Labrador (N.L.) -- Fiction; London (England) -- Fiction; Love stories, English
Talking one's relations over isn't particularly easy between husband and
wife at any time; we are none of us so sure of one another as to risk
loose phrases or make experiments in expression in matters so vital;
there is inevitably an excessive caution on the one hand and an abnormal
sensitiveness to hints and implications on the other. Marjorie's bills
were only an extreme instance of these unavoidable suppressions that
always occur. Moreover, when two people are continuously together, it is
amazingly hard to know when and where to begin; where intercourse is
unbroken it is as a matter of routine being constantly interrupted. You
cannot broach these broad personalities while you are getting up in the
morning, or over the breakfast-table while you make the coffee, or when
you meet again after a multitude of small events at tea, or in the
evening when one is rather tired and trivial after the work of the day.
Then Miss Margharita Trafford permitted no sustained analysis of life in
her presence. She synthesized things fallaciously, but for the time
convincingly; she insisted that life wasn't a thing you discussed, but
pink and soft and jolly, which you crowed at and laughed at and
addressed as "Goo." Even without Margharita there were occasions when
the Traffords were a forgetfulness to one another. After an ear has been
pinched or a hand has been run through a man's hair, or a pretty bare
shoulder kissed, all sorts of broader interests lapse into a temporary
oblivion. They found discussion much more possible when they walked
together. A walk seemed to take them out of the everyday sequence,
isolate them from their household, abstract them a little from one
another. They set out one extravagant spring Sunday to Great Missenden,
and once in spring also they discovered the Waterlow Park. On each
occasion they seemed to get through an enormous amount of talking. But
the Great Missenden walk was all mixed up with a sweet keen wind, and
beechwoods just shot with spring green and bursting hedges and the
extreme earliness of honeysuckle, which Trafford noted for the first
time, and a clamorous rejoicing of birds. And in the Waterlow Park there
was a great discussion of why the yellow crocus comes before white and
purple, and the closest examination of the manner in which daffodils and
narcissi thrust their green noses out of the garden beds. Also they
found the ugly, ill-served, aggressively propagandist non-alcoholic
refreshment-room in that gracious old house a scandal and
disappointment, and Trafford scolded at the stupidity of officialdom
that can control so fine a thing so ill.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account