The Flying Goat by H.E. Bates Read Free Book Online Page A

seriously, they now began to seem not only extraordinarily important, but very beautiful. As she lay stretched out in bed, she felt that all argument had ceased to have meaning. There was now no argument, no complexity. It was all different. The street lamp was still shining on the ceiling from outside,and looking up at it, she felt herself flooded by waves and waves of incandescent beauty. Borne on light, they were at the same time like intransient cadences of prolonged music. Sentimentally and passively she let them wash over her, and then recede, leaving her mind as clear-washed as a shore after a tide, smoothed and quiet, animated only by the faint phosphorescence of an absurd sort of rapture.
    Subsequently she became almost awfully aware of Bronson’s nearness. She went upstairs and met him coming down; took in the Bronsons’ meals and stood while he took the dishes from her, almost touching her. She was aware on those occasions of flashes of extraordinarily electric emotion, part pleasure, part pain, and at nights she put on, in her mind, the gramophone record of things he had said to her or about her, letting herself be passively swirled away from the eternal revolutions of repeated thought.
    Then Mrs. Harris noticed something else: the soap. Irma’s soap was the same, she suddenly discovered, as Mrs. Bronson’s soap.
    That could only mean one thing.
    It was an awful, outrageous thing. Soap, scent,the scent of hands and body and face: together they drove her to the edge of impossible conjecture.
    She rushed straight up to Irma’s bedroom, only to find the girl standing there by the window, looking at Bronson, drilling No. 3 Platoon farther down the street. For a moment Mrs. Harris could not speak. It was a moment of both humiliation and triumph. She felt enraged and yet quite strengthless. Then, before she could speak, Irma turned away from the window, lifted up her head and walked out of the room. She was a little flushed, but quite calm, and she did not speak.
    Irma’s look of unsubmissive tranquillity, her air of touch-me-not complacency, so beautiful and self-conscious and infuriating, aroused in Mrs. Harris a curious sort of enmity. Her synonymity with Irma was shattered. Irma had become another being, separate, unacknowledgeable, behaving with a self-confessed awful immorality that was a condemnation of Mrs. Harris herself.
    Going downstairs, she followed Irma about, arguing, basing everything on that point. ‘What about me? What do you think I feel? After all I’ve done for you. Don’t you see how I must feel?Don’t you ever think of me? Don’t you see how it affects me?’
    The girl could not say anything. In so intangible an affair, where so much was only the fiction of the mind, there was nothing much she could do except be silent.
    It was in silence that Mrs. Harris saw guilt. She blamed Irma bitterly, but only Irma, seeing her part in the affair as active, not passive. Irma was committing – staring out of the window, aping Mrs. Bronson, using the same soap – a wilful and stupid folly, a slight against parental decency. ‘Your father would have been
ashamed
of you.’ But it had not occurred to her that the Lieutenant might be condoning it.
    Pushed farther into secrecy, Irma enlarged in her mind the small fiction of herself and Bronson. She was pushed back into an inward loneliness, in which she made a structure of one improbability built on another. These improbabilities, as they grew up pagoda-fashion, she began to see as solid truths, lighting them up with the shimmering adolescent light of her own fancy. In this beautiful abstract fashion, she persuaded herself into an intense belief in the reality of Bronson’s affection for her, sufferingwith a certain pleasure, believing in the aspects of its tragedy as readily as she believed in its extraordinary ecstasy.
    In the Bronsons’ room downstairs there was a large black tin case. Here