The Chalk Giants by Keith Roberts Read Free Book Online

village, small as children’s toys; and other villages and towns, and others and still more. Then white flame leaped, devouring; and when he could see again they were blotted out. Wiped clean, every one. And the sea creamed against empty beaches, the wind hissed through the grass. Her voice came again, high and mournful as a sea bird. The sound rushed out to lose itself in the vastness of the west; and the sun rose, over a low hill, bringing an empty dawn.
     
     

TWO: Fragments
     
    MAGGIE
     
    Somebody wrote to me to say I’d killed my parents. If that’s true I suppose I did them a favour. It got them out of this. Did I kill them?
    In fact, no. You don’t die of grief. You don’t die of anything except stoppage of the heart. But that’s the trouble with emotions. People don’t understand them. They miss what they can do, and make a lot of noise about what they can’t.
    Certainly nobody understood me. After what I’d done I was supposed to be - oh Christ, distraught or something. That’s what they could never understand. I wasn’t distraught. I wasn’t anything. Not even sorry. Given the same chance I’d have done the same again.
    I suppose I got off lightly. Never teach again of course, but who the hell wants to? If you’d seen that school...
    Imagine a great, echoing, glass-and-concrete box. Or a stack of rabbit hutches, fifty or sixty feet high. And all round, reaching into distance, the roofs of the New Model Estate. Grass showing here and there, the grass they hadn’t destroyed. And little tamed trees. I felt I was suffocating. Like a goldfish in a bowl.
    I can still hear the kids if I want to. All the hundreds of kids, footsteps and chattering filling the place like splashing water. I can see the Links, long glass corridors stifling-hot in summer, the geometric troughs of peonies and geraniums. It was a Model School. Model School and Model Estate. That was what was wrong with it.
    They said I had no feeling for the children. That was the biggest laugh. I was the most popular staff member there, it used to get up the others’ noses. Then they said I had no morals. That stung. The only thing that did. Morals are of the mind, not the body. But that’s two thousand years of Christian ethos for you.
    I wonder what’s happened to that school. Flattened, I should think. Those noises... What did I actually do to that girl?
    At least that’s one thing I can still be precise about. The Estate was going to take her, like it took all the rest. She was going to marry, like all the rest. And beget children; decently, with the lights out, like all the rest. And shorten her husband’s life for a bigger fridge or a bigger car or new lounge curtains or a trailer cabin cruiser or a colour TV. Instead I opened her eyes, for a little while. I taught her, before the little houses took her, to swim in the wine-dark sea. She sat at the feet of Sappho; she heard the thunder from Olympus, knew Pan and all the fauns.
    Only that, of course, isn’t what they called it.
    I think there’s a time for everybody when feeling runs out, the tears just dry up. It’s another theory I had, something else that sent me wild; that emotion isn’t a bottomless well, that we’re all of us born with a measured amount and when we’ve run through that there’s no more to come. So if we squander it on unworthy things we’re squandering the only part of ourselves that has a meaning, that sets us apart from trees and the brute beasts. Holmes used to say the brain was like an attic, it could only hold so much lumber. So he never bothered to remember whether the earth went round the sun, or the sun went round the earth. Because it didn’t matter to him. I believe the same of the heart.
    So when I came back down here I wouldn’t let myself be moved. To anger, or to joy. They said I was cold, what I’d done showed I had no feelings. But it wasn’t like that. It was nothing like that at all.
    At least my mother gave, me a roof. I suppose I