What female intelligence can decipher rapidly those hieroglyphic sheets when presented in restaurants and unerringly select the "spécialité de la maison," or the most acceptable "plat du Jour"? She will vacillate between the super-strange and the ultra-commonplace, or losing her head, will select the cheapest of the mysteries proffered, or else plunge recklessly for something expensive and out of season.
"Never hesitate to do a kind action," said a cynical friend once in the writer's privileged hearing. "The burden of it almost invariably falls on some one else, whilst you get all the credit." The truth of this dictum, once heard, will often recur to the mind when promising, shall we say soup, or jelly, to some sick friend; for it is the cook who will make the offering, the boy who will carry it to its destination.
...similar experience may befall many of us, particularly at busy holiday times of the year, when cooks, whose mothers so often specialize in sudden and disastrous illnesses, may leave us to face problems we have never really envisaged before…
Salted almonds are expensive, and by many thought indigestible; they can be understudied by a packet of the American cereal Puffed Wheat. A few spoonfuls of this, crisped hot in the oven and lying invitingly on small mother-o'-pearl shells, or in some such decorative and labour-saving receptacles before each guest, will comfort the shy, stem the torrent of the fluent-obvious, and generally promote a flow of that pleasant conversation...
And yet it hadn't been love, but some depressing kind of swindle after all, it seemed.
Dolly finished washing, arranged her black hair with the rust-red strips in it neatly. She dipped something that looked like a limp orange 'Captain' biscuit into a pink bowl on the dressing-table, and afterwards dabbed and smeared it all over her reproachful-looking face, leaving the skin covered over evenly with a light corn-coloured powder.
The whole toilet was carried out as a performing elephant might make its toilet sitting up in a circus ring, -- languidly, clumsily, as though her arms were made of iron.
...
Dolly knew, as she looked round at the long wedding-veil stretching away forever, and at the women, too, so busy all around her, that something remarkable and upsetting in her life was steadily going forward.
She was aware of this; but it was as if she were reading about it in a book from the circulating library, instead of herself living through it.
 |
| Persephone end-paper, 'Butterflies' by Madeleine Lawrence. |
For a long time there was a silence so complete, so absolute, that he did not know if he could ever breach it, ever utter again, ever be able to say another word to her for the rest of his life. The silence was a distance and a time span as well as the absence of sound. It was a space he did not think he had the nerve or the skill through which to travel.This is one of the most curious series of police procedurals that I've read. They are completely addictive. This is less because of their crime element (in general, it was pretty easy to pick the villain) but because they are more like a family saga with an overlay of a traditional mystery. In broader terms they are also like reading about the life and crimes of a particular type of English urban society.
I looked at her in some surprise. Seeing the Garnet week in, week out, always calm and unruffled and efficient we scarcely thought of her as a woman but rather as one of ourselves. I don't suppose she was a day more than twenty-five or twenty-six, but she was so self-assured that I imagine it made her seem older than she really was. And when she took off the hideous horn-rimmed spectacles she invariably wore in the office, she was really not bad-looking.
"Poor little monkey!" she at last exclaimed; and the words were an epitaph for the tomb of Maisie's childhood. She was abandoned to her fate. What was clear to any spectator was that the only link binding her to either parent was this lamentable fact of her being a ready vessel for bitterness, a deep little porcelain cup in which biting acids could be mixed. They had wanted her not for any good they could do her, but for the harm they could, with her unconscious aid, do each other.
...in the carriage, her mother, all kisses, ribbons, eyes, arms, strange sounds and sweet smells, said to her: "And did your beastly papa, my precious angel, send any message to your own loving mamma?" Then it was that she found the words spoken by her beastly papa to be, after all, in her little bewildered ears, from which, at her mother's appeal, they passed, in her clear shrill voice, straight to her little innocent lips. "He said I was to tell you, from him," she faithfully reported, "that you're a nasty horrid pig!"
"It must be either one thing or the other; if he takes you, you know, he takes you. I've struck my last blow for you; I can follow you no longer from pillar to post. I must live for myself at last, while there's still a handful left of me. I'm very, very ill; I'm very, very tired; I'm very, very determined. There you have it. Make the most of it. Your frock's too filthy; but I came to sacrifice myself." Maisie looked at the peccant places; there were moments when it was a relief to her to drop her eyes even on anything so sordid.
"Free, first, to divorce his own fiend."
The benefit that, these last days, she had felt she owed a certain person left Maisie a moment so ill-prepared for recognising this lurid label that she hesitated long enough to risk: "Mamma?"
"She isn't your mamma any longer," Mrs. Beale returned. "Sir Claude has paid her money to cease to be." Then as if remembering how little, to the child, a pecuniary transaction must represent: "She lets him off supporting her if he'll let her off supporting you." Mrs. Beale appeared, however, to have done injustice to her daughter's financial grasp.
"And support me himself?" Maisie asked.
"Take the whole bother and burden of you and never let her hear of you again. It's a regular signed contract."
"Why that's lovely of her!" Maisie cried.
"It's not so lovely, my dear, but that he'll get his divorce."
"I didn't look back, did you?"
"Yes. He wasn't there," said Maisie.
"Not on the balcony?"
Maisie waited a moment; then "He wasn't there" she simply said again.
Mrs. Wix also was silent a while. "He went to HER," she finally observed.
"Oh I know!" the child replied.
