The Beautiful Visit

PROLOGUE

I woke because the fur wrapped round me had slipped off my feet, which were cold. As I moved to cover them, there was a loud creak and I discovered that my waist was encircled with a heavy leather belt. This was not at all usual, and drawing the fur up to my chin I lay back again to think. If it came to that, I did not usually sleep in a fur rug. Lying there, the ridiculous thought occurred to me that I had just been born. She was born with a girdle round her waist, they would say, to account for her misadventures. This is the kind of absurd notion one has when half awake; but for some minutes I lay still, waking; enjoying the exquisite detachment and emptiness of my mind.

It was not dark nor light, but a very fresh early grey air, and above me I could see small round windows, uncurtained. Round windows! I looked down again and saw, a few yards away, a pair of shining black boots which appeared never to have been worn. I was on the floor. I stretched out my left arm to touch it, and I was wearing a heavy gauntlet. The floor seemed to be shivering, or perhaps it was I who shivered. Listening, I heard a faint indescribable sound, an unhurrying rush, a sound of quiet, continuous, monotonous movement. I imagined the noise one makes walking through long dry grass; a little water spilt on to stone from some height; the distant drum-like murmur of a crowd ceaselessly conferring. Surely I must be the only person in the tremendous silence lying outside the small sound I could hear. I felt alone, warm and alone, in a desert or in outer space.

At this, my mind pricked up its senses and drawing the fur closely round me, I sat huddled on the floor and stared at the two round windows which were now a perceptibly paler grey.

After a moment, I rose stiffly to my feet and went to a window. There was nothing to be seen but a limitless wash of sea, breaking, and glinting where it broke, like steel. Above it was a paler empty stretch of sky, divided from the sea by a straight, faint, silver line. This whole round picture quivered, dipped a little, sustained the decline, and then rose again so that the original proportions of two-thirds sea, one-third sky were visible. This, very generally speaking, was where I was: but why? where was I going? and how did I come to be here at all?

I walked softly to the door, opened it, and looked out. There was nothing but a dim narrow passage: I hesitated a moment, then closing the door again, stood with my back to it, surveying the cabin where I had been sleeping. Catching sight of the boots again, I drew back the fur and looked down at myself. I was not reassured by my clothes, but clothes in which one had slept all night are not very reassuring. There was a perfectly good bed in one corner. Why had I not slept in that? I went to look at the bed. Lying in the middle of it were two fat marbled exercise books.

I remembered everything: remembered who I was and felt imprisoned with the knowledge that I was not free and new and empty as I had been when I woke on the floor. I stared at the two books which contained my life. I took them and sat beneath one of the windows, intending only, I think, to glance at them for the contrast they provided to my present circumstances. After all, I had little idea what would happen next. My life loomed before me, as wide with chance as it had been the day I was born.

ONE

I was born in Kensington. My father was a composer. My mother came from a rich home, and was, I believe, incurably romantic. She married my father, despite the halfhearted protestations of her family, who felt that to marry a musician was very nearly as bad as to marry into trade, and far less secure. I imagine their protestations were half-hearted, because she was, after all, their seventh daughter; and if they had been at all vehement in their disapproval I cannot imagine my mother sticking to her decision. At any rate, her family, after attending the wedding (there are pictures of all my aunts looking sulky, righteous, and incredibly tightly laced, on this occasion), washed their hands of her, which was far the cheapest, and from their point of view, the most moral attitude to adopt. It was certainly the cheapest. My father was not a good composer, he was not even successful; and my mother had no idea of money (or music). She had four of us in as many years, and I was the fourth. We would all wear passed on clothes until our nurse would no longer take us near the shops, and our contemporaries laughed at us; and then suddenly, in the drawing-room, would hang rich fiery brocade curtains; or perhaps there would be a party, and we would have new muslin frocks with velvet sashes; worn for that one occasion, and outgrown long before the next. I always remember my mother as pretty, but ceaselessly exhausted by her efforts to keep the increasing number of heads above water.

