The Green Knight Read Online Free PDF Page B

curtains to open the window slightly (for she liked fresh air at night) had also seen the man whom she had seen near the house twice before. She turned out the light, returned to the window and continued to watch him. He was a tall robust man wearing a trilby hat and a mackintosh, just folding up his green umbrella. He certainly did seem to be watching the house. She closed the curtains, turned on the lamp and prepared for bed. She put on her nightdress. Raising her arms to put on her nightdress gave her a strange feeling of being young again, a young girl, feeling a strange solitary thrill of vulnerability, going to bed and dreaming of marriage. Marriage, she thought. But I’m all confused. Marriage is in the past. I was married. Besides, even when I was a young girl I didn’t really think about that . It came suddenly out of the blue, suddenly like a storm wind. And now it’s all over and I shall grow old.
    Later, silence reigned in the house. The man was gone. Louise turned out the light. She dreamt that it was her wedding day and that she was dressed in black. She was in a room waiting for her bridegroom whom she had never seen. She kept saying aloud, ‘How terrible! I’m late, I’m late.’ The door opened slowly and a man in a black trilby hat and a black mackintosh stood outside. As he beckoned her to follow him, she felt a violent thrill like an electric shock. She thought, but this is not my wedding day , this is that other day. She ran sobbing in darkness, stumbling over black obstacles, the humped backs of animals; and she thought and they are dead too. Downstairs Sefton, not yet undressed, was thinking about Hannibal’s tactics at the battle of Cannae, and pressing yellow gingko leaves between the pages of her Liddell and Scott. In the little room opposite Louise’s room Aleph, in her long cotton nightdress, dark blue with little white flowers, was looking at herself in the mirror. She smiled faintly at herself, then by the tiniest movements of her face dissolved the smile into a pensive pout, then into an ugly demented gasp. Her teeth captured the fullness of her lower lip, her nose wrinkled, her eyes narrowed and filled with tears. She thought, it’s a mask – and sometimes the mask is so heavy, and it is pulling me to the ground where I shall lie face downward. Perhaps this was a dream which I had and then forgot. Strange thoughts were in Aleph’s head. She knelt down beside the bed, lifting the hem of her long nightdress and spreading it out around her. She knelt there for some time, open-eyed, breathing deeply. In the attic above, in her nightdress, dark red and voluminous, Moy was standing beside her bed. Over the bed hung the picture of her beloved, the Polish Rider. He was looking, with his authoritative pensive mouth and his calm wide-apart eyes, past Moy, over her left shoulder and away into some vast distance. He was a knight upon a quest. He was brave, innocent, chaste, good. But Moy was looking now, not at her hero, but at where her grotesque ugly flint stones were arranged upon a shelf. She was gazing at one stone in particular, golden brown, shapeless as crushed brown paper. She moved, reaching out her hand towards it. After a moment the stone shifted slightly, it rocked, then slid evenly forward off the shelf and through the air into her open hand. Moy knew about poltergeists and why, or at any rate when, they were present. She had said nothing to the others, but had, by investigative hinting, satisfied herself that she was the only one to whom the ambiguous gift had been given. She accepted it as. a strange not unfriendly presence or form of being which joined her life with the life of things. Only sometimes, for it had various manifestations, it frightened her.
    She put the stone, warmed and reassured by her hand, back on the shelf. She had, as usual, brought Anax’s basket up from the Aviary, and put it in a corner where she could see it from her