Mrs. Wix gave a sidelong look. She still had room for wonder at what Maisie knew.
helluo librorum, n.Pronunciation: Brit. /ˌhɛljʊəʊ lᵻˈbrɔːrəm/, U.S. /ˌhɛljuoʊ ləˈbrɔ(ə)rəm/Etymology: < post-classical Latin helluo librorum (in some medieval MSS of Cicero) < classical Latin helluō HELLUO n. + librōrum, genitive plural of liber book (see library n.1). In early editions of Cicero De Finibus 3. 7, it is said that Cato ‘quasi helluo librorum‥videatur’ (‘appeared like a glutton for books’); the modern reading, restored from MS evidence by Jan Gruter in his edition of 1618, is ‘quasi helluari libris‥videatur’ (‘appeared as if to devour books’).Now rare.An insatiable reader, a bookworm.1635 S. BIRCKBEK Protestants Evid. xii. 4 One of these brothers was called Comestor‥, as it were booke-eater, because he was such a Helluo librorum, a devourer of bookes.
1738 Relig. of Nature Delineated (ed. 6) Pref. p. ix, He was of Opinion too That a man might easily read too much: And he considered the Helluo Librorum and the True Scholar as two very different Characters.
1841 U.S. Democratic Rev. Sept. 299 We would not style him exactly a helluo librorum, but rather a sort of antiquarian epicure of letters.
1942 E. K. Chambers Sheaf of Stud. 153 He [sc. Coleridge] does not mention the Bodleian, but it would be odd if such a helluo librorum did not see it.
"Let’s all step back and take a deep breath," I said, though I was the only person in the room who was breathing.
It's nearly ten years now since I left Italy, and three full years since I left the Andes, but strangers still come up to me sometimes in Paris, or London, or Caracas. And they say,'You were one of the four, weren't you?'And I know what they mean, and sometimes I nod, and sometimes I don't any more, but inside, I always think, 'We weren't really four, there were five of us: César, Otto, Elías and me, and the slow train to Milan.' And the slow train was the slide rule of our existence, often our raison d'être. Our exile was aimless without it. I wonder if we would have survived the waiting, the tension and the failure, but for the luxury of moving on. (The Slow Train to Milan)
I couldn't tell if César minded or not, he seemed quite emotionless. He said that he would be all right anyway because he had the washing to do. He had just discovered the automatic washing-machine, and it was giving him endless pleasure. He often stood over my mother while she did the weekly wash, and sometimes he would ask if he could have a go. He himself had a habit of changing his clothes from head to foot twice a day and then having everything laundered at a proper laundry.
...we discovered that we had no ring.'Never mind,' César said, 'one day you shall have lovely rings.'But it seemed that we specifically needed one then and there. Luckily my mother came to the rescue. She said that she had a stock of wedding rings in her bag that she carried round for sentimental reasons.'If I were you,' she said, pointing to a platinum and white-gold one, 'I would have that one. Andrew gave it to me in 1947, and it was easily my best marriage.'
Now I found myself in a phase of manic restlessness in which I used the railways like an emergency extension of my own nervous system. For this, I chose the line from Bologna to Brindisi, travelling backwards and forwards, occasionally taking a day of so off in Brindisi, for the best part of three weeks. The two-year-old Alexander travelled with me, with his monosyllabic vocabulary, his teddy bear, his luggage, and his own, younger, passion for trains.Looking back, that time that I spent literally on the rails may appear to be the nearest I ever came to going off them.
Travelling is like flirting with life. It's like saying, 'I would stay and love you, but I have to go; this is my station.' (Off the Rails)
Valancy wakened early, in the lifeless, hopeless hour just preceding dawn. She had not slept very well. One does not sleep well, sometimes, when one is twenty-nine on the morrow, and unmarried, in a community and connection where the unmarried are simply those who have failed to get a man.
An unknown man in a lonely place is a permitted object of fear to a young woman privately bred...
The apparition had reached the landing halfway up and was therefore on the spot nearest the window, where at sight of me, it stopped short and fixed me exactly as it had fixed me from the tower and from the garden. He knew me as well as I knew him; and so, in the cold, faint twilight, with a glimmer in the high glass and another on the polish of the oak stair below, we faced each other in our common intensity. He was absolutely, on this occasion, a living, detestable, dangerous presence. But that was not the wonder of wonders; I reserve this distinction for quite another circumstance: the circumstance that dread had unmistakably quitted me and that there was nothing in me there that didn't meet and measure him. I had plenty of anguish after that extraordinary moment, but I had, thank God, no terror. And he knew I had not—I found myself at the end of an instant magnificently aware of this. I felt, in a fierce rigor of confidence, that if I stood my ground a minute I should cease—for the time, at least—to have him to reckon with; and during the minute, accordingly, the thing was as human and hideous as a real interview: hideous just because it WAS human, as human as to have met alone, in the small hours, in a sleeping house, some enemy, some adventurer, some criminal. It was the dead silence of our long gaze at such close quarters that gave the whole horror, huge as it was, its only note of the unnatural. If I had met a murderer in such a place and at such an hour, we still at least would have spoken. Something would have passed, in life, between us; if nothing had passed, one of us would have moved. The moment was so prolonged that it would have taken but little more to make me doubt if even I were in life. I can't express what followed it save by saying that the silence itself—which was indeed in a manner an attestation of my strength—became the element into which I saw the figure disappear; in which I definitely saw it turn as I might have seen the low wretch to which it had once belonged turn on receipt of an order, and pass, with my eyes on the villainous back that no hunch could have more disfigured, straight down the staircase and into the darkness in which the next bend was lost.