We had the usual childhood, with governesses, and interminable walks in Kensington Gardens. We soon learned that most people’s fathers were not composers, and we boasted about ours to the other children we met on our walks: affected a knowledge and love for music which we did not feel, and held prearranged conversations about it for the benefit of these richer and generally more fortunate friends. We were intelligent, and they were impressed. It all helped us to bear the lack of parties, seaside holidays and expensive toys.

Eventually, of course, my two brothers went away to school, and I was left at home with my sister. In all the years we grew up together, only two things stand out in my mind. The first was our poverty. I do not think we were exactly poor, but we had, as we were continually told, a position to keep up. I think the situation was complicated by the fact that my father and mother had quite different positions in mind; with the result that we oscillated hopelessly just out of reach of either.

The second was music. Music dominated our lives ever since I can remember. We were forced to listen to it for hours on end in silence; sometimes for a whole afternoon. My garters were often too tight; I used to rub under my knees, and my father would frown, and play something longer, and even less enjoyable. He was a tired, disgruntled little man; ineffectually sarcastic, and haunted by a very bad digestion, which made him morose and incapable of enjoying anything. I think even he got sick of music sometimes, but not until he had left it too late to start anything else: and my mother, I think, would have been finally shattered if he had presented her with any alternative.

Occasionally, his work would be performed; we would all go and there would be desperate little parties in the Green Room afterwards, with a lot of kissing, and frenziedly considered praise.

We were all made to learn the piano; but I was the only one who survived the tearful lessons with an enormous woman, who lisped, adored my father, and ambled into unwieldy rages at our incompetence. Also the chill, blue-fingered hour of practice before breakfast, choked the others’ less dogged aspiration. After some years, my father suddenly added another hour on to this practice, and began to superintend it. He used to stand over me while I raced through easier passages of Mozart, or perhaps exercises of Bülow, asking me difficult questions which were larded with sarcastic similies I was far too resentful and afraid to comprehend.

I remember us getting steadily poorer. There were eventually no parties, except at tea-time, when my mother would perforce entertain her more distant relations, who patronized her, and suggested alterations in the household which she had neither energy nor means to allow.

The house smelt of dusty carpets and forgotten meals; of grievance and misfortune. There was cracked white paint on all the windowsills, and there were slimy slips of soap in the basins. The drawing-room degenerated to a dining, living and schoolroom; with the remains of furniture for all three purposes. There were yellowing pictures of us on the mantelpiece; languid, and consciously cultivated. The glass bookcase with cracked panes held rows of dull dark volumes which nobody wished to read. I remember the sunlight, sordid and unwelcome on my mother’s sofa; and her head drooping over the arm. Her hair was always parted in the middle, strained back, and escaping in brittle strands round her ears. She seemed perpetually struggling with an enormous round work basket, writhing with grey and brown socks which gaped for attention. I can remember no colour that I can describe: no change of tempo. In the studio, the pianos stopped and started with monotonous regularity when my father resorted to teaching. For several years there was a great jar of dusty crackling beech leaves. I remember odd ends of braid round the piano stools, which shivered when pupils banged the door, as they invariably did. It was a very heavy door. Upstairs there were wide draughty passages covered with small faded mats over which one slid or tripped. My mother’s bedroom was filled with huge and reputedly valuable pieces of furniture: but her remnants of jewellery winked sadly in worn white velvet; her silver-topped brushes were always tarnished; there were innumerable bent hairpins in cracks between the floorboards; and the whole room was impregnated with the brisk improbable smell of my father’s shaving soap (there was always a soft grey foam on his brush). There were a great many gilt mirrors about the passages, all spotted and blurred with damp, like the passages themselves. We had a tiny garden, surrounded by black brick walls, filled with straggling grass and silent fleeting cats. I do not recall anything else very much.

My elder sister put up her hair, and began going down to dinner. The boys were always away, and I did not, in any case, like them very much. I was horribly lonely. I read everything I could lay my hands on, which was little; grew too fast; and, above all, longed for something to happen.

