peeking at me behind my back. It ale, soft, pretty face, streaming blonde hair, and it sprang out quite suddenly from the refles of the backs of the lilies. But when I turned, she -- young, tricksy, fleet of foot -- was gone already, though I could have sworn I heard a carillon of giggles, unless my sharp, startled movement had disturbed the delier, again. This fleeting apparitio me know for sure I was observed. ("How amusing, a game of hide-and-seek. All the same, do you think, perhaps, the chauffeur could. . .") With the sullen knowledge of myself as appointed , I opehe first door I came to on the ground floor, expeg to discover my tittering audience awaiting me. It erfectly empty. A white on white reception room, all bleached, all pale, sidetables of glass and e, artefacts of white lacquer, upholstery of thick, white velvet. pany was expected; there were deters, bowls of ice, dishes of nuts and olives. I was tempted to swallow a cut-glass tumbler full of something-or-other, to snatch a handful of salted almonds -- I arched and starving, only that pub sandwich since breakfast. But it would never do to be caught i by the fair-haired girl Id glimpsed in the hall. Look, shes left her doll behind her, fotten in the deep cushioning of an armchair. How the ridulge their children! Not a doll so much as a little work of art; the cash register at the bay mind rang up twenty guineas at the sight of this floppy Pierrot with his skull-cap, his white satin pyjamas with the black buttons down the front, all plete, and that authentic pout of ic sadness on his fine a face. Mon ami Pierrot, poor old fellow, limp limbs a-dangle, all anguished sensibility and no moral fibre. I know how you feel. But, as I exged my glance of pitying plicity with him, there came a sharp, melodious twang like a note from an imperious tuning fork, from beyond the half-open double doors. After a startled moment, I sprang into the dining room, summoned. I had never seen anything like that dining room, except at the movies -- not even at the dinner where Id met Melissa. Fifteen covers laid out on a tongue-shaped spit of glass; but I hardly had time to take in the splendour of the fine a, the lead crystal, because the door into the hall still swung on its hinges and I knew I had missed her by seds. So the daughter of the house is indeed playing "catch" with me; and where has she got to, now? Soft, softly on the white carpets; I leave deep prints behi do not make a sound. And still no sign of life, only the pale shadows of the dles; yet, somehow, everywhere a sense of hushed expecy, as of the night before Christmas. Then I heard a patter of running footsteps. But these footsteps came from a part of the house where no carpets muffled them, somewhere high above me. As I poised, ears a-twitch, there came from upstairs or downstairs, or miladys chamber, a spring of thin, high laughter agitating the deliers; then the sound of many, many runni overhead. For a moment, the whole house seemed to tremble with unseen movement; then, just as suddely, all was silent again. I resolutely set myself to search the upper rooms. All these rooms were quite empty. But my always paranoia, now tingling at the tip of every nerve, assured me they had all been vacated the very moment I ehem. Every now and then, as I made my increasingly grim-faced tour of the house, I heard bursts of all kinds of delierriments but never from the room o the one in which I stood. These voices started and stopped as if switched on and off and, of course, were part and parcel of the joke; this joke was my unease. In what, by its size and luxury, must have been the master bedroom, the polar bearskin rug throwhe bed was warm and rumpled as if someone had just been lying there and now hid, perhaps, in the ivorine wardrobe, enjoying my perplexity. And I could have wrecked their fun if only -- if only! -- I had the ce to fling open the pale doors and catch my relut hosts croug, as I thought, among the couture. But I did not dare do that. The staircarpets gave way to scrubbed boards and still I had not seen anything living except the possibility of a fa the mirror, although the entire house was full of evidence of life. These upper floors were dimly lit, only single lights in holders at intervals along the walls, but one door was standing open and light spilled out onto the passage, like an invitation. The Snow Pavilion-2 A good fire glowed in a little range where nightclothes were warming on the brass fender. I felt a sudden, sharp pang of disappoio firail lead me to the nursery; I had been duped of all the fleshly advehe house had promised me and that, damn them, must be part of the joke, too. All the same, if I indulged the fancy of the child Id seen in the mirror, perhaps I might ehe fancy of her mother, who must be still young enough to enjoy the caress of a bearskiead; and not, Id be bound, inimical to poetry, either. This mother, who had ned even the o whiteness, white walls, white painted furniture, white rug, white curtains, all chic as hell. Even the child had been made a slave to fashiohough the nursery itself had succumbed to the interior designers snowdrift that had engulfed the entire house, its inhabitants had not. Id never seen so many dolls before, not even in Melissas et, and all quite exquisite, as if theyd just e from the shop, although some of them must be older than I was. How Melissa would have loved them! Dolls sat on shelves with their legs stuck out before them, dolls spilled from toychests. Fine ladies in taffeta bustles and French hats, babies in every gradation of ess. A limp-limbed, golden-haired creature in pink satin sprawled as if in sensual abandon on the rug in front of the fire. A wonderfully elaborate lady in a kitsch Victorian pelisse of maroon silk, with brown hair under a feather straw bo, lay in an armchair by the fire with as proprietorial an air as if the room beloo her. A delicious lass in a purple velvet riding habit occupied the saddle of the wonderful albino rog horse. Now at last I was surrounded by beautiful women and they were dumb repositories of all the lively colours that had been exiled from the place, vivid as a hot-house, but none of them existed, all were mute, were fis and that multitude of glass eyes, like tears gealed in time, made me feel very lonely. Outside, the snow flurried against the windows; the storm had begun in ear. Ihere was still ohreshold left to cross. I guessed she would be there, waiting for me, whoever she was, although I hesitated, if only momentarily, before the door that lead to the night nursery, as if unseen gryphons might guard it. Faint glow of a night light on the mantelpiece; a dim tranquillity, here, where the air is full of the warm, pale smells of childhood, of hair, of soap, of talcum powder, the inses of her sanctuary. And the moment I ehe night nursery, I could hear her transparent breathing; she had hardly hidden herself at all, not even pulled the covers of her white-enamelled crib around her. I had taken the game seriously but she, its instigator, had not; she had fallen fast asleep in the middle of it, her eyelids buttoned down, her long, blonde, patri hair streaming over the pillow. She wore a white, fragile, lace smod her long, white stogs were fine as the smoky breath of a winters m. She had kicked off her white kid sandals. This little huhis little quarry, lay curled up with her thumb wedged, baby-like, in her mouth. The wind yowled in the ey and snow pelted the window. The curtains were not yet drawn so I closed them for her and at ohe room deempest, so I could have thought I had been snug all my life. Weariness came over me; I sank down in the basketwork chair by her bed. I was loath to leave the pany of the only living thing Id found in the mansion and even if Nanny brusquely stormed in to interrogate me, I reassured myself that she must know how fond her little charge was of hide-and-seek indeed, must have been in plicity with the game, to let me wander about the nursery suite in this unventional fashion. And if Mummy came in, now, foodnight kisses? Well so much the better; I should be discovered demonstrating the tenderness of a poet at the cradle of a child. If nobody came? I would ehe anti-climax; Id just take the weight off my feet for a while, and then slip out. Yet I must admit I felt a touch of disappoi as time passed and I was forced relutly to abandon all hope of an invitation to diheyd fotten all about me! Careless even of their own games, they had left off playing in the middle of the chase, just as the child had done, aired into the immutable privacy of the rich. I promised myself that at least Id help myself to half a tumbler of good whisky on my way out, to see me warmly back to the lane and the stark trudge home. The child stirred in her sleep and muttered indecipherably. Her fists ched and unched. Her cheeks were delicately flushed a pa?