Let her be lonely, bother her, there is no such thing as loneliness with a great grey fur rug over your knees. No, there is no such thing as loneliness curled into one corner of a mammoth car, there were no cars like this, how did this come here, great car like a conqueror’s chariot and the wind through the open hood and the world outside made perfect, perfected, and made proportionate to perfection. What do I mean? Why do the trees look so different for they do. It must be just the sheer human perspective but this is luxury and we have all forgotten luxury, we have lived in ditches, for years and years and our lives were light things, pinned lightly to our coats, our brown, fawn brown and horizon blue jackets, tunics, they called them, flowers to be worn lightly, to be tossed away. I have lived so long with trees, with trees that I don’t know what to think, feel like some captured hamadryad under this pelt, this great pelt, how primitive the wealthy are, how primitive this is, rolling on and on and on and the roads are all narrower than they ever were when I walked them, scrambling over the ditches, catching a cluster of red berries to stand in the corner of the clean little hut. All the roads are different. I have no time to remember that that corner held the great orange shaft of late autumn lily that had escaped from the nearby cottage and this is the Tinkers Arms where I stopped that rainy afternoon for tea. Solitude, splendour with a little book in my pocket, tea steaming, “yes, I am here for a few months, my husband is in France. I know Miss Drake.” The country, the country, every inch of it was measurable, English country, being kind to her, why were they kind to her? They were kind in Cornwall, here they were kind to her. Morgan le Fay, great autumn lily wandered from a garden, what are you doing, lover of luxury in these woods, orange lily, glowing with fire, kissed of the fire, in some wood, some beech forest? What are you doing, Morgan le Fay? Drag the pelt over you. It’s getting late. Soon real winter. Prolonged autumn with dark evenings. Sense of mystery in England. England is all a mirage, love it — love it as you love a dream, a place for ghosts, for phantoms, for throw-backs, Morgan le Fay. They were always kind to you in England, I don’t know why, for people say it is a hateful country, why were they so kind? Morgan le Fay, smile Morganlefayishly. . “yes, I loved the drive over. No, not cold.” House full of odd things, chippendale, old hall, was she living here? Don’t ask. What is the weird child doing here? Why didn’t she say something, say “my father paid a billion billion pounds — for that car,” why wasn’t she communicative, say, “I bought this dress at—” but where had she bought the dress? Hermione couldn’t quite “place” the dress. Where had she found the dress, it was too old for her, her shoes weren’t right. Who had dressed her, head pulled forward by the huge coils of braided hair, tea brought in, she was clumsy with the tea-cups. “O let me help you,” but what a thing to say, never met her but once, asking to pour her tea, that hieratic ceremony. The child held the huge tea-pot in small unbelievably fine little hands, hands too small, too small for anything, head too heavy and hands too delicate, too small. Head and hands don’t match, what is the matter with her? Her head is too big, her hands are too small, her eyes are far, far too blue. . “do you — do you — paint?” “O paint—” The girl put down the heavy tea-pot, turned eyes that were far too blue on eyes that were grey and green and somehow coming back (Hermione felt this) to some indoor perspective. “Paint — what made you ask it?” “Your hands — I don’t know — something in the way your eyes stare—” O lovely room, last stray bit of sun, like a gold gauze of fine web falling, filtered through trees outside between drawn beautiful curtains. Little waif, are you a le Fay too? What is this family that seeks its own, brothers and sisters, lost people? Vane had been so dear in Cornwall, was it her fault, her own lack of patience that had lost him? Sister, brother. What were these hectic relationships, this Louise-Darrington alliance, for instance, what did it know, what could it know of these things, these inevitable kinships of the spirit?
Stark colour broke across an old room, gone dim with light fallen to gold-grey, fallen to grey with the hint of gold that under clouds at sun-set throw over grey water, gone to grey water. . the room was filled with grey water from which odd knobs and handles and the flank of a candle-stick emerged, streaked in the water-grey like metallic gilt sun-fish, flicking here and there fin or under-belly, flicking colour, metallic from and-irons, the claw foot of a table, the reflected fire-light in a polished bowl and the stark upright shafts of hot-house carnations (she had not noticed them before) white wax spikes that glowed now, gave uncommon frost and winter and artificiality to the interior that up till now had been just the web and comfort of a big country room with the firelight and the inexpressible comfort of the great arm-chair after the camp-chairs, deck-chairs and the low crude (but so dear) foot stools of the little cabin shelter. Carnations. “How did they get there?” “What — where?” “I hadn’t noticed the carnations till the sun faded and they glowered out wax-white, taper-white, I hadn’t noticed the scent, now it comes over me, so spiced, so cold, so hieratic in this room that smells of logs, of tea, of comfort, of pot-pourri, I noticed that when I first came in.” “We always have carnations — dada loves them.” “O dada.” Then there was a dada. Who was this dada? My dada paid a billion pounds for the car (but she hadn’t said it). Which car? An emperior. He was Tiberius obviously. “Is your (if you will forgive me) ‘dada,’ Tiberius?” Was it possible that the child could laugh? It seemed so. High, clear, the voice of a boy laughing over a fish that has fallen from his line that he with some arrogant and unexpected gesture has caught back, flung into the net as it was just escaping. The laugh lit the room with the same metallic glamour, the slight note of discord, like clear tropic fish beating up out of grey water. “You don’t seem altogether — English.” This was the sort of thing one never said nowadays. She oughtn’t to have said it. “You see, being myself really American—” would excuse everything, every lapse and the faux pas of intimating anybody wasn’t English in this time. “O but we are — we aren’t—” “I thought so. I mean I thought you were — you weren’t. What (if I’m not being curious) are you?” “Dad has boats. Now not so many. A hundred have been lost. We were always in Egypt in the winter—” “You were born then in Egypt?” “No — nearly though in Naples—” “Ah — Naples—” Under trees flowering with the locust blossom, that sweet honey and salt of the sea and the salt and the weeds lying against the break-water and the odd wrong songs, the bella Lucia and the atrocious Verdi. “Naples—” The word prolonged into the odd interior, the grey water from which the fin of a brass candle-stick, the flick of the back of a cigarette box or the bright ivory worked on the polished idol she just now noticed, made eccentric Chinese, tropical odd comment on the very greyness. Pot pourri-like incense and the heady sharp stinging sweetness of the staunch white taper of the hot-house winter carnation. . room full of subtlety yet strength, odd comment on the world, on the war. How had she ever come here? In the room against the sheer north grey and the more obvious erratic Chinese, tropical glint of fish-fin that was the candle-stick and knob of something that was the crystal glass knob of something that was the crystal substance of some delicate jelly-fish, more obvious European, classic colour obtruded. Naples? Names, people, names. Naples. Atrocious sound of Verdi, Bella Lucia. Blue, blue, blue. “Why is it that one immediately thinks of stark blue, thick blue that you can cut with a knife when one says Naples?” Someone from somewhere had switched on a light but it didn’t matter and the light was modified from where she sat by the heavy idol on the table, by the sprays of tall upstanding stark wax-taper of the white carnation. Someone was moving forward, gathering up the tray but it didn’t matter. It was the sort of someone that would do things like that so they wouldn’t be noticed, could go on talking, even about Naples. “Stark, stark blue. Why is it?”