My sister began going to church a great deal and I found a purple Bible with silver clasps in her bedroom. She was out and I was amusing myself with her room and private things. There were a crucifix, a rosary and a few books on religious subjects smugly bound in red and gold. Was she a Roman Catholic? I didn’t know anything about her; if I caught her eye at meals or in the evening she would smile, remotely gentle, and go on eating or sewing, delicately withdrawn. Her speech was carefully non-committal and she didn’t talk to me much beyond asking me if I was going to wash my hair or telling me to help our mother.

I opened the drawers of her dressing-table. Her underclothes were beautifully embroidered, all white and folded, made by herself. Her boots were polished, with no broken laces. Above them in the wardrobe her dresses hung wasted with waiting; with no one to take them out into the air. They were chiefly white, mauve, dark blue and grey, with shoulders flopping sulkily off the hangers. The mauve was pretty: I had never worn mauve. It had hundreds of little buttons made of itself. I took it out of the wardrobe. It swayed a little, and suddenly I was unhooking my skirt, tearing my blouse under the arms as I wrenched it over my head, my long hair catching on the hooks, and then standing in my petticoat looking down at my ugly black shoes and stockings. I laid hands on the mauve frock. The buttons were awfully difficult to do up. I couldn’t manage the one in the middle of my back at all. I twisted like a flamingo and heard the taut cotton cracking. Just about to crack I hoped. Not actually torn. I turned to a long thin mirror by the bed. My petticoat was not long enough and there was a line like a let-down hem. The dress fitted me. How clean and trim and old. I looked into the glass and said: ‘I love you, Edward,’ several times. My hair was wrong; he would laugh. I rushed to the dressing-table, the tight mauve skirts primly resisting, and succeeded after some agonizing moments with hairpins in twisting a bun at the back of my head. ‘Good afternoon, Lavinia,’ I said, advancing on the mirror. ‘Good afternoon.’ And I curtsied. At that moment my sister came into the room. I saw her face in the mirror. I turned round quickly so that she should not see the gap with the undone buttons. I was very frightened and afraid the gap would make her more angry. I hated her for coming in. No harm, I kept repeating to myself, only one frock, no harm.

‘I hate my clothes,’ I said. ‘I didn’t choose this house. I can’t start life in it. This is so pretty.’

She shut the door, and began taking off her gloves from slim smooth white hands, fingers unpricked because she always wore thimbles when she worked.

‘Will you take it off now? I don’t want it too crushed,’ she said.

I was struggling with the buttons when she glided forward and I felt her fingers regularly neat, releasing them, down to my waist. I pulled the dress over my head. She took it from me in silence and replaced it on its hanger in the wardrobe. I reached for my skirt and she said, ‘Have you been trying on all my clothes?’

She saw the drawers open. I bent over my skirt ashamed. She sat down and talked. She would not have minded me trying on her clothes with her there, she said. But did I not feel it a little wrong to come to her room when she was out, to play with her private possessions? ‘If I had known you were going to do that I should have asked you to wash your hands.’ And she laughed pleasantly.

I looked at my hands. They were grey and clumsy. I felt they had only become dirty for her to see.

‘We must try and remember that things don’t matter.’ She was leaning forward. ‘I know jealousy is hard. I have suffered from it myself’ (with a weary reminiscent little smile). ‘But there are other things so much more important and so little time to set sufficient values. Life is hard for us all in different ways.’

She talked for a long time in the same quiet assured unemotional voice. There was a lot about God and trying to live a good life, peace of mind, acceptance of what was given, examples, final reward, and back to not prying un-asked into other people’s things: and an absolute passion of disagreement grew in me.

‘I split the frock,’ I said.

‘That is a pity. But I expect it can be mended. I am not angry. It’s quite all right.’

‘I’ve got to go. I promised to sort the laundry,’ I said. I couldn’t bear her voice any more.

‘Well we’ll say no more about it. Agreed?’ And she rose suddenly and kissed my cheek. I left her room quickly and ran into mine. ‘Don’t forget the laundry.’ I heard her voice daintily energetic as I shut my door.

