Bildungsromans; Domestic fiction; Mothers and daughters -- Fiction
Since Mark died she had begun to dream about Ilford. She would struggle
and break through out of some dream about Morfe and find herself in Ley
Street, going to Five Elms. She would get past the corner and see the red
brick gable end. Sometimes, when she came up to the gate, the house would
turn into Greffington Hall. Sometimes it would stand firm with its three
rows of flat windows; she would go up the flagged path and see the sumach
tree growing by the pantry window; and when the door was opening she
would wake.
Sometimes the door stood open. She would go in. She would go up the
stairs and down the passages, trying to find the schoolroom. She would
know that Mark was in the schoolroom. But she could never find it. She
never saw Mark. The passages led through empty, grey-lit rooms to the
bottom of the kitchen stairs, and she would find a dead baby lying among
the boots and shoes in the cat's cupboard.
Autumn and winter passed. She was thirty-two.
III.
When your mind stopped and stood still it could feel time. Time going
fast, going faster and faster. Every year its rhythm swung on a longer
curve.
Your mind stretched to the span of time. There was something exciting
about this stretch, like a new sense growing. But in your dreams your
mind shrank again; you were a child, a child remembering and returning;
haunting old stairs and passages, knocking at shut doors. This child
tried to drag you back, it teased you to make rhymes about it. You were
not happy till you had made the rhymes.
There was something in you that went on, that refused to turn back, to
look for happiness in memory. Your happiness was _now_, in the moment
that you lived, while you made rhymes; while you looked at the white
thorn-trees; while the black-purple cloud passed over Karva.
Yesterday she had said to Dorsy Heron, "What I can't stand is seeing the
same faces every day."
But the hill world had never the same face for five minutes. Its very
form changed as the roads turned. The swing of your stride put in play a
vast, mysterious scene-shifting that disturbed the sky. Moving through it
you stood still in the heart of an immense being that moved. Standing
still you were moved, you were drawn nearer and nearer to its enclosing
heart.
She swung off the road beyond the sickle to the last moor-track that led
to the other side of Karva. She came back by the southern slope, down the
twelve fields, past the four farms.
The farm of the thorn-tree, the farm of the ash, the farm of the three
firs and the farm all alone.
Four houses. Four tales to be written.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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