９9lｉｂ.le, luminous pink. Such skin -- the fiure of childhood, the inparable down of skin that has never go in the cold. The more I watched beside her, the frailer she looked, the more transparent. I had never, in my life before, watched beside a sleeping child. The milky smell of innod se suffused the night nursery. I had anticipated, I suppose, some sort of gratified lust from this game of hide-ahrough the mansion if not the satisfa of lust of the flesh, then that of lust of the spirit, of vanity; but the more I mimicked tenderowards the sleeper, the more tender I became. Oh, my shabby-sordid life! I thought. How she, in her untouchable sleep, judges me. Yet she was not a peaceful sleeper. She twitched like a dog dreaming of rabbits and sometimes she moaned. She snuffled stantly and then, quite loudly, coughed. The cough rumbled in her narrow chest for a long time and it struck me that the child, so pale and sleeping with such racked exhaustion, was a sick child. A sick, spoiled little girl who ruled the household with a whim, a, poor little tyrant, went uhey must have been glad she had dropped off to sleep, so they could abandon the game she had forced them to play. She had fairy-tale, flaxen hair and eyelids so delicate the eyes beh them almost showed glowing through; and if, indeed, it had been she who secreted all the grumbling grown-ups in their wardrobes and bathrooms and wouhrough the house on an invisible spool towards her, well, I could scarcely begrudge her her fun. And her game had been as much with those grown-ups as it had been with me; hadnt she tidied them all away as if theyd been dolls shed stowed in the huge toychest of this exquisite house? When I thought of that, I went so far in fiveness as to stroke her eggshell cheek with my finger. Her skin was soft as plumage of snow aive as that of the princess iory of the princess and the pea; when I touched her, she stirred. She shrugged away from my touch, muttering, and rolled over uneasily. As she did so, a gleaming bundle slithered from between her covers on to the floor, banging its a head on the scrubbed linoleum. She must have tiptoed down to collect her fotten doll while I went prowling about the bedrooms. Here he was again, her Pierrot in his shining white pyjamas, her little friend. Perhaps her only friend. I bent to pick him up from the floor for her and, as I did so, something caught the light and glittered at the er of his huge, tragic, glass eye. A sequin? A brilliant? The moon is your try, old chap; perhaps theyve put stars in your eyes for you. I looked more closely. It was wet. It was a tear. Then I felt a suct blow on the bay neck, so sudden, so powerful, so ued that I felt only a vague astonishment as I pitched forward on my fato a black vanishment. When I opened my eyes, I saw a troubled absence of light around me; when I tried to move, a dozen little daggers serrated me. It was terribly cold and I was lying on, yes, marble, as if I was already dead, and I was trapped inside a little hill of broken glass ihe wet carapaelissas husbands sheepskin coat that was sodden with melting snow. After a few, careful, agonising twitches, I thought it best to stay quite still in this dank, lightless hall where the snow drove in through an open door whose outline I could dimly see against the white night outside. Slow as a dream, the door shifted bad forth on rusty hinges with a raucous, meical, monotonous caw, like that of crows. I tried to piece together what had happeo me. I guessed I lay on the floor of the hall of the house I could ha..ve sworn Id just explored, though I could see very little of its interior in the ghostly light -- but all must once have been painted white, though now sadly and obsely scribbled over by rude village boys with paint and chalks. The despoiled pallor reflected itself in a cracked mirror of immense size on the wall. Perhaps I had been trapped by the fall of a delier. Certainly, I had been caught in the half-shattered glass viscera of the delier that I thought Id just seen multiplying its refles in another hall than the one in which I lay and every bone in my body ached and throbbed. If time had loosehe delier from its ms in the flaking plaster above me, the delier might very well have e tumbling down on me as I sheltered from the storm that howled and gibbered around the house but then it might have killed me and I knew by my throbbing bruises that I was still alive. But had I not just walked through this very hall when it was warm and perfumed and suave with money? Or had I not. Then I ierced by a beam of light that struck cold green fire from the prisms arouhe invisible behind the flashlight addressed me unceremoniously in a cracked, old womans voice, a es voice. Who be you? What be you up to? Trapped in the splintered glass, the splintered light, I told her how my car had broken down in the snow and I had e here for assistahis alibi now seemed to me a very feeble one. I could not see the old woman at all, could not even make out her vague shape behind the light, but I told her I was staying with the Lady Melissa, to impress her old try es snobbery. She exclaimed and muttered when she heard Melissas name; when she spoke again, her manner was almost excessively ciliatory. She has to be careful, poor old woman, all alone in the house; thieves e for lead from the roof and young couples up to no good e and so on and on. But, if I am the Lady Melissas guest, then she is sure it is perfectly all right for me to shelter here. No, there is no telephone. I must wait here till the storm dies down. The new snow will have blocked the lane by now -- we are quite cut off! she says; and titters. I must follow her carefully, walk this way; she gives me a hand out of the mess, so much broken glass. . . take care. What a crash, when the delier came down! Youd have thought the world had e to an end. e with her, she has her rooms; she is quite cosy, sir, with a r fire. (What weather, eh?) She lit me solicitously out of the glass trap and took me past our phantoms moving like deep sea fish in the choked depths of the mirror; up the stairs we went, through the ruins of the house I thought I had explored in my waking faint or system of linked halluations, snow induced, or, perhaps, induced by a mild cussion. For I am shaky and a little nauseous; I grasp the baoo tight. The doors shudder on their hinges. I glimpse rooms with the furniture spookily shrouded in white sheets but the beam of her torch does not linger on anything; her carpet slippers go flipperty-flopperty, flipperty-flopperty, she is an intrepid iator of the shadows. And still I ot see her clearly, although I hear the rustle of her dress and smell her musty, frowsty, sed-hand clothes store, typical e smell, like grandmas smell, smell of my childhood women. She has, of course, ensced herself in the nursery. And how I gasped, in my mild fever, to see so many dolls had set up camp in this decay! Dolls everywhere higgledy-piggledy, dolls thrust down the sides of chairs, dolls spilled out of tea chests, dolls propped up on the mantelpiece with blank, battered faces. Had she gathered all the dolls of all the departed daughters of the house here, around her, for pany? The dolls stared at me dumbly from glass eyes that might hold in suspension the magiow-storm that trapped me here; I felt I was the osure of all their blind eyes. And have I indeed met any of these now moth-gnawed creatures in this room before? When I first fainted in the hall, did I fall ba time to enter on a white beach of years ago this young lady, whose heavy head drops forward on her bosom since her limp body has lost too much sawdust to tio support it? The struts of her satin oliove in like a broken umbrella. Her blousy neighbours dark red silk dress has faded to a thin pink but she has not lost her parasol because it had beeo her hand araw bo with the draggled feathers