My passion broke and I sat on the floor clutching my knees and repeating her words so that I could fight them more clearly in my mind. Things must matter. Everything existed because someone had once thought it important. Nobody gave me this house, nobody could love it; if you were peaceful you never wanted to change. I wanted every single simple thing to be different. I should not mind people looking at my clothes if they were nice. There wasn’t anyone to help. If helpful people didn’t care about beautiful stuffs and colours, sounds and more people, then they weren’t any use to me. But there was nobody to help me here. Hot resentful tears fell down into my hands. Everything was dirty, dusty and grey; no clear colour; no piercing sound; and at tea everything would be the same. Nobody worth their salt ever had much peace of mind. I wasn’t jealous of her. Good Lord no. And I repeated ‘Good Lord’ aloud in a pompous self-satisfied manner enjoying its rounded scorn. It was a mistake to put me in this house. I wasn’t suited to it. I couldn’t even cry any more, but my nose was hot and full: horrid. I got up to search for a handkerchief and rooted for hours among bits of string; postcards; a broken watch; a ring out of a cracker; a musty lavender bag, all dust and spikes; a shoelace; elastic; a ninepenny Nelson; a little pink china pig with a chipped ear; a balloon, soft, and curiously unpleasant to touch; an envelope bursting with stamps; a penwiper; and, at last, a handkerchief, grey, but folded. I shook it out, and it smelt of dolls’ houses and the water out of their tea cups. I blew my nose and sat down.

‘I am against everybody,’ I said.

Nothing changed.

‘Everybody and everything. I don’t like it, I’m going to change.’ The gaping drawer reminded me. A lot of those things were too childish to keep. I had outgrown them. I would throw away everything I hated. Everything in my room.

But it was tea-time.

Two days later I was still in the midst of my private revolution. My room was chaotic and each night when I went to bed the bloated waste-paper basket reminded me of more to purge. The family took no notice of me, which was comforting as there would only have been an incredulous banality about their comments. I eventually made my room unsentimentally bare; hardly belonging to me, and only resentfully part of the house. All the books and toys that had verged on grown-up possessions were gone, and it took me no time to find a handkerchief. That was not as enjoyable as I had expected; but I persevered and sorted my clothes into heaps of the unwearable, mendable, and usable. The mending took several days; I got bored and relegated many garments to the first heap.

The next thing was to find new people. I started walking in Kensington Gardens by myself, watching the people, and trying to find someone to suit my needs. This accomplished, I intended taking the person home to tea with me. The Round Pond seemed the most likely spot, because people stopped to feed the birds, or watch the yachts, or simply the minnows. I was afraid to speak to anyone. Each day I resolved to take the plunge but I was determined that it should be thoroughly done and there was a private rule that the person had to be taken to tea. I saw one girl: very pretty, carrying a little blue book, and gazing at the swans. She sat down on a seat and I watched her, fascinated. She had enormous brown eyes with very long lashes and moth-like eyebrows. She opened the little blue book, and a stupid duck which was walking on the grass and gravel, moved, hasty and eager, like a shop attendant, thinking about bread I suppose. It waited, then walked to the water and slid in, swimming smugly away as though it never hurried greedily up to seats at all. The girl stopped reading and looked up pensively. The sun was setting, and gold was slipping uncertainly off the trees and water and her hair. It was very calm; the yachts were lying on the pond, with their sails shivering still; and the gardens were blue in the distance with the tree trunks dark, like legs seen from a basement window. On the Broad Walk a leisurely stream of perambulators rolled homewards; stiff gaiters to unbutton and peel off fat frantic legs and square white feeders to be tied round hundreds of warm pink necks. A clock struck four, and the swans arched their necks for the sound to pass through. A minnow floated on its side in the water, its mouth opening: it was going to die. The girl shut her book and walked away, and I had not spoken to her. I imagined her walking back to a neat beautiful home with friends all coming to a wonderful tea. She did not walk towards my gate. ‘She would never have liked me,’ I said. ‘She would not have come home.’ The thought cheered me for the loss of her. She was only a speck among the trees already. It didn’t matter, there were so many people. It was just a pity to let anyone go. All the way home I imagined her walking with me, telling me many new and exciting things about how to live, so that tea with the family would be a waste of her. It was cold by the time I reached home; the lamps were being lit in the streets, and the piano sounded in petulant bursts as I stood on the door step. My father was giving a lesson. My sister was wearing her mauve frock. After tea I darned black stockings and ironed my hair ribbons.

