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She was bad and she knew she was bad and she could see no end to it.
‘Do as you would be done by’ went the credo and it meant ‘Ask for nothing and you will be given nothing and no one will ask you for anything either.’
The scent of raspberries was poignant as the sound of pipe music, the scent of romance, of loss.
No one else did Greek; she had her lessons alone and these were a pleasure. They also enabled her to miss needlework. She could hardly believe that people could spend eighty minutes hemming what she called dishcloths and they called tea-towels, when they might be roistering and revelling through the Attic world. Soon she was to start reading Euripides’ Medea; soon they were to start making cotton knickers.
It was clear that there was as little point in trying to help people as there was in telling them the truth. You would be misunderstood or disbelieved and it would all be worse than ever.
Janet began to hate the sea. There was so much of it, flowing, counter-flowing, entering other seas, slyly furthering its interests beyond the mind’s reckoning; no wonder it could pass itself off as sky; it was infinite, a voracious marine confederacy. She saw how it diminished people as they walked along the shore; they lost their identity, were no more than pebbles, part of the sea’s scheme. Once there had been a great forest below the cliffs; there the hairy mammoth had browsed and raised his trunk and trumpeted. There had been mountain crags and deep, sweet valleys of gentle herbivores.
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Such memories she had, but no one wanted to hear them. And tea chests of sepia photographs, but no one wanted to see them.
She felt guilt for blighting Vera’s pleasure and excitement; she felt shame. Her shame and guilt only made her angrier. Where would it end?
‘More like an English country house,’ said Vera approvingly, and certainly it was unusually well heated.
