Song at Twilight Read Online Free PDF Page A

left I felt a sense of relief at having my house to myself again, but I supposed that I had alleviated his loneliness. I glanced at the snowdrops he had brought. They were delicate single ones. I fussed around the kitchen for a while, tidying up my lunch and the coffee cups, and wondered what to do next. I didn't feel like going back to my writing and neither did I really want to go for a walk. So I told Pansy that she would have to forgo her walk. Dear Pansy is so philosophical – she accepted her fate like an angel. Perhaps I would lie down, but for some reason I felt restless and uneasy. Eric had interrupted the tenor of my day. He really was quite an intrusive person.
    *
    I did not teach Timothy Hooper until he was in his second year at Blenkinsop's. 
    When he returned to school after those first summer holidays I was quite surprised by the change that had come over the boy. In only two months he had grown considerably taller, his voice had just begun to break and his pristine complexion was marred by acne, and yet he seemed rather better looking than before, or would have been had he managed to walk with a more self-confident air, with his shoulders back as they were when he sang in the choir. I wondered how he had spent the holidays and how his pretty little mother had entertained him.
    For my own part I was glad to be back at school after the long holiday which I had mostly spent redecorating my kitchen, although I did stay for a week with Victor and Patricia and went for another week to Normandy with a woman friend of mine, a former maths teacher at Blenkinsop's.
    I have to admit that I had a most peculiar feeling of expectation and mild excitement at the prospect of teaching Timothy's class. I felt, in some sort of way, as though I already had an understanding and a certain intimacy with the boy, although I wonder if at that stage he had any awareness at all of my own identity.
    So it was with a certain feeling of trepidation that I entered that classroom for the first time that Autumn Term. There were nineteen children in the class and they were divided almost evenly into girls and boys. Some of the girls I had already taught at Doble's, but they had changed a great deal since then.
    This was a class of fourteen-year-olds, and in it most of the girls were made up in a way that jarred extraordinarily with their school uniform, although I have observed that only very young schoolgirls make themselves up in that particularly ridiculous fashion. I wondered then at the adolescent male libido which was supposed to be provoked by so brash and yet so false a display of female charms.
    Not that the young males were any more appealing. Except for Timothy. It seemed to me that although most of them were not exactly large, their bodies took up too much room. They spread their thighs in an aggressive, arrogant manner, pushed and pulled at each other like young puppies, and often smelt. They showed off to the girls who, in their turn, showed off to the boys and I wondered, as I often did in those days, how I was ever going to capture the attention of any one of them in order to instil in them the least understanding of the refinements of French grammar.
    Timothy sat at the back of the class. He was quite quiet. The boy with whom I had seen him so often the year before was not there. He must have been in a different set. I wondered if they were still friends.
    As the term progressed I found that Timothy, as other teachers had already told me, was attentive and reliable, but by no means brilliant. Although he was quiet, he was not unapproachably introverted so I do not know what it was about him that gave me a very strong impression of loneliness. Perhaps I even imagined it at that stage. I had, after all, developed a mild fascination for this boy and perhaps I invested him with feelings and thoughts which he did not have. In any case I felt a warm sympathy for him. So much so, that I found myself minding what he thought about me