The Sleeping Beauty Read Online Free PDF Page A

wide sleeves, was brought up sharply by his pausing there;
felt
before
saw
him, jerked up her head and, as he turned, stumbled into his arms. He felt her own arms folded across her breast, for she could not disentangle them to thrust him away. Stepping back, to steady her he touched her shoulder for an instant. His apology was hesitant. He forced his lips to move as he looked down at her face, which was white in the shadow of her hood and of a perfect, even beauty; mask-like and, in the gathering dusk, terrifying.
    Her bare hand drew the hood closer to her cheeks and her sleeve fell back to show her thin wrist and forearm. He felt her shoulder move impatiently as if to shake off his hand, then she hurried forward, across the sands to the cliff-steps – the steps he had watched her climb the evening before. Her straightness,the hands in her sleeves, he recognised at once. What he had not been able to imagine had been the strange quality of her beauty, its faultlessness and blank terror.
    He walked back under the cliff. The sea was so far out in the bay and the air so silent that he felt wary; he had an impression of her standing quite still on the steps watching him. Although he tried hard not to look, after a while he turned his head. She was going slowly up the steps and had almost reached the top. Her hood hung from her shoulders now and he could see her dark hair. He turned right round and stood still, hoping that the cliff’s shadow obscured him, that he would become – to her, if she glanced down – one with the rocks. At the very top of the steps she paused and he drew back until he touched cold seaweed. The wind lifted her hair away from her face and he could see her pale hand against her coat. He could not visualise again the earlier moment when he had touched her and spoken to her; but he remembered that she had not answered him or added an apology to his.
    Pacing the sands more and more slowly, because unwilling to return to Isabella, he tried to go back over that experience; but failed. He could only feel the shock of, the inexplicable recoil from, her beauty – as if a moth had brushed his cheek and terror had driven him to beat it off; a terror ridiculous, instinctive and humiliating.
    Nearing fifty, Vinny felt more than ever the sweet disappointments only a romantic knows, whose very desires invite frustration; who loves twilight rather than midday, the echo more than the voice, the moon more than the sun, and women better than men; adoring all scarcely-revealed things; insinuations, whispers; eyes veiled, landscapes veiled; the imperfectly remembered and the half-anticipated. Past and future to him were the realities; the present dull, meaningless, only significant if, as now, going back along the sands, he could say to himself:‘Later on, I shall remember.’ To link his favourite tenses in such a phrase was to him the exhalation of romance, and the fact that such phrases had preceded all his disappointments, heralded all the counterfeit and treachery he had worked or suffered, could not detract from its magic. He disdained to learn from so drab a teacher as Experience.
    When he reached Isabella’s little house by the pier, he saw Laurence come to the parlour window to draw the curtains. Although, with the light of the room behind him, he could not have seen Vinny out in the dark, his gesture seemed insolent, and the drawn curtains an affront.
    Laurence continued to be exclusive for the rest of the evening, so that his act of drawing the curtains became symbolic to Vinny, who seldom in his life had been up against just such an unrelaxed dislike in a person. Other people, thinking: ‘We cannot all take to one another,’ would turn from or return the antagonism; but Vinny did not: he grieved. It was his business to be loved – a mission created afresh with everyone he met – and he was always conscious of another’s coldness. Uneasily, he would be aware. He could not work his magic.
    That anyone so in