Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

cracked clogs. I read, I read, I read. Anything, everything … My father, dipping the quill in the penny bottle of ink, laboriously added ‘steel-rimmed spectacles’ to the note beside my name in his directory. Charity spectacles. I was so ashamed.
    “But I was a helpless addict; so precious were those books to me that I carried them around next to my heart, beneath the ragged liberty vest from the parish poor-box but above the layer of newspaper that, for warmth, my mother sewed around us, renewing it each autumn.
    “My mind grew in the darkness like a flower. But my isolation increased. I could not communicate my love, my wonder, my veritable lust for things of the spirit, the intellect, with my parents—nor, indeed, with my teachers, for them I hated. They bound my face in iron: first my eyes, then my teeth.
    “ ‘Teeth in brace,’ my father amended by the guttering light of the farthing candle. Or was it a penny candle? Or a halfpenny rush dip? One forgets—one forgets.”
    Again the brief cry; then she resumed her narrative.
    “Life went on. The years passed. The bright peonies of the menstrual flow blossomed. My breasts grew like young doves. I had a fever and they cropped my hair. To my wonder and delight it grew again in little soft curls.
    “I stared at my reflection in Dapple’s trough. I took off my spectacles and pulled the brace from my mouth. I dimly saw this white face and this golden topknot and I was afraid, for the child I had been was dead; dead and replaced by a beautiful woman whom I did not know.
    “Jason, the candles.”
    He—the boy; slight, fair, delicate—struck matches, and the branched candlesticks sprang to life.
    Her face was a painted mask of beauty. Eyes bluer than their blue-stained lids, precise discs of scarlet on her white cheeks, lambent hair piled above the winking lights of her tiara. And the diamonds burned with no more dangerous fire than did her white breasts, exposed to the nipples by the black chiffon robe that fell away from her thighs.
    She was as beautiful as Venus rising from the waves in the celebrated picture by Botticelli, only more so. She was as beautiful as the celebrated bust of Nefertiti in the Louvre, only more so. She was as beautiful as the statue of the young David by the celebrated Michelangelo that gazes on the thronged traffic of Milan with such serenity, only more so.
    Slowly she ground out her cigarette in the wounded onyx of an ashtray on the arm of her chair. She resumed her narrative.
    “At fifteen, I went walking in the park. I glowed with beauty on the boating pond, in a canoe, at half a crown an hour. I disputed about Plato, whose books I read deeply, with a small brown man in a loin cloth, and all the time I gazed on my reflection in the rippling water.
    “When I concentrated on my reflection, I was that lovely being. Je suis un autre. Dizzied, drunk on the miracle of arriving at a personality with the suddenness of epiphany, I turned from the pool to make some brilliant point to my companion—and my new self fell away like a cloak. I wept, stammered: ten years old again.
    “I ran, stumbling, back to the familiar warmth of the stable, to weep saltily into Dapple’s warm mane. And there my mother, coming from the streets with her hands full of potato peelings that she gleaned from the ashcans of our neighbours (when no one was looking; she had a fierce pride), to enrich Dapple’s mash … my mother, returning, saw me.
    “ ‘Susan,’ she said, ‘hush your moitherings.’ And then she paused, bewildered, laid her burden on a nearby tea chest and came close to me, so close that I could count the grey hairs growing from her nostrils. Her rheumy eyes filled, overflowed.
    “ ‘But you be not my Susan!’ she cried. ‘My Susan didn’t live to be as old as you!’ And she buried her head in her apron and her shoulders heaved with sobbing. But, selfishly, I dried my own tears on Dapple’s tail, for my mother had at last recognised my