The next day I went to the Round Pond half hoping, half expecting to see the girl with the blue book. It was a fresh, cold day and she was not there. I stood in front of the water: a little tufted duck dived and came up gleaming with secret pleasure. Beside me was a tall old man, very neat and black, with a stick.

‘Water water everywhere nor any drop to drink,’ he said suddenly. I turned to him.

‘The very deep did rot: Oh Christ!

‘That ever this should be!’

he went on rapidly with great emphasis.

‘I know it all by heart,’ he said. Then suddenly: ‘Do you know where that came from, young lady?’

‘Coleridge. Ancient Mariner,’ I mumbled. My governess had read it with me.

‘Quite right. Exactly right. Not many young people nowadays know that sort of thing. Great poetry. I know it all by heart.’ And he walked away lifting his hat. A dog ran after him sniffing, but he took no notice and walked faster.

Nothing else happened that day. I told my family at tea about the old man, and they received it with the expected mild surprise. My father had written a choral work which was to be performed at Christmas, and they were all absorbed with being a composer’s family.

We went to a concert that evening. We always contrived to look poor, cultured, and apart at these functions. The programme was chamber music, mostly Schubert and Brahms. I could never listen to chamber music for more than an hour; after which I began to count people’s heads; still, bald, hatless, swaying, thrown back, shrunk forward between the shoulders, sunk on the hands, erect, anguished, emotional, ecstatic; my father stern and bored, and my mother acquiescently rapt; my sister prettily still; and I, I wondered what I looked like. I shut one eye and squinted. No good. There were red plush and gold paint; fat naked little boys in biscuit-coloured relief. The platform was a pale blue semi-circle, with the players impressively still, driving their instruments with a delicate force and deliberation. We went to see the players afterwards. They were dazed and friendly, their hands wrung and their faces stretched with answering good-will.

Going home was the nicest.

TWO

I still walked in the Gardens, but I did not feel any less lonely.

One windy day there were kites between the Orangery and the Pond. I went to the slope and stared upward at three of them. They were half proud, half fearful; soaring with wild little tugs at their strings. I watched their joy at a moment’s release in the dropping wind’s fantasy; their floating in the second’s calm before they were off again; sinuous and wild, and captive all the time. I looked down, too far of course, to the ground and saw muddy tufted grass and a pair of black boots. Enormous boots. A boy. An old boy; nearly as old as I. His suit was dirty, his breeches tight, his sleeves too short, and his wrists red and bony. He was very intent on his kite; his eyes were screwed up with the sky and staring cold; his dark hair ruffled up by the wind into a square crest. He had a large Adam’s apple which reminded me of five notes and then down a fifth on a piano. I stood a little nearer and stared again at the kite because he was so intent upon it. I was suddenly possessed of a desire to have been flying it with him; for his winding in to be by our mutual consent, because we had other things to do, planned together. The kite was almost in; it was pink and yellow, with ribs dark and delicate against the sky; and he was winding fast, his fingers hard and capable against the string. His eyes came down to earth, and he glanced at me just as the kite hit the ground with a thin papery thud.

‘Can I look at it?’

‘What?’

‘Your kite. Can I look at it?’

‘If you like.’ He watched the kite in my hands indifferently.

‘Did you make it?’

‘No.’ I knew he wished he had.

‘Do you often fly it?’

‘No.’

I gave it back to him.

‘I’ve stopped because of the wind,’ he volunteered.

‘It’s dropping.’ My mouth was very dry.

