Tirra Lirra by the River Read Free Page A

was only a little chap then, of course.’
    ‘You used to practise piano scales in the room above the shop.’
    He begins to speak, but such trances must not be interrupted. I raise a hand. ‘Wait. I have just remembered your maiden name. I mean,’ I continue without a blink, ‘your Christian name. Jack.’
    ‘Yes, Jack.’
    And now he has thrust his head forward and is looking at me closely. I hate being looked at closely. My husband used to do it. Suddenly I am furious with this man Jack Cust, furious with him for his cushiony obtuseness and even for his kindness. I shut my eyes tight. His voice sounds very close.
    ‘Mrs Porteous, you’re done in, aren’t you?’
    I can only nod.
    ‘Look, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. Standing gasbagging! I’ll get those odds and ends up and then I’ll really push off.’
    As soon as he goes I sit down hard in the straight-backed chair by the window. It goes without saying that never, never in my life, have I chosen the right clothes for a journey. I am hot in all my silly wool. As I take off my jacket Jack Cust comes back, almost running this time, and looking at me anxiously, as if I may be going to beat him.
    ‘Where do you want them, Mrs Porteous?’
    ‘Just there, thank you, Mr Cust.’
    His anxiety changes to indignation. ‘But the front bedroom’s all fixed up for you.’
    ‘Then please, put everything in there.’
    He does. He does that. And at last he goes.
    It is wonderful to be able to stop smiling. I feel that ever since setting foot in Australia I have been smiling, and saying, ‘Thank you’ and ‘So kind’. I have one rather contemptible characteristic. In fact, I have many. But never mind the others now. The one I am talking about is my tendency to be a bit of a toady. Whenever I am in an insecure position, that is what happens. I massage the smile from my face by pressing the flesh with my fingertips, over and over again, as I used to do when I had that facelift, all those years ago. I long more than ever for that hot bath, but am too tired to move. I am troubled, too, by guilt, because I was irritable with Jack Cust, who was so kind. I shut my eyes, and when, after a few minutes, I open them again, I find myself looking through the glass on to a miniature landscape of mountains and valleys with a tiny castle, weird and ruined, set on one slope.
    That is what I was looking for. But it is not richly green, as it used to be in the queer drenched golden light after the January rains, when these distortions in the cheap thick glass gaveme my first intimation of a country as beautiful as those in my childhood books. I would kneel on a chair by this window, and after finding the required angle of vision, such as I found just now by accident, I would keep very still, afraid to move lest I lose it. I was deeply engrossed by those miniature landscapes, green, wet, romantic, with silver serpentine rivulets, and flashing lakes, and castles moulded out of any old stick or stone. I believe they enchanted me. Kneeling on that chair, I was scarcely present at all. My other landscape had absorbed me. And later, when I was mad about poetry, and I read
The Idylls of the King
and
The Lady of Shalott
, and so on and so forth, I already had my Camelot. I no longer looked through the glass. I no longer needed to. In fact, to do so would have broken rather than sustained the spell, because that landscape had become a region of my mind, where infinite expansion was possible, and where no obtrusion, such as the discomfort of knees imprinted by the cane of a chair, or a magpie alighting on the grass and shattering the miniature scale, could prevent the emergence of Sir Lancelot.
    From underneath his helmet flowed
    His coal-black curls as on he rode,
    As he rode down to Camelot.
    From the bank and from the river
    He flashed into the crystal mirror,
    ‘Tirra lirra,’ by the river
    Sang Sir Lancelot.
    The book was one of my father’s. It used to open at the right page because I