Sugar and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

every century, Renaissance, Classical, Victorian, Art Nouveau, on satin cushion covers. If you went to see her you took her a present of white satin to work on. She liked heavy bridal satin best. She liked the creamy whites and could never take to the new glaring whites in the nylon satins. When she was eighty-five the local paper had an article in it about her marvellous work, and a photograph of Auntie Florrie in her little sitting-room, sitting upright amongst all the white rectangles of her needlework, draped on all the furniture. Aunt Florrie still wore a woven crown of her own thinning hair. She had a good neighbour, Emily’s mother said, who came in and did for her. She couldn’t do much work, now, though. The arthritis had got her hands.
    After Miss Crichton-Walker’s little talk, Emily began to cry. For the first half-hour of the crying she herself thought that it was just a nervous reaction, a kind of irritation, because she was so strung-up for the next day’s examination, and that it would soon stop. She cried at first rather noisily in a subterranean locker-room, swaying to and fro and gasping a little, squatting on a bench above a metal cage containing a knot of canvas hockey boots and greying gym shoes. When bed-time came, she thought she oughtto stop crying now, she had had her time of release and respite. She must key herself up again. She crept sniffing out into the upper corridors, where Flora Marsh met her and remarked kindly that she looked to be in a bad way. At this Emily gave a great howl, like a wounded creature, and alarmed Flora by staggering from side to side of the corridor as though her sense of balance were gone. Flora could get no sense out of her: Emily was dumb: Flora said perhaps she should go to the nursery, which was what they called the sick bay, should see Sister. After all, they had A-level Latin the next day, she needed her strength. Emily allowed herself to be led through the already-darkened school corridors, moaning a little, thinking, inside her damp and sobbing head in a lucid tic-tac, that she was like an ox, no, like a heifer it would have to be, like Keats’s white heifer in the Grecian urn … lowing at the skies … Dusty round white lamps hung cheerlessly from metal chains.
    Sister was a small, wiry, sensible widow in a white coat and flat rubber-soled shoes. She made Emily a cup of Ovaltine, and put her into an uncomfortable but friendly cane armchair, where Emily went on crying. It became clear to all three of them that there was no prospect of Emily ceasing to cry. The salt tears flooded and filmed her eyes, brimmed over and ran in wet sheets down her face, flowing down her neck in cold streamlets, soaking her collar. The tic-tac in Emily’s mind thought of the death of Seneca, the life simply running away, warm and wet, the giving-up. Sister sent Flora Marsh to fetch Emily’s things, and Emily, moving her arms like a poor swimmer in thick water, put on her nightdress and climbed into a high hospital bed in the nursery, a hard, cast-iron headed bed, with white cotton blankets. The tears, now silent, darkened and gathered in the pillow. Emily put her knees up to her chin and turned her back on Sister, who pulled back some wet hair, out of her nightdress collar. What has upset her, Sister asked Flora Marsh. Flora didn’t know, unless it was something the Headmistress had said. Emily heard them at a huge distance, minute in a waste of waters. Would she be fit to take herexams, Flora asked, and Sister replied, with a night’s sleep.
    Emily was double. The feeling part had given up, defeated, abandoned to the bliss of dissolution. The thinking part chattered away toughly, tapping out pentameters and alexandrines with and against the soothing flow of the tears. The next morning the feeling part, still watery, accepted tea and toast shakily from Sister; the thinking part looked out craftily from the cavern behind the glistening eyes and stood up, and dressed, and