Immediately after this the somewhat more stabilized formality of a black tree-trunk, of which A’s body forms a part, with perfectly naked bilateral boughs, immediately sprouting several huge white trumpet-shaped flowers.
There is an infinitesimal break in continuity as the dream angle changes a little. The comments of the chorus veer, but scarcely, and continue
you must find it a great change living here
very different indeed
perhaps a trifle dull after all your travels
although we have our own interests too
there’s always plenty going on in a quiet way
the bridge parties
the tap dancing at the health class
the sale of work
the Women’s Institute meetings
the garden fête at the vicarage
dinner at Dr. Moore’s (such a charming man).
The accompanying pictures outside the window by contrast with the previous sequence are very slow and definitive; their materialization is painstakingly realistic and they follow the spoken phrases meticulously, with strict, but not exaggerated, attention to rigorous suburban respectability, dullness.
And then it’s so easy to run up to town for a theatre or a film.
Quick in the vision the closed car sliding along, a man with a white silk scarf at the wheel, a woman beside him wearing an evening wrap of some kind; their dummy figures sitting stiffly erect, their white faces calcified in boredom. Branching out of the car fading, the black arterial road with lateral streets swings back to the black tree, the black woman’s body clamped to the tree. This time the flower-spurting is reversed, the petal wreckage dripping down flaccid, a slimy tatter of dissolution, semiliquid decay.
The light goes back sharply to normal, returning to the dream the suburban drawing-room, the chintzes, the knick-knacks, the vases of flowers. A has just sat down on the sofa. Under polite composure her limp attitude protests against hard reality. The visitor, sitting exactly as she has sat from the start, is saying something indistinguishable to her as the maid comes in at the door pushing a trolley with bright crested silver tea-service, plates of thin bread-and-butter, absurdly small cucumber sandwiches, macaroons.
A little girl with fair hair — she is unmistakably the child of her mother and so could be called B — peeps in through the open door, unnoticed by the grown-ups; then tiptoes away.
OUR house always seemed especially quiet, as if people spoke there only in lowered voices. My parents seldom had time for talking to me. No one talked to me much: hut the rain often used to whisper.It rained a lot and the rain kept whispering to me. In the long afternoons when the rain filled each window and shadows met together in every corner, I sometimes thought of the sun and the Japanese houseboy. It was lonely in those rooms dark with my mother’s sadness and with the rain on the windows. The rain shut off the house by itself in a lonely spell.
In time I found out what it was that the rain whispered. I learnt from the rain how to work the magic and then I stopped feeling lonely. I learnt to know the house in the night way of mice and spiders. I learnt to read the geography of the house bones.Invisible and unheard I scampered down secret tunnels beneath the floor boards and walked a tightrope webbing among the beams.
After that I never wished for children to play with, or for the Japanese houseboy to tell me fantastic stories. Hidden by curtains, sheltered in cupboards, ambushed in foxholes between the tables and chairs, I transmuted flat daylight into my night-time magic and privately made for myself a world out of spells and whispers.
THE PRE-REALIST fantasia opens up in an inchoate sort of Marie Laurençin dream of delicate tints. No form to speak of. Just a pearly billowing and subsiding of fondant chromatics; baby blue, candy pink, lemon-icing yellow, all sweetly harmonious and insipid like a débutante’s bon-bon box tied up in cellophane and big satin bows. After a sufficiency of this things begin to take shape, but as we are taking a long view of the time-stream and creation hasn’t occurred yet, there’s naturally a lot of fluidity. A tinkling twinkling musical-box tune, with accompanying Tyrolean or Swiss dancers, fancy peasants, rose-wreathed cupids, angels with nightgowns and cheeks like pomegranates, is liable to translate any minute into a Brahms symphony and the austere discipline of the ancien corps de ballet.
In the same way the mountain which presently arches itself up like a cat’s back is perhaps Mount Olympus, or perhaps Mount Sinai, or perhaps it is a cat’s back and not a mountain at all. Assuming that it’s a mountain, as a closer view seems to confirm, one gets an impression of pellucidity more appropriate to a mirage. There are crystalline snow slopes, diaphanous groves of trees, hyaline rocks, and, in the immediate foreground, a small lake, clear as glass, the translucent waters of which have surely never been contaminated by so much as a minnow.
Perhaps it is an extreme northern latitude that gives such rarefied transparency to the scene, lighted, as it appears to be, by the limpid coruscations of the aurora borealis. And this is a theory which gains a certain amount of support from the arrival of a party of hikers, of a truly Scandinavian robust comeliness, who proceed to picnic by the water’s edge. Every one of these picnickers, old as well as young (for there are several elderly people among them), is remarkable for his or her splendid physique, and for a skin tanned to a glorious golden brown. As might be expected of such magnificently fit specimens, they are full of abounding gusto and energy. Every now and then members of the group, unable to contain their joie-de-vivre, go off to run races or engage in contests of strength, calling aloud to each other by oddly familiar names. A good deal of indiscriminate necking, of a specially exuberant, whole-hearted and unself-conscious variety, also goes on; and this gives rise to sudden jealousies, apt to culminate in violence or in malicious pranks and practical jokes. It is noticeable that these childishly evanescent loves and quarrels spring up and are forgotten with equal ease; and perhaps this has something to do with the wine with which all the haversacks seem to be well supplied.
The irresponsible holiday atmosphere has a good innings before certainly pronouncedly killjoy clouds, gathering censoriously over the lake, begin to deluge the picnickers with torrential rain. It’s no ordinary mountain storm that comes on, but an absolute cloud burst, a cataclysmic jet of watery disapproval, a purge which attacks the gay party with dank tenacity, never letting up until it has succeeded in washing them out of the picture entirely.
And now that the clouds clear away the whole aspect of the mountain has changed. Vanished the lake, the roseate dream-light, the ethereal snows. Instead, a prosaic materialism illuminates a dado of arid crags behind a laboratory where a scientist is working, an old fellow with a grubby grey beard reminiscent of those superannuated physicians who dodder out their last days at obscure Continental spas. He is wearing a voluminous white overall tied with strings at the back, and this gives him a grotesque likeness to a stout elderly bonne. The overall, beneath which his broad-toed black boots poke out like obstinate tortoises, is none too clean, being spotted, not only with spilled food and gravy, but by traces of the various experiments with which he is grumpily occupied. Back and forth he lumbers between his microscope and his reports, frequently pausing to consult a huge reference book, so massive that it might almost be made of stone, but without ever seeming to find the formula that he wants. A specially baffling point teases him, he paws at the great tome, shakily turning the pages with his vein-knotted hands.