Jerusalem the Golden Read Online Free PDF Page A

more than me? I never come to this theatre, I hate this theatre, I hate experimental plays.’
    ‘Does it do experimental plays?’ asked Clara.
    ‘Of course it does,’ said Clelia. ‘How ever did you manage not to know that? You must have known it.’
    ‘I didn’t know it,’ said Clara. ‘And now you see that I can substantiate my disadvantage.’
    ‘I should call such ignorance a positive
blessing
,’ said Clelia. ‘But I take your point. Wherever can you come from?’
    ‘I come from Northam,’ said Clara. ‘It’s a town in Yorkshire. But at the moment I’m at the University. At Queen’s College.’
    ‘Ah,’ said Clelia. ‘I see. You’re reading English.’
    ‘No, I’m not,’ said Clara.
    ‘Then whyever, if I may ask without being rude, did you come to this thing? I can never understand why anyone comes to these things.’
    ‘I came with Peter. Peter de Salis.’
    ‘Oh, I
see
,’ said Clelia.
    ‘I don’t suppose you do,’ said Clara, feeling that she should make her relationship with Peter clear, and not quite liking the tone which Clelia adopted towards her escort.
    ‘Oh,’ said Clelia, correcting herself, delicately correcting her intonation, ‘Oh yes, I see.’
    ‘He just thought I would be interested,’ said Clara.
    ‘And were you?’
    ‘Yes, I was interested. I was interested to meet you,’ said Clara. Clelia put her comb back in her bag and pulled her skirt straight, but not disinterestedly, on the contrary, as though something had been settled between them.
    ‘I must be going,’ she said. ‘The buses take so long. And the baby really does wake. Though I was lying when I said Martin doesn’t hear it, he always hears it, but he can’t kind of do anything with it when it wakes.’
    ‘It isn’t your baby?’ said Clara, following her back through the corridors towards the bar.
    ‘No, it’s not really,’ said Clelia, ‘but I feel kind of responsible for it. Sometimes I pretend it’s mine. But if it were, I wouldn’t call it it, would I? Poor little thing. It’s a he, really.’
    ‘How old is he?’ said Clara.
    ‘I’m not exactly sure,’ said Clelia. ‘Somewhere in the nine-month range, I imagine. Look,’ she added, ‘if you give me your address when we get back there, I’ll give you a ring, and you must come and see me and I’ll tell you about it.’
    And when they got back to the bar, Clara did indeed inscribe her name and address and Common Room telephone number upon a page of Clelia’s unbelievably occupied diary; they had no time to exchange further intimacies, as Sebastian Denham was there and waiting to drive his daughter home, and ready to be annoyed by the delay that she had caused him.
    ‘I haven’t got your number,’ said Clara, as she departed. ‘Oh, mine,’ said Clelia, ‘it’s in the book.’
    And Clara, living as she did, in the floating insubstantial bed-sitter student world, had not so much as thought of the book. It seemed
very wonderful to her, that people could live in London, and live there long enough to have a number in the book.
    And as she went home that night she knew that she was sure that Clelia would at some point ring her. She knew, moreover, that she had found something that she had been looking for, and that events would prove the significance of her discovery: she wondered only at the means of her recognition. The fact of it never ceased to astound her, and she would return over the ground constantly, searching for marks, for tracks and breaths and sighs and trodden grass and names and cloudy indications, because she could not forget that she had not recognized it at once, that it had required on her part some keenness of perception, some chancy courage, to see it: and she breathed perpetually an air of terror, a cold air of chance, an air in which she might for the whole of her life have missed it, marginally perhaps, but missed it and for ever.

2
    Because there was nothing in Clara’s past that would seem to have