The Intimates Read Online Free PDF

of iced tea with the sun on her face, I felt I had entered a world of elegance which I could only be privy to by possessing some talent. I knew then that over the course of the party I would try to find a way to permanently inhabit this world. I suspected that by giving me a glimpse of what success might offer, Francoise had encouraged such rumination. As the gates closed behind me, sealing away my problems for one glorious evening, Georgina waved a tennis racket in my direction and Francoise peered up from the wide rim of her summer hat; I instantly felt lighter.
    That afternoon, watched by Francoise's cool maternal gaze, Georgina and I reclaimed The Fountains. We played tennis on the mossy and overgrown court with battered rackets, ducking and diving over the drooping net and blasting winning shots into the overgrowth of trees that surrounded it. We found abandoned chalets at the end of the grounds, filled with decaying newspapers left by the previous owner, which Francoise had doubtless been too laconic to remove. As we circled a forgotten tree house in a wooded copse Georgina notes that ‘Francoise has probably never even bothered to walk through the grounds. She would have seen a few charming photos of it, in a carefully designed flier, and fallen in love with the hallway'. I had to concede that she was probably right.
    The Fountains had its own voice that seemed to breathe from every corner. The more overgrown and neglected it revealed itself to be, the more that voice grew pronounced, steady and assuring. The Fountains was full of secrets, and however hard we tried to see every corner of it, it became increasingly apparent that it was too ephemeral a place to cover. As our time there progressed, more and more of it was alluded to until it seemed bigger than any of us. I would think we had seen every inch of it, just to find out about another corner essential to its essence. Like the feeling of success it evoked, The Fountains was a place where timeless resonance was taken for granted.
    Francoise's butler had been looking for us for half an hour before he was able to call us inside to dress for dinner. Georgina and I had taken the iced tea Francoise had offered and lain by an empty swimming pool at the foot of the garden. In the afternoon sun the walls of the pool were coloured by precise maps of algae. Nonetheless, Georgina found it charming and she insisted that we unbutton our shirts and lay on our backs beside it. We looked up at the clouds and played our favourite childhood game, trying to find random shapes within each of them. At first I had resisted relaxing there, thinking there was something tragic and uneasy about the pool.
    The same feeling returned to me as Georgina led me into the garden, which was this time cloaked in darkness. I couldn't help feeling uncertain about entering it at night, even following someone that I knew as intimately as her.
    Georgina lifts her dress as she steps a few paces in front of me. As we draw nearer I see that each of the seven sculptures have been made to depict one of The Intimates.
    “Have you seen this?” she asks. “Only Francoise would think of doing something like this for her guests. Which one is supposed to be me?”
    The iced version of James clenches a paint brush, every limb of his elongated to the point of caricature, making him seem made purely of sinew and muscle. The sculpture of Barbara is pressing her hand to the skin above her bosom, her mouth open wide in rapture, as if she is embracing the adulation of an audience. Georgina stares directly into the face of her mothers sculpture. “No, still nothing behind the eyes.”
    We weave in and out of the silver steam emanating from each precisely chiselled form, Georgina posing and laughing as she loops her arm through Francoise's model, a picture of Gallic poise, taller than the rest. Graham's statue holds aloft two surgical knives, and appears ready to plummet them back into the prostrate torso of some