Holiday Read Online Free PDF

‘A Doll’s House’ and he enjoyed himself explaining why he found it an important play.
    ‘And yet,’ he said, eager, spreading jam, ‘there’s something wrong with it.’
    ‘Such as?’
    ‘Perhaps it’s pre-Freudian. Would she have left him if matters had been right sexually between them?’
    ‘He enjoyed her.’
    ‘Is that it? I don’t know. I mean given the position of a woman in those days and their provincial view of petty-crime, she hardly seemed strong enough to make her mind up, just like that, and leave. I know she’d something about her, that she’d borrowed the money which needed some doing for a woman, I admit, and saved her husband’s life, but . . .’
    ‘What?’
    ‘To leave three children. Children she loved. For a mere piece of intellectualism.’
    ‘You think like her husband,’ Meg said. ‘That women are little song-birds or feather-headed spendthrifts. You do. You might think you don’t.’
    ‘But a young family . . .’
    ‘Listen,’ she answered. ‘Nobody would leave children they loved, if they acted sensibly. But thousands do. Lawrence’s Frieda. Nearly broke her heart.’
    They argued desultorily so that Fisher was thwarted. He was not sure what he felt and guessed that the girl was bent on making fun of him. She’d enjoyed the play, admitted now that the dialogue wasn’t too unreal if she made allowances for the old-fashioned translation, but her main objection was that Ibsen was out to act bogeys. Scare her with his horror.
    ‘What do you want, then?’
    ‘Ordinary pieces of life.’
    ‘What’s that mean?’
    ‘Quarrels about the rent or the soup. Agreement about what shoes to buy. I don’t know. When people come on stage, fit as fiddles and say they’re going to die with T.B. of the spine caused by their father’s lechery, I begin to think . . .’ She broke off, smiling down at her plate.
    ‘That sort of thing happens.’
    ‘I wish it wouldn’t. Anyway, I don’t want it shoved under my nose. There’s enough unpleasantness as it is.’
    ‘But we get pleasure, a marvellous pleasure, don’t we, out of seeing men and women face up to, and even be defeated by fearful events?’
    ‘You might. I don’t.’
    ‘Why do you go the theatre, then?’
    ‘Because Malcolm asked me.’
    ‘Though,’ he said, ‘you knew you wouldn’t enjoy it.’
    ‘I’d not seen it before. You never know.’
    Now it seemed important to him to convince her, to open her eyes to the poet’s art. As he talked, lectured her, hectored, she listened politely enough, even with a show of interest, but with a fixed determination not to be influenced. Her mind she’d made up, for herself. Ibsen and Shakespeare and Sophocles could tear their man, their noble women, to tatters, in the greatest language, and she’d look on as she’d watch a man fly-fishing or a bulldozer flattening a building or a horse-race on television. Such things happened, and as I’m here I might as well see what’s going on, but I’m not involved, only curious.
    ‘It might be your house they’re knocking down.’
    ‘Then I’d be furious. Or sorry, or something.’
    ‘But you wouldn’t feel the same for somebody else whose home’s being destroyed?’
    ‘Neither would you,’ she said.
    ‘Not so strongly, perhaps.’
    He argued, and she talked. It was like trying to run a private race against a cripple. She hobbled; he sprinted. When he passed the post, she was elsewhere so that the victory meant nothing, went unobserved. An emotional cripple, that’s what this beautiful girl was. He liked the expression but kept his mouth shut. As usual he did not believe himself.
    Excited he returned to Ibsen, who hadn’t made his Nora convincing. She’d suffered shock, at her husband’s self-righteous anger, but that seemed hardly enough to cause her to fly off in the middle of the night, out into a cold, man’s world to fend for herself. ‘She’d damned soon find out,’ Fisher said, finger-nail tapping