still hangs by a few threads from the brue wig now awry on a a scalp. And I almost tripped over a poor corpse on the floor in a purplish jacket of baldi, her worn, wax face raddled with age, only a few strands left of all that honey-coloured hair. . . Yet if any of the denizens of that imaginary nursery were visiting this one, slipped out of my dream through a of the imagination, then I couldnt reise them, thank God, among the dolls half loved to death and now scattered about a room whose present owner had secrated it to a geriatric ess. heless, I felt a certain sense of disquiet, not so much fear as foreboding; but I was too preoccupied with my physical disfort, my horrid aches, pains and scratches, to pay much attention to a prig of the nerves. And in the old womans room, all was as f as a glowing fire, a steamile could make it, even if eldritchly illuminated by a dle stu its own grease on to the mantelpiece. The very homeliness of the room went some way towards rest my battered spirits and the ade me very wele, bustled me out of the sheepskin coat with almost as much solicitude as if she knew who it beloo, set me down in an armchair. In its red plush death-throes, this armchair looked nothing like those bleached, remembered splendours; I told myself the snow had got into my eyes and brain. The old woman crouched down to take off my wet shoes for me; poured me thick, rich tea from her ever-ready pot; cut me a slice of dark gingerbread that she kept in an old biscuit tin with a picture of kittens on the lid. No spook or phantom could have had a hand in the making of that sagging, treacly, iible goody! I felt better, already; outside, the blizzard might rage but I was safe and warm, inside, even if in the pany of an authentic e. For such she undeniably was, bent almost to a hoop with age, salt and pepper hair skewered up on top of her head with tortoiseshell pins, a face so eroded with wri was hard to tell whether she was smiling or not. She and her quarters had not seen soap and water for a long time and the lingering, sour, rank odour of uncaredforness faintly repelled me but the tea went down like blood. And dont you remember the slops and old clothes smell of grandmas kit? Clouts e home again, with a vengeance. She poured tea for herself and perched on top of the pile of old neers and discarded clothing that cushioned her own chair at the other side of the fire, to sip from her cup and chatter about the violence of the weather whilst I went on thawing myself out, eyeing -- nervously, I must admit -- the dolls propped on every flat surface, the roomful of bedizened raggle-taggles. When she saw me looking at the dolls, she said: "I see youre admiring my beauties." Meanwhile, snow drove against the curtainless window-panes like furious birds and blasts echoed through the house. The old woman thrust her empty cup away in the grate, all at once moved as if by a sudden sense of purpose; I saw I must pay in kind for my kiion, I must give her a piece of undivided attention. She scooped up an armful of dolls and began to introduce them to me one by one. Dotty. Quite dotty, poor old thing. The Hon. Frances Brambell had one eye out and her bell-shaped, satin skirt had collapsed but she must have been a pretty acquisition to the toy cupboard in her day; time, however, has its revehe three divorces, the voluntary exile in Morocco, the hashish, the gigolos, the slow erosion of her beauty. . . how it made the old woman chuckle! But how enting the girl had looked when she resehe ostrich feathers nodding above her curls! I looked from the old woman to the doll and back again; now the e was animated, a thick track of spittle desded her . With an ironic laugh, she tossed the Hon. Frances Brambell to one side; the a head bounced off the wall and her limbs jerked a little before she lay still on the floor. Seraphine, Duchess of Pyke, wore faded maroon silk and what had once been a feathered hat. She hailed, initially, from Paris and still possessed a certain style, even in her old age, although the Duchess had been by no means a model of propriety and, even if she carried off her acquired rank to the manner born, there is no more perfect a lady than one who is er than she should be, suggested the old woman. In a paroxysm of wheezing laughter, she cast the Duchess and her pretensions on top of the Hon. Frances Brambell and told me now I must meet Lady Lucy, ah! she would be a maress when she ied but had been ied with moth in her most sensitive parts and grown emaciated, in spite of her pretty velvet riding habit. She always wore purple, the colour of passion. The sins of the fathers, insihis gossipy harridan, a genital affli. . . the future held in store for the pirl only ics, sanatoria, a wheel-chair, dementia, premature death. Each dolls murky history was unfolded to me; the old icked them up and dismissed them with such fident authority I soon realised she knew all the little girls whose names shed given to the dolls intimately. She must have been the nanny here, I thought; and stayed on after the family all left the sinking ship, after her last charge, that little daughter who might, might she not? have looked just like my imaginary blonde heiress, ran off with a virile but uncouth chauffeur, or, perhaps, the black saxophonist in the dance band of an o liner. And the retainer ied the desuetude. In the old days, she must have wiped their pretty noses for them, cut their bread and butter into piano keys for them. . . all the little girls must once have played in this very nursery, e for tea with the young mistress, go riding on ponies, grown up to e to dances in wonderful dresses, stayed over for house parties, golf by day, affairs of the heart by night. Had my Melissa, herself, danced here, perhaps, in her unimaginable adolesce? I thought of all the beautiful women with round, bare shoulders discreet as pearls going in to dinner in dresses as brilliant as the hot-house flowers that surrouhem, handsomely set off by the dinner-jackets of their partners, though they would have been far more finely accessorised by me -- women who had once filled the whole house with that ineffable perfume of sex and luxury that drew me greedily to Melissas bed. And time, now, frosting those lovely faces, the years falling on their head like snow. The wind howled, the logs hissed in the grate. The e began to yawn and so did I. I easily curl up in this armchair beside the fire; Im half asleep already -- please dont trouble yourself. But, no; I must have the bed, she said. You shall sleep in the bed. And, with that, cackled furiously, jolting me from my bitter-sweet reverie. Her rheumy eyes flashed; I was stri with the ghastly notion she wao sacrifice me to some aged lust of hers as the priy nights lodging but I said: "Oh, I t possibly take your bed, please no!" But her only reply was to cackle again. When she rose to her feet, she looked far taller than she had been, she towered over me. Now, mysteriously, she resumed her old authority; her word was law in the nursery. She grasped my wrist in a hold like lockjaw and dragged me, weakly protesting, to the door that I knew, with a shock of perfect reitioo the night nursery. I was cruelly precipitated bato the heart of my dream. Beyond the door, ohreshold of which I stumbled, all was as it had been before, as if the night nursery were the geless, unvaryingly eye of the storm and its whitehat of a place beyond the spectrum of colours. The same st of washed hair, the dim tranquillity of the night light. The white-enamelled crib, with its dreaming oct. The storm ed a lullaby; the little heiress of the snow pavilion had eyelids like carved alabaster that hold the light in a luminous cup, but she was a flawed jewel, this one, a shattered replica, a drawing that has been scribbled over, and, for the first time in all that night, I felt a pure fear. The old woman softly approached her charge, and plucked an object, some floppy, cloth thing, from between the covers, where it had lain in the childs pale arms. And this object she, cag again wi藏书网th obscure glee, hao me as ceremoniously as if it were a present from a Christmas tree. I jumped when I touched Pierrot, as if there were aric charge in his satin pyjamas. He was still g. Fasated, fearful, I touched the shining teardrop pendant on his cheek and licked my finger. Salt. Aear welled up from the glass eye to