A Sort of Life by Graham Greene Read Free Book Online Page B

comfort’ I sought even at that age. It was some years before I was again so sexually moved by a play, and then it was at Christopher Sly . The beautiful actress who played with Matheson Lang and was his wife wore a long white silk nightdress which proved just as exciting as the animal skins.
    When we went to London we usually had lunch with a retired colonel of the Indian Army called Henry Wright and his wife, our great-aunt Maud, at 11, Belgrave Road – always known to me as Number 11. Maud had introduced Robert Louis Stevenson to his first great love, Mrs Sitwell, who was tied to an unwanted alcoholic husband, but that, of course, meant nothing to me then. It was the vast chamberpot produced after lunch from the side-board cupboard by Colonel Wright, a relic of Victorian manners, which impressed me. He was my godfather, a bluff man, bearded like Edward VII, who walked with the help of sticks because of gout, I suspect, though he claimed to my brother Raymond that he had a cork leg. Before we left for the theatre he held out a hand to each of us concealing a half-crown piece. He died during the First World War and left me a gold watch. My mother sold it for five pounds and put the money for me into war-savings; for more than a quarter of a century afterwards this was my only inheritance.
    In later years, after Colonel Wright’s death, we were always taken to the Florence Restaurant in Soho, where to my constant surprise a black man in Oriental costume brought the coffee. I wasn’t allowed coffee and I was always afraid we would not get to the theatre before the curtain rose. Grown-ups seemed slow at eating and drinking and too blasé about the theatre to be safe companions, particularly my uncle Graham if he happened to make one of the party. I had the unhappy impression that he had come to see his family and not the play.
    Qualities most admired in men . My favourite and youngest uncle, Frank, the only uncle on my mother’s side of the Greenes, was tall and good-looking and intellectual. I used to see very little of him at this time except at Christmas which he spent with us. I felt shy ofhim. He understood me too well, and though I liked him, he was a danger to my privacy. He was a civil servant in the Board of Education and he married the daughter of Doctor Todhunter, the Irish poet, when I was about seven. He was the most literary-minded of all my uncles and aunts and he liked walking. When I was older, he, Raymond and I would go on foot to Boxing-day meets of a local pack, and to this day, as I write, I can feel the hard rungs of the furrows under the feet, see the fumes of the riders’ breath, and hear the horns and the shouts sharp as ice. Until the hounds moved off we were never certain that the hunt would not be cancelled and we would lose the cry when the fox was sighted and the dabs of scarlet racing over the winter fields. Frank died in the late 1920s from appendicitis, and except for my cousin St George Lake, killed in France, he was the first relative I had to mourn.
    Favourite quality in women . I think my reply to this question was probably motivated by disdain, for I find in the School House Gazette , from a Table Talk written by my aunt, that I had a good deal of undeserved contempt for my elder sister Molly and through her for girls in general – a contempt which I was soon to lose. My interjections were pointed and repetitious: ‘You are silly, Molly. Girls are so silly.’ ‘Girls wouldn’t know. They know nuffin.’ ‘Girls are always slow and always last.’
    Favourite pastime . I am mystified by my choice, for I can’t remember that I ever played at Red Indians, The Last of the Mohicans I find to this day unreadable, and it was before the days of Western films. I have a vague memory of a small bow and arrows with a green velvet handhold with which for a time I shot erratically at a target hung on the apple trees. But I was too bad a shot to continue long.
    Pet hobby . The coins were any