Mansfield with Monsters Read Online Free PDF Page A

like this… Now my best little Teneriffe-work teacloth is simply in ribbons. What is that extraordinary smell? It’s like shellfish and old socks. Oh, heavens, this wind!”
    She has a music lesson at ten o’clock. At the thought the minor movement of the Beethoven begins to play in her head, the trills long and terrible like little rolling drums… Marie Swainson runs into the garden next door to pick the ‘chrysanths’ before they are ruined. Her skirt flies up above her waist; she tries to beat it down, to tuck it between her legs while she stoops, but it is no use—up it flies. Matilda stares at her through the window and wonders what it would be like to be a normal girl, to live without the fear of the ocean and wind claiming her forever. No one escapes the wind.
    â€œFor heaven’s sake keep the front door shut! Go round to the back,” shouts someone.
    And then she hears Bogey: “Mother, you’re wanted on the telephone. Telephone, Mother. It’s the butcher.”
    The butcher. All that sliced, long-dead meat. Nothing fresh, nothing wriggling. How hideous life is—revolting, simply revolting… And now her hat-elastic’s snapped. Of course it would. She’ll wear her old tam and slip out the back way. But Mother has seen.
    â€œMatilda. Matilda. Come back im-me-diately! What on earth have you got on your head? It looks like a tea cosy. And why have you got that mane of hair over your forehead.”
    She brushes her mother’s hand away. The force of it frightens her mother. She can see it in her eyes. But it would be worse for her to see the patch of scales on Matilda’s forehead that hasn’t changed back this time.
    She hurries away down the hall. “I can’t come back, Mother. I’ll be late for my lesson.”
    â€œCome back immediately!”
    She won’t. She won’t. She hates Mother. “Go to hell,” she shouts, running out the door. Bogey is in the garden, hair whipping in the wind. He smiles at her.
    â€œWasn’t last night delicious?” he asks. He closes his eyes and tastes the wind, his tongue slipping over his lips in quick, darting movements.
    â€œYou know I hate it,” Matilda protests. The transformation has always been terrifying and painful for her. Bogey has never seemed to resist it.
    â€œI heard them, Maddie. In the deep, calling to us. The time for us to go to them is coming.” Bogey opens his eyes and there is something cold, unblinking in his stare.
    â€œI have to go,” says Matilda, the wind tearing at her. She has heard the voices from the deep too, but she cannot remember them, will not let herself remember.
    â€œSoon,” Bogey calls after her as Matilda flies down the road. “It’s almost time.”
    In waves, in clouds, in big round whirls the dust comes stinging, and with it little bits of straw and chaff and manure. There is a loud roaring sound from the trees in the gardens, and standing at the bottom of the road outside Mr Bullen’s gate she can hear the sea sob: “Ah!… Ah!… Ah-h!” The pull. It wants her close. It wants her to change, to claim her once more. But Mr Bullen’s drawing-room is as quiet as a cave. The windows are closed, the blinds half-pulled, and she is not late. The-girl-before-her has just started playing MacDowell’s “To an Iceberg”. Mr Bullen looks over at her and half smiles.
    â€œSit down,” he says. “Sit over there in the sofa corner, little lady.”
    How funny he is. He doesn’t exactly laugh at you… but there is just something… Oh, how peaceful it is here. She likes this room. The wind cannot reach her in here. It smells of art serge and stale smoke and chrysanthemums. There is a big vase of the bushy flowers on the mantel-piece behind the pale photograph of Rubinstein. Over the black glittering piano hangs “Solitude”—a dark tragic woman