replace the one I had stolen, then another, and another. Until the eyelids quivered and closed. I had seen his face before, a face that had eaten too much bread and margarine in its time. A magiow-storm blinded my eyes; I wept, too. Tell Melissa the image factory is bankrupt, grandma. Diffuse, ironiedi of the night light. The sleeping child extended her warm, sticky hand to grasp mine; in a terror of solation, I took her in my arms, in spite of her impetigo, her lice, her stench of wet sheets. The Quilt Maker-1 Oheory is, we make our destinies like blind men chug paint at a wall; we never uand nor evehe marks we leave behind us. But not too much of the grandly actal abstract expressionist about my life, I trust; oh, no. I always try to live on the best possible terms with my unscious a my right hand know what my left is doing and, fresh every m, scrutinise my dreams. Abandon, therefore, or rather, destruct the blind-a painter metaphor; take it apart, formalise it, put it back together again, s>９９lｉb?trive for something a touch more hard-edged, iional, altogether less arty, for I do believe we all have the right to choose. In patchwork, a ed household art ed, obviously, because my sex excelled in it -- well, there you are; thats the way its been, isnt it? Not that I have anything against fi, mind; heless, it took a hundred years for fiists to catch up with the kind of brilliant abstra that any ordinary housewife used to be able to put together in only a year, five years, ten years, without making a song and dance about it. However, in patchwork, an infinitely flexible yet harmonious overall design is kept in the head and worked out in whatever material happens to turn up in the ragbag: party frocks, sackcloth, pieces of wedding-dress, of shroud, of bandage, dress shirts etc. Things that have been worn out or torn, remnants, bits and pieces left over from making blouses. One may appliqué upon ones patchwork birds, fruit and flowers that have been clipped out of glazed tz left over from c armchairs or making curtains, and do all manner of things with this and that. The final design is indeed modified by the availability of materials; but not, necessarily, much. For the paper patterns from which she snipped ular regles and hexagons of cloth, the thrifty housewife often used up old love letters. With all patchwork, you must start in the middle and work outward, even on the kind they call "crazy patchwork", which is made by feather-stitg together arbitrary shapes scissored out at the makers whim. Patience is a great quality in the maker of patchwork. The more I think about it, the more I like this metaphor. You really make this image work for its living; it synthesises perfectly both the miscellany of experiend the use we make of it. Born and bred as I was in the Protestant north w-class tradition, I am also pleased with the metaphors overtones of thrift and hard work. Patchwood. Somewhere along my thirtieth year to heaven -- a decade ago now I was in the Greyhound Bus Station in.? Houston, Texas, with a man I was then married to. He gave me an Ameri of small denomination (he used to carry about all our money for us because he did not trust me with it). Individual partments in a large vending mae in this bus station tained various cellophane-ed sandwiches, biscuits and dy bars. There was a partment with two peaches in it, rough-cheeked Dixie Reds that looked like Victorian pincushions. One peach was big. The other peach was small. I stiously selected the smaller peach. "Why did you do that?" asked the man to whom I was married. "Somebody else might want the big peach," I said. "Whats that to you?" he said. I date my moral deterioration from this point. No; holy. Dont you see, from this peach story, how I was brought up? It wasnt -- truly it wasnt -- that I didnt think I deserved the big peach. Far from it. What it was, was that all my basic training, all my internalised values, told me to leave the big peach there for somebody who wa more than I did. Wa; desire, more imperious by far than need. I had the greatest respect for the desires of other people, although, at that time, my own desires remained a mystery to me. Age has not clarified them except on matters of the flesh, in whiow I know very well what I want; and thats quite enough of that, thank you. If youre looking for true fessions of that type, take your busio another shop. Thank you. The point of this story is, if the man who was then my husband hadnt told me I was a fool to take the little peach, then I would never have left him because, in truth, he was, in a manner of speaking, always the little peae. Formerly, I had been a lavish peach thief, but I learo take the small one because I had never been punished, as follows: ed fruit was a very big deal in my social class when I was a kid and during the Age of Austerity, food-rationing and so on. Sunday teatime; guests; a glass bowl of ed peach slices oable. Everybody gossiping and milling about and, by the time my mother put the teapot oable, I had surreptitiously trived to put away a good third of those peaches, thieving them out of the glass bowl with my crooked forepaw the way a cat catches goldfish. I would have been shall we say, for the sake of symmetry -- ten years old; and chubby. My mother caught me lig my sticky fingers and laughed and said Id already had my share and would any more, but when she filled the dishes up, I got just as much as anybody else. I hope you uand, therefore, how, by the time two more decades had rolled away, it erfectly natural for me to take the little peach; had I not always been loved enough to feel I had some to spare? What a dangerous state of mind I was in, then! As any fool could have told him, my ex-husband is much happier with his new wife; as for me, there then een years of grab, grab, grab didnt there, to make up for lost time. Until it is like crashing a soft barrier, this collision of my internal dar, on which dates melt like fudge, with the tender inexorability of time of which I am not, quite, yet, the ruins (although my skin fits less well than it did, my gums recede apace, I crumple like chiffon ihigh). Forty. The significe, the real significe, of the age of forty is that you are, along the allotted span, o death than to birth. Along the lifeline I am now past the halfway mark. But, indeed, are we not ever, in some sense, past that halfway mark, because we know when we were born but we do not know. . . So, having knocked about the four ers of the world awhile, the ex-peach thief came back to London, to the familiar seclusion of privet hedges and soiled lace curtains in the windows of tall, narrow terraces. Those streets that always seem to be sleeping, the secrecy of perpetual Sunday afternoons; and in the long, brick-walled back gardens, where the little town foxes who subsist off mid garbage bark at night, there will be the soft pounce, sometimes, of an owl. The city is a thin layer on top of a wilderhat pokes through the paving stones, here and there, in tufts of grass and ragwort. Wood doves with mucky pink bosoms in the old trees at the bottom of the garden; we double-bar the dainst burglars, but thats nothing new. -doors cherry is ing out again. Its Aprils quick-ge act: one day, bare; the dripping its curds of bloom. One day, once, sometime after the i with the little peach, when I had put two os and a ti between myself and my ex-husband, while I was earning a? Sadie Thompsonesque living as a barmaid in the Orient, I found myself, on a free weekend, riding through a fl grove oher side of the world with a young man who said: "Me Butterfly, you Pion." And, though I de hotly at the time, so it proved, except, when I went away, it was food. I never returned with an Ameri friend, grant me suffit good taste. A small, moist, green wind blew the petals of the scattering cherry blossom through the open windows of the stopping train. They brushed his forehead and caught on his eyelashes and shook off on to the slatted woodes; we might have been a wedding party, except that we were pelted, not with fetti, but with the imagery of the beauty, the fragility, the fleetingness of the human dition. "The blossoms always fall," he said. " year, theyll e again," I said fortably; I was a stranger here, I was not attuo the sensibility, I believed that life was for living not fret. "Whats that to me?" he said. You used to say you would