‘I’m going home now. Good-bye.’ He started off, the kite perched in his arms. ‘I’ll be here tomorrow if you want to see it fly properly.’ He was going.

‘I say,’ I called. ‘I say. Would you like to come home to tea?’

He stopped. It was up to him. I saw his eyes faintly curious and defensive, and I longed for him to come.

‘What’s your name?’

I told him.

‘How old are you?’

I told him.

‘All right,’ he said; and we set off down the Broad Walk.

‘Will your family wonder where you are?’

‘Oh no. I shouldn’t get any tea anyhow. They’re against me at the moment. I don’t agree with them.’

I digested that in silence.

‘My father’s a doctor,’ he added as an explanation.

‘I see,’ I said. ‘What school do you go to?’

‘I don’t. I’ve been expelled.’

I didn’t know what to say.

‘How awful.’

‘It jolly well is. I didn’t like it much there but it’s worse at home.’

‘Why did they?’

‘Partly because of God.’ He stopped and transferred the kite from one arm to the other. ‘And partly because of games.’

‘I didn’t know they could expel you for them.’

‘Oh well it wasn’t just them. They just started it. I was a bad influence anyway,’ he said with some pride.

‘How do you start being an influence?’

‘Why?’ He stopped and regarded me again suspiciously. ‘I don’t think it would be easy for you. You might be a good influence of course. Girls always want to be that. But I shouldn’t advise you to try. It’s no good deliberately trying to influence anyone. My English master taught me that. It’s about all I learned at school. You mustn’t try and change other people. It’s never good for them in the end. At school they want the masters to change everyone. And they want the boys to be sure of being everyone. He wouldn’t and I wasn’t and so he left and I was expelled.’

‘Where is he now?’

‘Edinburgh. With his family. They aren’t pleased. I get letters from him. I’ll show you if you like. You seem sensible.’

‘Oh I am,’ I said.

‘We’d better sit down. Letters are too difficult standing up.’

We sat on a black bench. He took a crumpled envelope out of his pocket, and unfolded the letter. The writing was slanting and very difficult.

‘– decision is not simple. Man’s ultimate purgatory could be fraught with endless decisions; the consequences unknown and terrible even with knowledge –’ a blank which I couldn’t read, ending with –’and he spent twenty years deciding that, incomplete though it is –’ unreadable again – ‘therefore assess yourself freely with sincerity and courage and tackle the main problem of what you want to be; once you are at all sure, nothing should stop you. Until then it is just strife for the sake of self-expression, a grisly means to achieve no positive end. I hope –’

The boy didn’t turn over the page but folded it away back into the envelope and his pocket. ‘The rest is just about writing and what to read,’ he said.

I was paralysed. It was the first time I found myself facing something about which I had never thought, and was quite incapable of judging even generally, good from bad.

‘He means, if you are going to change be sure why, and know what you want to change into, or else it would be like throwing your clothes away and being naked.’

‘But if you want to change,’ I said. ‘If you want everything to be different, it’s because the old things are dreary and dead and anything else would be new to you.’

‘Not necessarily good though.’

‘Supposing you wanted them new at all costs? Surely sometimes anything different would be better?’

‘To think or to do?’

‘I can’t separate them,’ I said.

He looked at me rather scornfully. ‘I don’t think you can. But don’t you see by renouncing anything blindly without substitute you expose yourself to any fool or foolishness.’

‘But supposing you hate everything that is in you,’ I cried desperately, ‘and you’ve never had a chance to know anything else, you only know you must change, what do you do then? You have to throw things away.’ A litter of fairy books and dolls’ clothes flung across my mind.

‘You can read can’t you?’ he demanded fiercely. ‘And talk to people. Learn, listen, and find out, and then choose.’ And he went on in stern little spurts of energy and knowledge, serious, even sententious, but it didn’t seem that then; only marvellous and rather frightening that one could be my age and know so much, and then be so fierce, and excited and serious about it.

