Isobel on the Way to the Corner Shop Read Online Free PDF Page A

everything at the middle distance. When he looked at her, he saw a girl who lived in an attic and wrote—how romantic. How she would like to be the thing that Robbie saw.
    ‘Will you come over? There’s somebody who wants to meet you. Stephen Hines, he does some reviewing for the
Herald
besides lecturing in English.’
    He took her arm and drew her away from the bowl of nuts. She came with her eyebrows raised in surprise. She did know of Stephen Hines. The name had a life of its own, and, crossing the room with Robbie, she was creating an image to match it. The image deflated in a soft fizzle of laughter at the sight of him, a little slip of a man, so young in face and in figure that the even grey of his hair and his beard looked as if it had been applied from a bottle in an effort to achieve a mature and dignified appearance.
    He was listening to an emphatic speech from a big, bony girl perched like a raven on the arm of a chair which was occupied by a smaller, more graceful girl who bent her neat ballerina head as she listened with attention to the pair.
    ‘But Stephen, symbolism is acceptable when it is the only possible language to convey meaning. It isn’t a mere enhancement of the commonplace. It’s for something that can’t be said in any other way.’
    ‘You have something there.’
    He paused as they came within speaking range.
    ‘Here she is, then,’ said Robbie. ‘Isobel, this is Stephen Hines. Isobel Callaghan.’
    Stephen Hines’s deeply serious expression seemed, like the colour of his hair, to be an attempt at gravitas. In spite of it, he looked like a pixie.
    ‘I was very impressed by a story of yours in
Seminal
. About the survivor of a suicide pact.’
    She nodded.
    ‘“Meet me there”.’
    ‘You write with great power.’
    ‘Thank you.’
    ‘What made you choose such a subject?’
    Made fretful by hunger, she answered sharply, ‘I don’t choose subjects. They choose me.’
    ‘That’s an interesting observation. I suppose subjects do choose writers, but I wouldn’t have expected a writer to say so. Do you think that is a good thing?’
    ‘It’s rather limiting. Depends on one’s range, I suppose. I’d like to be able to venture outside my limitations.’
    ‘If you can write about a suicide pact and make it so convincing—but so unexpected, the happiness of that pair constructing an afterlife that will give them everything the world has denied them, such an air of play about it—I don’t think your limits are very narrow.’
    Isobel said, ‘Sometimes the extreme things are easier. Ordinary things can be most difficult.’
    She looked across at the young couple on the divan, sitting now side by side, heads bent, talking quietly together.
    ‘That boy and girl,’ she said. ‘I suppose they aren’t planning suicide.’
    ‘Not by the look of them, no.’
    He gave up dignity at that and grinned a pixie grin.
    ‘But…how do they…’ she tried for a word, ‘how do they communicate? That ought to be easy, but it isn’t.’
    The raven girl came to her help.
    ‘You mean the love talk. I can see the difficulty. What one may say in life would sound pretty foolish in fiction.’
    ‘It’s for the moment only,’ agreed Stephen.
    ‘But if it’s my business to catch the moment,’ said Isobel.
    ‘Yes, we can see the problem, but we can’t solve it for you. It’s unfortunate that it is when one is expressing one’s sincerest feelings that one sounds most artificial.’
    The ballerina girl spoke.
    ‘The artificial can sound sincere enough. Remember Romeo and Juliet and the saints and palmers. That rings true, all right.’
    ‘I think you may be right, Judith. Love seeks disguise. It is always literature.’
    ‘One dresses the naked feeling in symbols.’
    ‘What was that, Sybil, about enhancing the commonplace?’
    ‘If you think it commonplace, Stephen, you have lived a very interesting life.’
    ‘Touché!’
    Stephen laughed very heartily.
    Isobel had her mind on