To the North by Elizabeth Bowen Read Free Book Online Page A

The family intimated to Julian that they would be satisfied with any arrangement he chose to make, and suggested a week in his flat in London, visiting the museums and getting to know her uncle. Pauline, said his sister-in-law, is full of interests and wonderfully responsive. She put Pauline into the London train and retired into a nursing-home, where she had a baby.
    So Pauline was, at present, in Julian’s Westminster flat, where she played the gramophone and talked a good deal to the housekeeper. She stitched name-tapes on to her new summer-term outfit, sang to herself and was terribly little trouble. But his housekeeper did not like children; his flat was not arranged for a little girl. His community with all bachelor uncles in the great tradition of English humorous fiction did not console Julian. He saw that this must be funny, but suffered acutely. For his niece, who read Ian Hay, the situation was full of charm. She was diligently little-girlish; whimsicality distorted their conversation. She alternated between the romp and the dream-child, occasionally attempting the mouse, when she effaced herself noticeably. With a sense of guilt that was profound, he did not know which of these aspects was most distasteful. It was at him that she daydreamed, at him that she thundered about the flat; her assaults on his attention were like the firings-off of a small gun.
    It was not, Julian said to Cecilia, the gramophone that he minded, though she scratched his records and walked a whole box of needles into a rug: he was out so much, it was not fair to complain. It was not that, having been recommended to drink much milk, she was always white round the mouth and left clouded glasses about on the mantelpiece. It was not that she rubbed her chilblains with small pieces of camphor. He did not know what it was… . When he went down to the school the headmistress took him aside to tell him Pauline was psychologically interesting; she seemed to be proud of Pauline. The headmistress had made Julian think of a man who once came into his flat with a new fire-extinguisher. “I should like to interest you,” he had said, “in this new line we are showing… .” The headmistress, failing to interest Julian, had liked him less.
    “It is not …” he said, looking heavily round Cecilia’s drawing-room. “Oh, she’s doing her best, poor child; I can feel her doing it.”
    Cecilia said, surely one could put up with anything for a week?
    In fact, it was less the niece than the uncle that worried Julian: something in him that would not bring off the simplest relationship, that could be aware of any relationship only as something to be brought off; something hyperconscious of strain or falsity. This descent of an orphan child on his life might have been superficially comic, or even touching. But the disheartening density of Proust was superimposed for him on a clear page of Wodehouse. The poor child’s approximation to what she took to be naturalness parodied his own part in an intimacy. She mortified him on his own account, and on account of the woman so drearily nascent in her immaturity: he confronted again and again in her look, as she chattered and romped, the unavowable anxiety of the comedian. He was estranged from her, as though she were transparent, as he was estranged from almost all women, by a rather morbid consciousness of fraternity. After three days of her company, he felt like a pane of mean glass scrubbed horribly clean, like a pool dredged of its charming shadowy water-weeds. Those inexactitudes of desire that sent him towards Cecilia, those bright smoky movements of fancy became remote and impossible. Society, peopled with nudes, became unseemly as a Turkish bath; he could look nowhere without confusion, least of all at himself.
    To be with Cecilia made a slowing-down and a break in this anxious consciousness; it was like falling asleep. Aware of her pretty figure in black on the sofa beside him, her head turned his