Dark Places Read Online Free PDF Page B

grow into his fat, and one who finally seemed to have outgrown the shameful asthma, certain social events began to be expected of me when I was home from school for the holidays: afternoon teas, mainly, with charades, and a game on the lawn later. Here I was expected to deal with the sisters, cousins, sisters’ friends, and sisters’ friends’ cousins, of the boys who were at school with me. Reluctantly, and only because there was no choice, I went with Kristabel and sat in various drawing-rooms.
    At home, Kristabel was always a square peg failing to fit a round hole: Mother longed for a dainty flouncy type of daughter, and although she and Kristabel made the best of it among the quilting and the tatting, Kristabel was never going to be that sort of daughter. But in other people’s drawing-rooms, Kristabel blossomed, and her sharp remarks made people laugh, so she did not mind these afternoons. ‘Oh, at least it is a chance to get out of that everlasting house!’ she told me.
    But I dreaded the visiting. I was awkward, all fumbles and spills taking my tea, tipping the biscuits off their silly little tray—the sort of biscuits, I discovered too late, that shattered into many crumbs around one’s boots. I did not quite know what to do with my hands, or my cup of tea on these occasions. I watched myself leaning on things stiffly, trying to look relaxed as the others did: I tried getting my hands out of the way in my pockets, and found them bunching into fists in the darkness there, so I took them out again; I tried crossing my arms, or sitting down and crossing my legs, but whatever I did my body seemed all thumbs.
    I watched Davis, who seemed to have been doing this all his life. Davis was a dab hand with a cricket bat and had a hank of pale hair that hung over one eye. This hank of hair, or something about the way he stood and smiled, drove the cousins and sisters into a frenzy: they positively shouted each other down, all speaking at once to attract his attention with some saucy remark or other. They had not seen him, as I had, picking his nose in Religious Instruction, and flicking the snot across the room at the Map of the World.
    My trouble was females seemed a race apart: human, I imagined, but not human in the way I myself was human. It was the plumage of a different species, the way their hair looped, folded, curled and fell; I could not understand how there could be any room for their organs of digestion within their tiny stiff waists; and although I had secretively studied various marble breasts, half-covered with marble drapery, on display in the Gardens, they had not been deeply informative. I could not imagine what bulges and ledges of flesh might be underneath the bodices of these sisters and friends of sisters.
    Quite apart from the physical differences, there were others, even less comprehensible. How were the minds of these girls constructed, so they could keep up their trilling and exclaiming, and did not need to have anything of significance to say before they spoke? I could never have sparkled and tinkled to try to draw a smile from a young man scowling with shyness. I could not possibly have pretended all the phobias of which I learned: of spiders, of sunlight, of large birds, of tea gone cold, of draughts, and of yellow and green worn together. These girls did not laugh aloud when I committed some gaffe or other, only soothed and wiped up my slopped tea with a cloth, but I was abashed and found it easy to be surly. It was all too easy to imagine them tittering together about poor old Albion when I left the room; and was not all that soothing and mopping almost too solicitous: was it even possible that there was an element of parody?
    Faces grew solemn when I joined a group of muslins and boaters, chat grew thin and lifeless, boys stopped doing droll things with their ties, and the laughter of the muslins faded. Silence grew like fungus around my facts when I brought them out