wear and tear. A table that I broke has been removed from sight. I simply locked the door, took the key and on my forenoon walk dropped it into the little pond where there are splints of ice and where there is also reputed to be carp, John Dorys, bleak and bream. It was a fiendish room, a dining-room, a morgue, twelve high-backed chairs, a perspex hotplate,artificial fruits which I hazard to say were not unlike artificial testicles. I dine in the kitchen, perch on a high stool. The saucepans are gleaming. I have looked at myself in the bottom of those saucepans and my reflection is positively fulgent. I like it here. Of course it is not ideal, but it is a resting place. The silences are unnerving. I can hear my own hair splitting. Very often as I go down the stairs, the swish of my skirt surprises me and causes me to start as if I am about to be given a clout of some kind. Another thing I hear is the salt as it falls on to my food, that little shiver it gives as I sprinkle it on to the forkful of cabbage or whatever I happen to be eating. I am a devil for cabbage. I wouldn’t mind a few beds of York cabbage in the rose garden and my having to go out with my spray gun and stop the slugs from mottling it, and eating it right through, to the bunch that is its heart. Then there are the other things, the senseless sounds, the creaks, maybe worms in the futtocks and timbers, or maybe it’s the timbers themselves settling down or revolting after hundreds of years. They are not exactly musical, but no one is asking them to be. I recall that the sweetest note I ever heard was the rupture of a cobweb as it tore, scattered and fell. Jewelled it was from the sun and shaped like a mandala. It was in a boilhouse in Coose. In the breach the note sounded, and then the silence sounded. I don’t know why it got torn, as there was no reason for it, no fist or no slashhook, but it did. It may have decided to give up.
I am getting used to my own company, my own dissertations. I play Patience, play variations on it. It isthen that the long grey tenders of cigarette-ash burn their way into some item of furniture and I jump up, my mouth full of apologies. I shall be busy with the turps, one day, one day.
Maybe I should not have come here, maybe it has given me a taste for reverie. I should have gone as a dairymaid or a lady’s companion, or even a gentleman’s companion. But it was glorious the morning I applied. It was autumn time, a beautiful bronze light, the birch leaves like sovereigns, the wide granite steps sweeping up to the house, the two push-bells and a policeman strolling around, overseeing all. Inside, everything sunny, everything tinkling, chimes and so forth, and when I looked up at the big high ceilings and the cornices I foresaw myself giving hoolies and suppers. The first thing I did when I came to reside was to make myself familiar with the light switches. I know these switches off by heart. I dare say I know them better than they do. For instance, on one of the landings there is an array of switches that operates lights above and below even as far down as the cellar, and I can go to any one of these switches and be certain of which light it is I am turning on. I practised it for nights on end and would go up and down to see the correctness or otherwise of my actions. In the case of the cellar I had to stoop and see the crack of light under the door because it is locked and padlocked. Now I go up or down simply to applaud, to prove to myself that I am no clod in these matters. It is the same with the carpet and the stair rods. I have studied them both with my eyes and with the tips of my fingers, in all lights, even the gloaming. I know wherethere are little blemishes, where the woof is going thin, and I know the various stresses on the surface of the rods. I have knelt. Providential that they didn’t come in and find me beating the ground with my head as if, like the Arab, preparing myself to remove cataracts.
Often when
I am getting used to my own company, my own dissertations. I play Patience, play variations on it. It isthen that the long grey tenders of cigarette-ash burn their way into some item of furniture and I jump up, my mouth full of apologies. I shall be busy with the turps, one day, one day.
Maybe I should not have come here, maybe it has given me a taste for reverie. I should have gone as a dairymaid or a lady’s companion, or even a gentleman’s companion. But it was glorious the morning I applied. It was autumn time, a beautiful bronze light, the birch leaves like sovereigns, the wide granite steps sweeping up to the house, the two push-bells and a policeman strolling around, overseeing all. Inside, everything sunny, everything tinkling, chimes and so forth, and when I looked up at the big high ceilings and the cornices I foresaw myself giving hoolies and suppers. The first thing I did when I came to reside was to make myself familiar with the light switches. I know these switches off by heart. I dare say I know them better than they do. For instance, on one of the landings there is an array of switches that operates lights above and below even as far down as the cellar, and I can go to any one of these switches and be certain of which light it is I am turning on. I practised it for nights on end and would go up and down to see the correctness or otherwise of my actions. In the case of the cellar I had to stoop and see the crack of light under the door because it is locked and padlocked. Now I go up or down simply to applaud, to prove to myself that I am no clod in these matters. It is the same with the carpet and the stair rods. I have studied them both with my eyes and with the tips of my fingers, in all lights, even the gloaming. I know wherethere are little blemishes, where the woof is going thin, and I know the various stresses on the surface of the rods. I have knelt. Providential that they didn’t come in and find me beating the ground with my head as if, like the Arab, preparing myself to remove cataracts.
Often when
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