never fet me. That made me feel like the cherry blossom, here today and goomorrow; it is not the kind of thing one says to a person with whom one proposes to spend the rest of ones life, after all. And, after all that, for three hundred and fifty-two in each leap year, I hink of you, sometimes. I cast the image into the past, like a fishing line, and up it es with a gold mask on the hook, a mask with real tears at the ends of its eyes, but tears which are no longer anybodys tears. Time has drifted over your face. The cherry tree i-darden is forty feet high, tall as the house, and it has survived many years of . In fact, it has not o two tricks up its arboreal sleeve; each trivolves three sets of transformations and these it performs regularly as clockwork each year, the first in early, the sed in late spring. Thus: one day, in April, sticks; the day after, flowers; the third day, leaves. Then -- through May and early Juhe cherries form and ripen until, one fine day, they are rosy and the birds e, the tree turns into a busy tower of birds admired by a tranced circle of cats below. (We are a neighbourhood ri cats.) The day after, the tree bears nothing but cherry pits picked perfectly by quick, clever beaks, a storee. The cherry is the principal mo of Lettys wild garden. How wonderfully unattended her garden grows all the soft months of the year, from April through September! Dandelions e before the swallow does and languorously blow away in drifts of fuzzy seed. Then up sprouts a long bolster of creeping buttercups. After that, bindweed distributes its white ets everywhere, it climbs over everything iys garden, it swarms up the crete post that sustains the clothesline on which the lady who lives in the flat above Letty hangs her underclothes out to dry, by means of a pulley from her upstairs kit window. She never goes in to the garden. She ay have not been on speaking terms for twenty years. I dont know why Letty and the lady upstairs fell out twenty years ago wheter was youhan I, but Letty already an old woman. Now Letty is almost blind and almost deaf but, all the same, enjoys, I think, the ging colours of this disorder, the kaleidoscope of the seasons variegating the garden that her she nor her late brother have touched sihe erhaps for some now fotten reason, perhaps for no reason. Letty lives in the basement with her cat. Corre. Used to live. Oh, the salty realism with which the Middle Ages put skeletons on gravestones, with the motto: "As I am now, so ye will be!" The birds will e and peck us bare. I heard a dreadful wailing ing through the wall in the middle of the night. It could have beeher of them, Letty or the lady upstairs, pissed out of their minds, perhaps, letting it all hang out, shrieking and howling, alone, driveed by the heavy anonymous London silence of the fox-haunted night. Put my ear nervously to the wall to seek the source of the sound. "Help!" said Letty in the basement. The cow that lives upstairs later claimed she never heard a cheep, tucked up uhe eaves in dreamland sleep while I leaned on the doorbell for twenty minutes, seeking to rouse her. Letty went on calling "Help!" Then I telephohe police, who came flashing lights, wailing sirens, and double-parked dramatically, leaping out of the car, leaving the doors swinging; emergency call. But they were wonderful. Wonderful. (Were not black, any of us, of course.) First, they tried the basement door, but it was bolted on the inside as a precaution against burglars. Theried to force the front door, but it wouldnt budge, so they smashed the glass in the front door and unfastehe catch from the inside. But Letty for fear of burglars, had locked herself securely in her basement bedroom, and her voice floated up the stairs: "Help!" So they battered her bedroom door open too, splintering the jamb, making a terrible mess. The cow upstairs, mind, sleeping sweetly throughout, or so she later claimed. Letty had fallen out of bed, bringing the bedclothes with her, knotting herself up in blas, in a grey sheet, an old patchwork bedchtly streaked at one edge with dried shit, and she hadnt been able to pick herself up again, had lain in a helpless tangle on the floor calling for help until the coppers came and scooped her up and tucked her in and made all cosy. She wasnt surprised to see the police; hadnt she been calling: "Help"? Hadnt help e? "How old are you, love," the coppers said. Deaf as she is, she heard the question, the geriatrics ary trigger. "Eighty," she said. Her age is the last thio be proud of. (See how, with age, one defines oneself by age, as one did in childhood.) Think of a en. Double it. Twenty. Add ten again. Thirty. And again. Forty. Double that. Eighty. If you reverse this image, you obtain something like those Russian wooden dolls, in which big babushka tains a middling babushka who tains a small babushka who tains a tiny babushka and so on ad infinitum. But I am further away from the child I was, the child who stole the peaches, than I am from Letty. For ohing, the peach thief lump brue; I am a skinny redhead. Henna. I have had red hair for twenty years. (Whey had already passed through middle age.) I first dyed my hair red when I was twenty. I freshly hennad my hair yesterday. Henna is a dried herb sold in the form of a scum-green-coloured powder. You pour this powder into a bowl and add boiling water; you mix the powder into a paste using, say, the handle of a wooden spoon. (It is best not to let henna touch metal, or so they say.) This henna paste is no lreyish, but now a dark vivid green, as if the hot water had revived the real colour of the living leaf, and it smells deliciously of spinach. You also add the juice of a half a lemon; this is supposed to "fix" the final colour. Then you rub this hot, stiff paste into the roots of your hair. (However did they first think of it?) Youre supposed to wear rubber gloves for this part of the process, but I ever be bothered to do that, so, for the first few days after I have refreshed my henna, my fiips are as if heavily nie-stained. Ohe green mud has been thickly applied to the hair, you it in an impermeable substance -- a polythene bag, or kit foil and leave it to cook. For one hour: auburn highlights. For three hours: a sort of vague russet halo around the head. Six hours: red as fire. Mind you, henna from different pays dines has different effects -- Persian henian henna, Pakistani henna, all these produce different tones of red, from that brick red usually associated with the idea of henna to a dark, burning, courtesan plum or cockatoo scarlet. I am a oisseur of henna, by now, "an uious henna from the southern slope", that kind of thing. Ive been every redhead in the book. But people think I am naturally redheaded and even make certain tempestuous allowances for me, as they did for Rita Hayworth, who purchased red hair at the same mythopoeic ter where Marilyn Monroe acquired her fatal fairness. Perhaps I first started dyeing my hair in order to acquire the privileged irrationality of redheads. Some men say they adore redheads. These men usually have very iing psycho-sexual problems and should out without their mothers. When I bed Lettys hair m, to get her ready for the ambulance, I saw telltale scales of hennad dandruff lying along her scalp, although her hair itself is now a vague salt and pepper colour and, I hazard, has not been washed since about the time I was making the peach decision in the Houston, Texas, bus station. At that time, I had appropriately fruity -- tangerine-coloured -- hair in, I recall, a crewcut as brutal as that of Joan of Arc at the stake such as we darent risk now, oh, no. Now we need shadows, my vain fad I; I wear my hair down to my shoulders now. At the moment, henna produces a reddish-gold tinge ohat is because I am going grey. The Quilt Maker-2 Because the effect of henna is also modified by the real colour of the hair beh. This is what it does to white hair: In Turkey, in a small try town with a line of poplar trees along the horizon and a dirt-floored square, chis, motorbikes, apricot sellers, and donkeys, a woman was haggling for those sesame-seed-coated bracelets of bread you wear on your arm. From the back, she was small and slender; she was wearing loose, dark-blue trousers in a peasant print and a scarf wound round her head, but from beh this scarf there fell the most wonderful long, thick, Rapunzel-like