Affinity

by Sarah Waters

except, it is not an angel, as I seemed to remember it, but his late Veritas.

symbolism aurghhhh….seeing her as the goddess of truth…oh boy oh man

She murmured at last, ‘Give me another name, then, to call you by. Give me any name but “Miss Prior”—which might be the name of a matron, or of any common visitor; which might as well be nothing to me. Give me a name that will be something—give me a secret name, a name that has, not the worst of you, but the best . . .’ She went on like this—until at last, in the same quick, queer spirit in which I had handed her the book, and then the pen, I said: ‘Aurora! You may say then, Aurora! For that is a name—it is a name that—’ I did not of course say it was a name that Helen gave me, before she married my brother. I said it was a name I used to like to call myself, ‘when I was young’. And then I blushed, to hear the foolish thing spoken aloud. She, however, only looked solemn. She gripped the pen again, wrote a line through Margaret, and put Aurora in its stead.

I look at my own face, that is reflected in my bulging window: it seems strange to me, I am afraid to gaze too hard at it. But I am afraid, too, to look beyond it, to the night which presses at it. For the night has Millbank in it, with its thick, thick shadows; and in one of those shadows Selina is lying—Selina—she is making me write the name here, she is growing more real, more solid and quick, with every stroking of the nib across the page—Selina. In one of those shadows Selina is lying. Her eyes are open, and she is looking at me.

She looks not at all like the Crivelli Veritas. I should say that she was never stern, before they sent her to Millbank.

The word was: TRUTH.

Why do gentlemen’s voices carry so clearly, when women’s are so easily stifled?

I imagined how it would be if I took her, not to Italy, but only to Marishes, to my sister’s house; if I sat with her at supper, and shared her room, and kissed her— I cannot say what would frighten them most—her being a spirit-medium, or a convict, or a girl.

I wish that, if anyone should look for faults in this, then they will find them with me, with me and my queer nature, that set me so at odds with the world and all its ordinary rules, I could not find a place in it to live and be content.

Selina, you will be in sunlight soon. Your twisting is done—you have the last thread of my heart. I wonder: when the thread grows slack, will you feel it?