Towards Another Summer by Janet Frame Read Free Book Online

liver fluke, footrot, pulpy kidney. She almost sobbed. She wished she hadn’t come to Relham, she wished she were back in her London flat listening to the weather report and the news, then switching it off, retreating to the corner by the bookshelf where she had placed her typewriter and parts one and two of her novel in their Boa File. And there would be the Standard Lamp shining its pale white light directly over the keys of the Olivetti; and the rows of books on their shelves on the left, buttressing her against intrusive influences from the Examining Board - she did not know what they examined, or when, or why, but beneath the sound of the traffic outside Grace could hear next door the subterranean murmurous examining, interrupted from time to time by a thumping, shifting sound, as if new standards were being set.
    You came to me; you said
last night I looked at my hand, and my hand was burned,
I have watched the fire spread.
I can do nothing that anyone might envy or put out with
a terrified foot.
I have watched the fire spread;
now my bones are placed in position, are set,
like the standards you talk of, the murmurous examining
by rain probing, the falsely sentimental
snow saying It is not possible
(snowflakes as Get-Well cards, flushed birthday roses,
satin concealment

slipped between my flesh and bone to jolly out
one more responsive year).
     
    Dear mother, dear father dear husband dear child,
there is no answer,
this microphone like a beehive celled with honey
is blocked forever with the sweetness of death.
     
    Since you came to me last night,
and said
what you said
I rode on a red bus
inside a clot of blood
I rode in grief over London,
I smashed nothing, no mirrors, windows, or glass sheets
of sky.
I prayed Let the world have wonder enough to care
when poets live
and to grieve when they die.
     
    —Four thousand pound houses.
    —Three thousand pound houses.
    —Two thousand pound houses.
    —Just under two thousand pound houses. Here we are.
    The suburbs of Relham were replaced by the town of Winchley, and here was the Thirkettles’ house almost at the end of Holly Road, on the edge of the moor. The trees were naked ragged sticks with ribbed ice heaped about their roots, and the dark street shone with mirrors of ice obscured by dark blots of snow. Alone among the other houses in the street the Thirkettles’ house bore no name; not the Nook, Rydal Mount, Dell Lane, Coral Cottage; merely number five - semidetached, old, heavy, comfortable, with its other half in silence and darkness like a sleeping limb.

    Philip rattled at the chained door.
    —This is Anne’s doing, he said.
    Footsteps. The chain was withdrawn. The door opened.
    —This is Anne.
    Anne was rosycheeked, almost buxom, certainly beautiful, although (Grace noted with pleasure) she had a double chin. She was followed to the door by a sudden swirl of white like tiny moving candle-flames and Sarah and Noel, stumbling, guttering, arrived to cling to their mother’s skirt, to welcome their father and stare curiously at Grace.
    —Grace-Cleave’s come to stay, Sarah whispered knowingly.
    Grace smiled a prim smile. She was terrified they might want to embrace her but they stayed clinging to their mother as she led them along the passage into the kitchen while Philip and Grace followed. Grace tripped over toys and books and blocks. Anne laughed.
    —Someone had a throwing session today.
    She spoke with a strong New Zealand accent.
    The room was big, untidy, with shelves in one corner filled with provisions as if the family expected to be marooned for months. Children’s clothes, toys, kitchen equipment, newspapers, were slung and bundled here and there in a marvellous conglomeration. Grace looked mournfully at what, to her, seemed the scattered evidence of a house full of love; she was remembering her own home as a child, where the rooms had been a muddle of possessions and furniture and food and chamberpots, and how the man from the ‘Welfare’ who