plait of golden hair. Pure gold; gold as a wedding ring. This single plait fell almost to her feet and was as thick as my two arms held together. I waited impatiently to see the face of this fairy-tale creature. Stringing her breads on her wrist, she turned; and she was old. "What a life," said Letty, as I bed her hair. Of Lettys life I know nothing. I know one or two things about her: how long she has lived in this basement -- since before I was born, how she used to live with an older brother, who looked after her, an older brother. That he, last November, fell off a bus, what they call a "platform act", fell off the platform of a moving bus when it slowed for the stop at the bottom of the road and, falling, irreparably cracked his head on a kerbstone. Last November, just before the platform act, her brother came knog at our door to see if we could help him with a light that did not work. The light in their flat did not work because the cable had rotted away. The landlord promised to send ari but the electri never came. Letty and her brother used to pay two pounds fifty pence a week rent. From the landlords point of view, this was not an eit; it would not cover his expenses on the house, rates etc. From the point of view of Letty and her late brother, this was not an eit, either, because they could not afford it. Corre: Letty and her brother could not afford it because he was too proud to allow the household to avail itself of the services of the g professions, social workers and so on. After her brother died, the g professions visited Letty en masse and now her financial position is easier, her rent is paid for her. Corre: aid for her. We know her name is Letty because she was banging out blindly in the dark kit as we/he looked at the fuse box and her brother said fretfully: "Letty, give over!" What Letty once saw and heard before the fallible senses betrayed her into a world of halftones and muted sounds is unknown to me. What she touched, what moved her, are mysteries to me. She is Atlantis to me. How she earned her living, why she and her brother came here first, all the real bricks and mortar of her life have collapsed into a rubble of fotten past. I ot guess what were or are her desires. She was softly fretful herself, she said: "Theyre not going to take me away, are they?" Well, they wo her stay here on her own, will they, not now she has proved that she t be trusted to lie still in her own bed without tumbling out arse over tip in a trap of blas, incapable hting herself. After I bed her hair, when I brought her some tea, she asked me to fetch her porcelaih from a saucer on the dressing table, so that she could eat the biscuit. "Sorry about that," she said. She asked me who the person standing beside me was; it was my own refle in the dressing-table mirror, but, all the same, oh, yes, she was in perfectly sound mind, if you stretch the definition of "sound" only a very little. One must make allowances. One will do so for oneself. She o sit up to drink tea, I99liｂ? lifted her. She was so frail it was like pig up a wicker basket with nothing i; I braced myself for a burden and there was none, she was as light as if her bones were filled with air like the bones of birds. I felt she needed weights, to keep her from floating up to the ceiling following her airy voice. Faint odour of the lion house in the bedroom and it was freezing cold, although, outside, a good deal of April sunshine and the first white flakes of cherry blossom shaking loose from the tight buds. Lettys cat came and sat on the end of the bed. "Hello, pussy," said Letty. One of those ill-kempt balls of fluff old ladies keep, this cat looks as if hes unravelling, its black fur has rusted and faded at the same time, but some cats are naturals for the g professions -- they will give you mute pany long after anyone else has stopped tolerating your babbling, they dont judge, dont give a damn if you wet the bed and, when the eyesight fades, freely offer themselves for the solation of still se fiips. He kneads the shit-stained quilt with his paurrs. The cow upstairs came down at last and denied all knowledge of last nights rumpus; she claimed she had slept so soundly she didhe doorbell or the forced entry. She must have passed out or something, or else wasnt there at all but out oown with her man friend. Or, her man friend was here with her all the time and she didnt want anybody to know so kept her head down. We see her man friend once or twice a week as he arrives crabwise to her door with the furtiveness of the adulterer. The cow upstairs is fiftyish, as well preserved as if shed sprayed herself all over with the hair lacquer that keeps her bright brown curls in tight discipline. No love lost between her ay. "What a health hazard! What a fire hazard!" Letty, downstairs, dreamily halluating in the icy basement as the cow upstairs watches me sweep up the broken glass on the hall floor. "She oughtnt ?t>to be left. She ought to be in a home." The final cher: "For her own good." Letty dreamily apostrophised the cat; they do cats into any old peoples homes that I know of. Then the social worker came; and the doctor; and, out of nowhere, a great-niece, probably summoned by the social worker, a great-nie her late twenties with a great-great-niece clutg a teddy bear. Letty is pleased to see the great-great-niece, and this child is the first crack that appears in the picture that Id built up of Lettys secluded, lonely old age. We hadnt realised there were kin; ihe great-s us in our place good and proper. "Its up to family now," she said, so we curtsy areat, and this great-niece is sharp as a tack, busy as a bee, proprietorial yet tender with the old lady. "Letty, what have you got up to now?" Warding us outsiders off; perhaps she is ashamed of the shit-stained quilt, the plastic bucket of piss beside Lettys bed. As they were pag Lettys things in an airline bag the great-niece brought, the landlord -- by a curious stroke of fate -- chose this very day to collect Lettys rent and perked up no end, stroking his well-shaven , to hear the cow upstairs go on and on about how Letty could no longer cope, how she endangered property and life on the premises by f men to e and break down doors. What a life. Then the ambulance came. Letty is going to spend a few days in hospital. This street is, as estate agents say, rapidly improving; the lace curtains are ing down, the round paper lampshades going up like white balloons in each front room. The landlord had promised the cow upstairs five thousand pounds in her hand to move out after Letty goes, so that he renovate the house and sell it with vat possession for a tremendous profit. We live in hard-imes. The still unravished bride, the cherry tree, takes fl possession of the wild garden; the ex-peach thief plates the prospect of ripe fruit the birds will eat, not I. Curious euphemism "to go", meanih, to depart on a journey. Somewhere along another year to heaven, I elicited the following laborious explanation of male sexual response, which is the other side of the moon, the absolute mystery, the ohing I ever know. "You put it in, which isnt b. Then you rock backwards and forwards. That get quite b. Then you e. Thats not b." For "you", read "hi藏书网m". "You e; or as anese say, go." Jus?