Jackson's Dilemma Read Free Page B

grey, a broad calm face, a high bland brow, dark blue eyes, a neat straight nose, full lips which often smiled though their owner was now often sad. Ever since he had left the Civil Service he had had troubles. Tim of course - his unsuccessful return to philosophy - his having never been in love - was that a trouble? What am I to do next? Of course this business with the girls had been a happy distraction.
    The drawing room was a big room with glass doors opening on to the main lawn. There were books here too, in low wooden bookcases, all sorts of books, atlases, cookery books, guides to English Counties, to London, France, Italy, big books on famous painters, books about games, books about animals, trees, the sea, books about machines, about science and scientists, books about poetry, about music. Of these books Benet had read only a few. Benet’s numerous philosophy books were beyond in the study, a room which opened off the drawing room. The drawing room floor was covered with a huge dark, dark-blue almost black, now very worn, carpet covered with minute trees and flowers and birds and animals, brought back from India by Uncle Tim when he was still young. There was a fine open fireplace surrounded by a heavy curly mahogany Victorian surround, numerous pictures on the walls, some of Quaker ancestors with dogs, more recent water colours with various views of the house, and of the river Lip. Uncle Tim had donated some Indian miniatures, said to be very valuable. There were numerous old armchairs with embroidered cushions, and a (not valuable) piano introduced into the house by Benet’s sweet short-lived lovely mother, Eleanor Morton. Benet recalled the happy childhood evenings when she played and they all sang. She soon set her opera music aside. Tim and Pat and indeed Benet preferred ‘Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair’, and (a song which brought tears to Tim’s eyes) ‘The Road to Mandalay’.
    Benet surveyed the room, re-arranging upon the mantelpiece, which still subsisted inside the Victorian surround, the netsuke which Owen Silbery had given him long ago; then he went through into his study. This also looked upon the terrace, and the immense lawn which had been dotted here and there with various tall and bushy trees by Benet’s great-grandfather and other far more remote ancestors, even beyond the Quaker time. A little farther off there was a small copse of dainty birch trees, and beyond that the dark forest of huge Wellingtonias. Somewhere else, beyond the fountain and the rose garden, Benet had vaguely dreamed of erecting some little Grecian building with marble columns; within which, the girls had insisted, there might one day be a warm indoor all-the-year-round swimming pool! Had the girls convinced him at last about that pool? Smiling, he opened the window which Sylvia was always shutting, and let in a thick warm pressure of air, filled with the odours of flowers and mown grass and mingled with the music of blackbirds, thrushes, larks, finches, sparrows, robins, collared doves and a distant cuckoo. He thought for a delicious moment how lucky he was - then he turned to worrying about his guests, about tomorrow and the wedding.
     
    After that, and when he was about to leave the room, he looked down at what he had been writing earlier in the day, not upon a typewriter or word-processor, machines which he despised, but upon the inky foolscap pages of his book on Heidegger. Benet had intended for some time to write, or attempt to write, that book. However, he found it difficult to plan the work and to decide what he really, in his heart, thought of his huge ambiguous subject. He had made a great many notes, with question marks, in fact his book so far consisted largely of notes, unconnected and unexplained. Benet found himself accusing himself of being fascinated by a certain dangerous aspect of Heidegger which was in fact so deeply buried in his own, Benet‘s, soul that he could not scrutinise or even dislodge