Towards Another Summer Read Free Page B

weeks now and I’ll be finished my story, then I’ll be able to emerge to prowl the streets and sniff the spring air.
     
    It’s like this:
    She spoke to herself,
    —Ready. Ah, the cameras wheeled into place, the microphones adjusted. She climbs in, looks back. Regrets? The door is clamped shut. The people of the world retreat. Rejoicing fiercely in her aloneness, she is anything now, nothing human - an egg, a hibernating tortoise, a hazelnut; she will circle the earth, like a marble rolled in the dark mouth of the sky; and ha, she’ll soon be in space, she’ll address her body, her food, her instruments as dogs, Down there, Down! The whirling floating fragments rasp like tongues against her skin, seize her flesh; everything rises around her, like vomit; it is the day when space, not sea or earth, gives up its dead. She smiles, she murmurs, What ever moored me?, peering at the stars, the pursuing fires, the earth wonderfully cultivated with plant brick stone and not a sign of moving people, animals, insects, commotions of love. Down, dream, down!
    Communication is lost.
    A faulty instrument, human error; the private pleasure of the certainty of her death, the public premature mourning for a heroine; on the seas the collection of little boats moving into the area of no recovery to witness the end; flags flying; a regatta;
representatives native and foreign.
    Her ship explodes, is burned; flash in the sky, stain in the sea; nothing human recovered. The boats disperse, the representatives native and foreign return to make statements, issue bulletins.
    Night. The writer emerges from her dream.
    —Oh God why have I been deceived? Which world do I inhabit?
    Down, dream, down!

5
    Every few days the cracked-wheat loaf, ninepence halfpenny, has to be bought; on Fridays the milk bill, seven half pints at fourpence halfpenny, paid; half a dozen eggs a week, half a pound of cheese, the daily newspaper, the literary weekly, the Sunday paper, thud, like a dangerous piece of scaffolding, a plank blown by a high wind out of the sky from a never-completed building - what’s it going to be, in the end, you ask. A cathedral, a little house, a railway station, a hangar? It’s too high to see the structure, velvet sky sags with fog, the newspaper with its insertion, the insertion within the insertion within the insertion (ah, technicolour!) lies heavily on the foot and heart.
    Also, there are visits here and there to consult the stains in their places of origin - the publisher with the soft voice (a bookie giving a quiet tip) and the aura of after-shave lotion; his peony-faced son with the quenched dark eyes; his head reader; editors, editors, the agent worried over his diet and elimination; visits from people, too. The phone rings. Time after time when the phone rings it is Sorry wrong number, but tonight it is Harvey.
    —A friend in the States gave me your address. Can I come over tonight, about nine?
    Pause.
    An American medical student? That will be pleasant. Tête-à-tête, sherry, coffee. Do I look like a writer? I should have straight black hair falling over my shoulders; my face should be pimpled and pasty; my shoes should be split at the sides; yet I should look interesting . Do I look like anybody, like myself? I wish I knew what to say, I wish I didn’t dry up when confronted with people. A slight hope; tonight; sherry; tête-à-tête.
    Pause.
    —Yes, do come. I’ll expect you at nine.
    —May I bring my girlfriend?
    Pause.
    —Do, do.
    The old frustrated witch dancing around the cauldron,
    ‘and like a rat without a tail,
in a sieve I’ll thither sail,
I’ll do, I’ll do and I’ll do . . .’
    Just after nine that evening the doorbell rang and Grace admitted Harvey and his girlfriend Sylvia.
    —I’m Harvey.
    —I’m Grace.
    —I’m Sylvia.
    Smiles, everyone established, and while Grace showed them into the sitting room with its floral suite, its lamp standard, desk, reproduction wine tables, electric fire,