９9liｂ?t so. "Ikimasu," to go. The Japanese asmic departure rehe English asmic arrival, as if the event were reflected in the mirror and the significe of it altogether different -- whatever significe it may have, that is. Desire disappears in its fulfilment, which is cold fort for hot blood and the reason why there is no such thing as a happy ending. Besides all this, Japas all its verbs at the ends of its sentences, which helps to fuse the fner all the more, so it seemed to me they themselves never quite knew what they were saying half the time. "Everything here is arsy-varsy." "No. Where you are is arsy-varsy." And he twain shall meet. He loved to be bored; dont think he was ptuously dismissive of the element of boredom i in sexual activity. He adored and veed boredom. He said that dogs, for example, were never bored, nor birds, so, obviously, the capacity that distinguished man from the her mammals, from the scaled ahered things, was that of boredom. The more bored one was, the more one expressed ones humanity. He liked redheads. "Europeans are so colourful," he said. He was a tricky bugger, that one, a Big Peach, all right; face of Gerard Philipe, soul of Nechaev. I grabbed, grabbed and grabbed and, since I did not have much experien grabbing, often bit off more than I could chew. Exemplary fate of the plump peach-thief; someone refuses to be assimilated. Once a year, when I look at Lettys cherry tree in flower, I put the image to work, I see the petals fall on a face that looked as if it had been hammered out of gold, like the mask of Agamemnon which Schliemann found at Troy. The mask turns into a shining carp and flips off the hook at the end of the fishing lihe ohat got away. Let me not romanticise you too much. Because what would I do if you did resurrect yourself? Came knog at my door in all your foul, cool, chic of designer jeans aher blouson and your pocket stuffed with G.N.P., arriving somewhat late in the day to make an ho woman of me as you sometimes used to threaten that you might? "When youre least expeg it. . ." God, Im forty, now. Forty! I had you marked down for a Demon Lover; what if indeed you popped up out of the grave of the heart bright as a button with an Ameri car purring outside waiting to whisk me away to where the lilies grow otom of the sea? "I am now married to a house carpenter," as the girl in the song exclaimed hurriedly. But all the same, off she went with the lovely cloven-footed one. But I wouldnt. Not I. And how very inappropriate too, the language of antique ballads in which to address one who knew best the iional language of the jukebox. Youd have one of those Wurlitzer Cadillacs you liked, that you envied G.I.s for, all ready to humiliate me with; it would be bellowing out quadraphonic sound. The Everly Brothers. Jerry Lee Lewis. Early Presley. ("When I grow up," you reveried, "Im going to Memphis to marry Presley.") You were altogether too much, you pure child of the late tweh tury, you person from the other side of the moon or mirror, and your hypothetical arrival is a catastrophe too terrifying to plate, even in the most pla state ret for ones youth. I lead a quiet life in South London. I grind my coffee beans and drink my early cup to a spot of early baroque on the radio. I am now married to a house carpenter. Like the culture that created me, I am reg into the past at a rate of knots. Soon Ill need a whole row of footnotes if anybody uhirty-five is going to prehend the least thing I say. A. . . Going out into the back garden to piary to put inside a chi, the daffodils in the uncut grass, enough blackbirds out to make a pie. Lettys cat sits oys windowsill. The blinds are drawn; the social worker drew them five days ago before she drove off in her little Fiat to the hospital, followiy in the ambulance. I call to Lettys cat but he doesnt turn his head. His fluff has turo spikes, he looks spiny as a horse-chestnut husk. Letty is in hospital supping broth from a spouted cup and, for all my ki, of which I am so proud, my empathy and so on, I myself had not giveys panion ahought until today, going out to piary with which to stuff a roast for reedy dinners. I called him again. At the third call, he turned his head. His eyes looked as if milk had been poured into them. The garden wall too high to climb sinow I am less limber than I was, I chucked half the tents of a guilty tin of cat food over. e a. Lettys ever moved, only stared at me with its curtained eyes. And then all the fat, sleek cats from every garden up and down came jumping, leaping, creeping to the ued feast and gobbled all down, every crumb, quick as a wink. What a lesson fiver of charity! At the clusion of this heartless ba which Id beehoughtless host, the pany of well-cared-for beasts stretched their swollen bellies in the sun and licked themselves, and then, at last, Lettys cat heaved up on its shaky legs and lauself, plop on to the grass. I thought, perhaps he got a belated whiff of cat food and came for his share, too late, all gohe other cats ignored him. He staggered when he landed but shted himself. He took no i at all iains of cat food, though. He managed a few d steps among the dandelions. Then I thought he might be going to chew on a few stems of medial grass; but he did not so much lower his head to藏书网wards it as let his head drop, as if he had nth left to lift it. His sides were caved-in uiff, voluminous fur. He had not been taking care of himself. He peered vaguely around, swaying. You could almost have believed, not that he was waiting for the person who always fed him to e and feed him again as usual, but that he ining for Letty herself. Then his hind legs began to shudder involuntarily. He so vulsed himself with shuddering that his hind legs jerked off the ground; he danced. He jerked and shuddered, shuddered and jerked, until at last he vomited up a small amount of white liquid. Then he pulled himself to his feet again and lurched back to the windowsill. With a gigantic effort, he dragged himself up. Later on, somebody jumped over the wall, more sprightly than I a a bowl of bread and milk. But the cat ighat too. day, both were still there, untouched. The day after that, only the bowl of sour sops, and cherry blossom petals drifting across the vat windowsill. Small sins of omission remind one of the greater sins of omission; at least sins of ission have the excuse of choice, of iion. However: May. A blowy, bright-blue, bright-green m; I go out on the front steps with a shifting plastic sack of garbage and what do I see but the social workers red Fiat putter to a halt door. In the hospital theyd hennad Letty. An octogenarian redhead, my big babushka who tains my forty, my thirty, my twenty, my ten years within her fragile basket of bones, she has returned, not in a humiliating ambulance, but on her own two feet that she sets down more firmly than she did. She has put on a little weight. She has a better colour, not only in her hair but in her cheeks. The landlord, foiled. Escorted by the social worker, the distriurse, the home help, the abrasive yet not ule niece, Letty is escorted down the u, grass-grown basement stairs into her own scarcely used front door that someoh a key has remembered to unbolt from inside for her return. Her new cockatoo crest -- whoever hennad her really uood henna -- points this way and that way as she makes sure that nothing ireet has ged, even if she see only large blocks of light and shadow, hear, not the shrieking blackbirds, but only the twitch of the voices in her ear that shout: "Carefully does it, Letty." "I manage," she said tetchily. The door the poli battered in closes upon her and her chatterie. The window of the front room of the cow upstairs slams down, bang. And what am I to make of that? Id set it up so carefully, an enigmatic structure about evanesd ageing and the mists of time, shadows lengthening, cherry blossom, fetting, , regret. . . the sadness, the sadness of it all. . . But. Letty. Letty came home. In the er shop, the cow upstairs, mad as fire: "They should have certified her"; the five grand the landlord promised her so that he could sell the house with vat possession has blown away on the May wind that disied the dandelion clocks. Iys garden now is the time for fierce yellow buttercups; the cherry blossom is over, s. I hope she is too old and tooo miss the cat. Fat ce. I hope she never wonders if the nice warm couple door thought of feeding him. But she has e home to die at her oarently ample leisure in the fort and privacy of her basement; she has exercised, has she not, her right to choose, she has turned all this into crazy patchwork. Somewhere along my thirtieth year, I left a husband in a bus station in Houston, Texas, a town to which I have never returned, over a quarrel about a peach which, at the time, seemed to sum up the whole question of the rights of individuals withiionships, and, indeed, perhaps it did. As you tell from the colourful scraps of oriental brocade and Turkish homespun I have sewn into this bedcover, I then (call me Ishmael) wandered about for a while and sowed (or sewed) a wild oat or two into this useful domestic article, this product of thrift and imagination, with which I hope to cover myself in my old age to keep my brittle bones warm. (How cold it is iys basement.) But, okay, so I always said the blossom would e back again, but Lettys return from the white grave of the geriatric ward is ridiculous! And, furthermore, when I went out into the garden to pick