The Feast (McNally Editions)

by Margaret Kennedy

He said that God has forgiven me. I told him that I do not forgive myself.

‘Duff,’ said Mr. Siddal, ‘had better be careful. She is older than the rocks on which she sits and she eats a young man every morning for breakfast. Her ash can is full of skulls and bones.’

Her panic did not subside till she was across the sands and halfway up to the headland. She mastered it only to discover that her misery had returned. Despair broke over her so irresistibly that she wondered how she could still observe the pure peace and beauty of the scene. But her senses continued to tell her that the sky, sea, cliffs and sands were lovely, that there was music in the murmur of the waves, and that the evening airs smelt of gorse blossom. To that message her mind replied: No good anymore. It might have helped me once.

So much suffering, she thought. So much suffering everywhere. And as long as I live I merely add to it. I am not strong. I can do nothing. I’m simply another hopeless, helpless person. A

Her pain was not entirely her own, and it had transported her into an existence outside and beyond her own, into a mind, an endurance, from which she could never again be separated.

But don’t you think of me unless you can think kindly.

For he was a Liberal—the kind of Liberal which turns pink in blue surroundings and lilac at any murmur from Moscow.