The day I woke to it: today, today, today. A tolling bell only I could hear. The twilight seemed to have peed my soul; I felt ahly weariness. My birthday. My deathday.
Judith brought a card from my father with the breakfast tray. A picture of flowers, his habitual, vaguely worded greetings and a note. He hoped I was well. He was well. He had some books for me. Should he send them? My mother had not sighe card; he had sig for both of them. Love from Dad and Mother. It was all wrong. I k and he k, but what could anyone do?
Judith came. “Miss Winter says would now… ?”
I slid the card under my pillow before she could see it. “Now would be fine,” I said, and picked up my pencil and pad.
‘Have you been sleeping well?“ Miss Winter wao know, and then, ”You look a little pale. You do enough.“
‘I’m fine,“ I assured her, though I wasn’t.
All m I struggled with the sensation of stray wisps of one world seeping through the cracks of another. Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes—characters even—caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you. Well, it was like that. All day I had beeo distras. Thoughts, memories, feelings, irrelevant fragments of my own life, playing havoc with my tration.
Miss Winter was telling me about something wheerrupted herself. “Are you listening to me, Miss Lea?”
I jerked out of my reverie and fumbled for an answer. Had I been listening? I had no idea. At that moment I couldn’t have told her what she had been saying, though I’m sure that somewhere in my mind there lace where it was all recorded. But at the point when she jerked me out of myself, I was in a kind of no-man’s-land, a place between places. The mind plays all sorts of tricks, gets up to all kinds of things while we ourselves are slumbering in a white zohat looks for all the world like iion to the onlooker. Lost for words, I stared at her for a minute, while she grew more and more irritated, then I plucked at the first cohereehat preseself to me.
‘Have you ever had a child, Miss Winter?“
‘Good Lord, what a question. Of course I haven’t. Have you gone mad, girl?“
‘Emmelihen?“
‘We have an agreement, do we not? No questions?“ And then, ging her expression, she bent forward and scrutinized me closely. ”Are you ill?“
‘No, I don’t think so.“
‘Well, you are clearly not in yht mind for work.“
It was a dismissal.
Ba my room I spent an hour bored, uled, plagued by myself. I sat at my desk, pencil in hand, but did not write; felt cold and turhe radiator up, then, too hot, took my cardigan off. I’d have liked a bath, but there was no hot water. I made cocoa and put extra sugar in it; then the sweetness ed me. A book? Would that do it? In the library the shelves were lined with dead words. Nothing there could help me.
There came a dash of raindrops, scattering against the window, and my heart leaped. Outside. Yes, that was what I needed. And not just the garden. I o get away, right away. Onto the moors.
The main gate was kept locked, I knew, and I had no wish to ask Maurice to open it for me. Instead, I headed through the garden to the farthest point from the house, where there was a door in the wall. The door, rown with ivy, had not been opened for a long time, and I had to pull th
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