My thoughts were like shillings in a pool, glittering and blurred, shimmering to the groping finger and always deeper and more elusive, until you think that perhaps there isn’t a shilling at all, it seems so far out of reach. I floundered and the words wouldn’t come. He forced me relentlessly into corners, and I felt the back of my neck getting hot, and warm little shivers down my spine. I didn’t tell him about myself lest he should scorn what then seemed to me such childish endeavour. He raced on through religion, came triumphantly to blasphemous conclusions. Education was stabbed with a ferocity I had never before encountered; until it lay a bewildered mess of Latin, historical dates and cricket stumps. And then the older generation was subjected to a vitriolic attack: such remorseless contempt, such despairing anger, such a thunder of criticism was broken over their meek, bald and bun-like heads that I was dumb at the death of so large a body; trembling with anxious rapture of choice and the still distance of freedom.

He stared at the gravel, his talk calming. The kite lay between us on the bench, its paper stretched between the struts, breathing and rucked a little in the breeze. I had not attempted to argue or deny, I was quite incapable of either; it just seemed to me that my solitude was at an end; and his talk, his spate of words were rushing, like liquid, into my mind.

‘What about your parents?’ he said, suddenly lifting his head.

‘Oh they – I have the same trouble.’

‘Do they stop you doing things?’

‘No, not exactly. There’s nothing for them to stop.’

‘What does your father do?’

‘He writes music.’

‘Oh, that should make it simpler for you.’

‘I don’t think it does. Anyway I don’t think he thought much about it being simple for anyone when he started. There isn’t much money and my mother’s always tired.’

‘I’m cold,’ he said and rose to his feet. ‘You’re cold too,’ looking down on me. It was an impersonal remark but I blushed and rose with a murmuring denial. It was blue grey, and the Gardens were nearly empty. We walked home almost in silence, and apprehension superseded the excitement I had known on the bench with the letter and the kite.

Lights were showing from houses, but mine was dark. I noticed the paint bubbled and peeling off the plaster, and the windows powdered and dull with dust.

We went in to tea.

‘Do you always keep your door open?’

‘Yes. It saves so much time.’ My teeth were chattering and I didn’t want to talk.

‘I like that.’ He put the kite on two chairs in the hall.

‘Do you want to wash?’

He looked surprised, and urged me on down the passage. The dining-room was terribly near. I prayed that they wouldn’t all be there. They would put down their cups and their bread and look up, all towards the door, at him, and at me, and back to him again, and there would be a stealthy concert against speaking first, an awkward calm, which I must clumsily break. I opened the door. They put down their cups.

‘He’s come to tea,’ I said, and turned to him blocking their sight. ‘I can’t remember your name.’

‘Michael Latham,’ he muttered as though it meant nothing, and he had learned it by heart.

‘Come and sit down, Michael. Milk and sugar, Michael?’ My mother wielded the tea-pot.

My father resumed his reading of Blackwood’s Magazine. Michael stared at him. My sister lowered her eyes and scraped strawberry jam neatly with her knife. I could think of nothing to say. There was an exhausted pupil swallowing tea with a pale film; it was cold, and he had been too nervous and depressed to drink it, until he had felt sure that attention was diverted from him and his tremendous, thick, white hands. Michael ate an enormous tea, punctuated by monosyllabic replies to my mother’s and sister’s small inquisitive advances. He seemed fascinated by my father, watching him timidly and bending his head abrupt and shy if my father turned a page or stirred his tea.

How to escape and where? My brothers always seemed to manage it when they had friends to tea. They clattered with one purposeful rush to their large bedroom, where they remained for the evening. If, for any reason, I had ever gone into their room, they were always to be found standing in a conspiratorial group, quite silent and apparently doing nothing, frozen like animals at an unavoidable intrusion; hostile, scarcely breathing, with some secret purpose deep in their minds. I could not take Michael upstairs; I knew that for some reason my parents would not like it.

‘Are you going to use the studio?’ I asked my father. The pupil wriggled and hid his hands with a desperate little grin.

‘I have to play something over once. Why?’

‘I thought that