a few tulips, there he is, oher side of the brick wall, lolling voluptuously among the creeping buttercups, fat as butter himself -- Lettys been feeding him up. "Im pleased to see you," I said. In a Japanese folk tale it would be the ghost of her cat, rusty and tactile as in life, the poor cat pining itself from death to life again to e to the back door at the sound of her voice. But we are in South London on a spring m. Lorries fart and splutter along the Wandsworth Road. Capital Radio is braying from an upper window. An old cat, palpable as a sed-hand fur coat, drowses among the buttercups. We know when we were born but -- the times of our reprieves are equally random. Shake it out and look at it again, the flowers, fruit and bright stain of henna, the Russian dolls, the wrinkling chiffon of the flesh, the old songs, the cat, the woman of eighty; the woman of forty, with dyed hair and most of her owh, who is ma semblable, ma soeur.Who now recedes into the deceptive privacy of a genre picture, a needlewoman, a quilt maker, a middle-aged woman sewing patchwork in a city garden, turning her face vigorously against the rocks and trees of the patient wilderness waiting round us. Appendix AFTERWORD TO FIREWORKS I started to write short pieces when I was living in a room too small to write a novel in. So the size of my room modified what I did i and it was the same with the pieces themselves. The limited trajectory of the short narrative trates its meaning. Sign and sense fuse to aent impossible to achieve among the multiplying ambiguities of aended narrative. I found that, though the play of surfaever ceased to fasate me, I was not so much expl them as making abstras from them, I was writing, therefore, tales. Though it took me a long time to realise why I liked them, Id always been fond of Poe, and Hoffman -- Gothic tales, cruel tales, tales of woales of terror, fabulous narratives that deal directly with the imagery of the unscious -- mirrors; the externalised self; forsaken castles; haunted forests; forbidden sexual objects. Formally the tale differs from t..he short story in that it makes few prete the imitation of life. The tale does not log everyday experience, as the short story does; it interprets everyday experiehrough a system of imagery derived from subterranean areas behind everyday experience, and therefore the tale ot betray its readers into a false knowledge of everyday experience. The Gothic tradition in which Poe writes grandly ighe value systems of our institutions; it deals entirely with the profas great themes are i and ibalism. Character as are exaggerated beyoy, to bee symbols, ideas, passions. Its style will tend to be ornate, unnatural -- and thus operate against the perennial human desire to believe the word as fact. Its only humour is black humour. It retain99lｉb?s a singular moral fun -- that of provoking unease. The tale has relations with subliterary forms of praphy, ballad and dream, and it has not bee with kindly by literati. And is it any wonder? Let us keep the unscious in a suitcase, as Pere Ubu did with his sce, and flush it down the lavatory when it gets too troublesome. So I worked on tales. I was living in Japan; I came back to England in 1972. I found myself in a new try. It was like waking up, it was a rude awakening. We live in Gothic times. Now, to uand and to interpret is the main thing; but my method of iigation is ging. These stories were writteween 1970 and 1973 and are arranged in ological order, as they were written. There is a small tribute to Defoe, father of the beois novel in England, ied iory "Master&qu>ot;. First Publications "The Man Who Loved a Double Bass" first appeared in Storyteller test, July 1962. "A Very, Very Great Lady and Her Son at Home" was first published in Nonesuch, in Autumn 1965 and "A Victorian Fable (with Glossary)" was also published in Nonesuch, in Summer/Autumn 1966. "A Souvenir of Japan", "The Executioners Beautiful Daughter", "The Loves of Lady Purple", "The Smile of Winter", "Peing to the Heart of the Forest", ?９９lｉb?"Flesh and the Mirror", "Master", "Refles" and "Elegy for a Freelance", writteween 1970 and 1973, were all inally published in Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces (Quartet Books, 1974). "The Bloody Chamber" and "The Tigers Bride" first appeared in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (Victollancz, 1979). "The Courtship of Mr Lyon" was inally published in British Vogue , "Puss-in-Boots" appeared ihology The Straw and the Gold, edited by Emma Tennant (Pierrot Books, 1979). "The Erl-King" appeared in Bananas (October, 1977), "The Snow Child" was broadcast on the BBC Radio Four programme Not Now, Im Listening. "The Lad>y of the House of Love" was first published in The Iowa Review (Summer/Autumn 1975), "The Werewolf" in South-West Arts Review (No 2, October, 1977), "The pany of Wolves" in Bananas (April, 1977) and "Wolf-Alice" in Stand (Winter, 1978, vol. 2, No 2). "Black Venus" first appeared i Editions in 1980, "The Kiss" was inally published in Harpers and Queen, in 1977, "Our Lady of the Massacre" appeared iurday Night Reader as "Captured by the Red Man" in 1979. "The et of Edgar Allan Poe" was published in Interzone in 1982, as was "Overture and Ial Music for A Midsummer Nights Dream". "Peter and the Wolf" is from Firebird 1, 1982. A version of "The Kit Child" ublished in Vogue, 1979, and "The Fall River Axe Murder" inally appeared in The London Review of Books in 1981 uhe title "Mis-en-Se for Parricide". A version of "Lizzies Tiger" was first published in opolitan iember 1981, and broadcast on Radio Three. "John Fords Tis Pity Shes a Whore" inally appeared in Granta 25, Autumn, 1988. "Gun for the Devil" was written as a draft for a splay and published in Ameri Ghosts and Old World Wonders (Chatto & Windus, 1993).?. "The Mert of Shadows" ublished in the London Review of Books in October 1989. "Ali Prague or The Curious Room" appeared in Spell, [Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature], (vol 5, 1990) and "The Ghost Ships" was first published in Ameri Ghosts and Old World Wonders (Chatto & Windus, 1993). "In Pantoland" was inally published in the Guardian in December 1991. "Ashputtle or The Mhost" was first published in the Virago Book of Ghost Stories (Virago, 1987), and a shorter version ublished in Soho Square. A version obbr>?f "Impressions: The Wrightsman Magdalene" inally appeared in FMR Magazine in February 1992. "The Snow Pavilion" is published here for the first time. "The Scarlet House" was inally published in A Book of porary Nightmares (Michael Joseph, 1977) and "The Quilt Maker" ublished in Sex and Sensibility: Stories by porary Women Writers from Nine tries (Sidgwick & Ja, 1981). About the Author Angela Carter was born in 1940. When she published her first novel, Shadow Dance, in 1966, she was immediately reized as one of Britains most inal writers. Eight other novels followed: The Magic Toy.?shop (1967, John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), Several Perceptions (1968, Somerset Maugham Award), Heroes and Villains (1969), Love (1971), The Infernal Desire Maes of Doctor Hoffman (1972), The Passion of New Eve (1977), Nights at the Circus (1984, James Tail Black Memorial Prize), and Wise Children (1991). Angela Carter also published three colles of short stories -- The Bloody Chamber (1979, Cheltenham Festival of Literature Award), Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces (1984), and Saints and Strangers (1985, published in the U.K. as Black Venus) -- a book of essays called The Sadeian Woman, two colles of journalism, and a volume of radio plays. She translated the fairy stories of Charles Perrault aed colles of fairy and folk tales as well as Wayward Girls & Wicked Women: An Anthology of Subversive.. Stories (1986). She also wrote the splay for the 1984 film The pany of Wolves, based on her short story. A fourth colle of stories ublished in the U.K. in 1993 as Ameri Ghosts and Old World Wonders. Most of Angela Carters fi is available in the U.S. from Penguin. From 1976 though 1978 Angela Carter was Arts cil of Great Britain Fellow iive Writing at Sheffield Uy, and from 198h 1981 she was visiting professor in the Writing Program at Brown Uy. She traveled and taught widely in the U.S. and Australia but lived in London. Angela Carter died in February, 1992.天涯在线书库《www.tianyabook.com》