The Clay Dreaming Read Online Free PDF Page A

company.
    Her great fear, on the train journey there, had been that whatever she might say would seem too trivial, and yet nothing could match what she had lately endured. To be made so suddenly self-conscious was an awful thing.
    The birds stayed silent, and the bees too. The humid heat could not suppress vibrant hues of leaf and petal. Doubly blessed, their responsibilities stretched to little more than looking pretty and inspiring calm.
    Looking down, Sarah considered her miserable outfit – sufficient for a funeral perhaps, but never the impending party. She suddenly despised her appearance – that very thing she had come, over the years, to think nothing of.
    Sarah’s girlhood had effectively ended the night her mother died, half a lifetime ago.
    ‘You are the woman of the house now.’
    She had awoken the next morning to those very words. The words with which her father chose to inform were his only consolation. Overnight, a woman, even while her body and mind struggled to catch up. What that meant, in purely practical terms of course, was that Sarah became the housekeeper, with a helping hand from Mrs Beeton’s invaluable little book. In very short order it had fallen to her to assume control of the household’s tidy function.
    Always and forevermore, her mother, Frances, would be the angel of the house. And a hollowed place it was in which to keep on living. There, the good daughter learnt her life’s lesson – to settle for being less.
    The first years following their sudden loss were close to unbearable. As the only real survivor of that night, Sarah gained the strength sufficient to stay weak, obliged to take on her new role, as ‘an helpmeet’. It was not good that the man should be alone. She must be willing to crouch, to place the slipper on her father’s foot – it was the least she could do.
    And if her own girlish feet were thereby bound, in the Chinese fashion, then she herself had allowed it: for the greater good; for the sake of peace; to please.
    Gently she cradled the heads of flowering blooms – camellias and lilies, wilting – listening all the while to the distant gurgle of the cascade, that delightful water feature across the front road.
    She should not resent the other ladies so much. In adulthood as in childhood, society required that genteel womenfolk fill their idle hours with harmless amusement – a ‘pass-time’, so-called: music, or drawing – anything so long as it was of no real consequence. She could not begrudge her poor father his demands of her exclusive attention.
    Sarah let the crisped bulb fall in a shower of petals.
    She was briefly courted when young – younger: a single suitor had made serious approaches, seeking her father’s permission. Lambert had turned him aside, citing lack of prospects. In paraphrase of the tract he shortly after tasked her to transcribe, an imprudent marriage might have taken its ill effect ‘On Posterity’. It was prosperity rather that occupied his mind, so she felt – and said as much when the time came, deliberately misreading the text back to him. He hadn’t commented.
    As for the disappointed young man, he had undertaken mission work in the colonies, soon to die from an extreme tropical malady. Or so she told herself. Either way, she had never heard from him again.
    This wound was old, however; the ‘pangs of dispriz’d love’ soon dimmed. Her infatuation had been but brief, and, Sarah decided, she had not loved. What, anyway, was love? As the Queen’s own chaplain had only just recently decreed, from the chapel at Windsor Castle: ‘The spirit of romance is dead.’ It was official.
    When it came to responsible womanhood, none less than Victoria Regina served as every feminine ideal: devoted wife and indulgent mother, a widow so dedicated in mourning that she had not been seen in public in years.
    Sarah could hear voices from within the house, calling her name – the first guests must be arriving. Turning too quickly, she