each time?
I have my good days and my bad. Guess which this one is.
Tea. Talk about tea. For me, the taking of tea is a ceremonial and solitary pleasure. I prefer a superior Darjeeling; there was a firm of merchants in Paris, I remember – what were they called? – who did a superb blend, an ounce or two of which they would part with in exchange for a lakh of rupees. Otherwise a really fine Keemun is acceptable, at a pinch. Then there is the matter of the cup: even the worst of Licht’s stewed sludge will taste like something halfway decent if it is served in, say, an antique fluted gold-rimmed piece of bird’s-egg-blue Royal Doulton. I love bone china, the very idea of it, I want to take the whole thing, cup and saucer and all, into my mouth and crack it lingeringly between my teeth, like meringue. Tea tastes of other lives. I close my eyes and see the pickers bending on the green hillsides, their saffron robes and slender, leaf-brown hands; I see the teeming docks where half-starved fellows with legs like knobkerries sticking out of ragged shorts heave stencilled wooden chests and call to each other in parrot shrieks; I even see the pottery works where this cup was spun out of cloud-white clay one late-nineteenth-century summer afternoon by an indentured apprentice with a harelip and a blind sister waiting for him in their hovel up a pestilential back lane. Lives, other lives! a myriad of them, distilled into this thimbleful of perfumed pleasure –
Oh, stop.
The philosopher asks: Can the style of an evil man have any unity?
The lounge.
The day outside was darkening. A bundled, lead-coloured cloud burning like magnesium all along its edge had reared up in the window. A crepitant stillness gathered, presaging rain. I wonder what causes it, this expectant hush? I suppose the air pressure alters, or the approaching rain damps down the wind somehow. I should have studied meteorology, learned how it all works, the chaotic flood and flow of things, air currents, wind, clouds, these vast nothingnesses tossing to and fro over the earth.
Flora is dreaming of the golden world.
Worlds within worlds. They bleed into each other. I am at once here and there, then and now, as if by magic. I think of the stillness that lives in the depths of mirrors. It is not our world that is reflected there. It is another place entirely, another universe, cunningly made to mimic ours. Anything is possible there; even the dead may come back to life. Flaws develop in the glass, patches of silvering fall away and reveal the inhabitants of that parallel, inverted world going about their lives all unawares. And sometimes the glass turns to air and they step through it without a sound and walk into my world. Here comes Sophie now, barefoot, still with her leather jacket over her shoulders, and time shimmers in its frame.
She stopped inside the door and looked about her at the big dark pieces of furniture huddled in the brownish gloom, and immediately there started up in her head the rattly music of a barrel organ and she saw a little girl standing at a window above a wide avenue, with grey light like this lingering and dead leaves in the wind stealthily scurrying here and there over the pavement. Assailed, she sank down into a corner of the sagging couch, drawing up her legs and folding them under her and gingerly massaging her bruised instep. There were so many things she was tired of remembering, the happy as well as the bad. The apartment onKirchenallee, the upright piano by the window where she practised scales through the endless winter afternoons, her fingers stiff from the cold and her kneecaps numb. Smell of almonds and ersatz coffee, of the dust in the curtains where she leaned her head, looking down on the people passing by on the broad, bare pavements of the ruined city, hunched and hurrying, carrying bags or clutching parcels under their arms, like people in a newsreel. Her mother in the kitchen selling silk stockings and American
I have my good days and my bad. Guess which this one is.
Tea. Talk about tea. For me, the taking of tea is a ceremonial and solitary pleasure. I prefer a superior Darjeeling; there was a firm of merchants in Paris, I remember – what were they called? – who did a superb blend, an ounce or two of which they would part with in exchange for a lakh of rupees. Otherwise a really fine Keemun is acceptable, at a pinch. Then there is the matter of the cup: even the worst of Licht’s stewed sludge will taste like something halfway decent if it is served in, say, an antique fluted gold-rimmed piece of bird’s-egg-blue Royal Doulton. I love bone china, the very idea of it, I want to take the whole thing, cup and saucer and all, into my mouth and crack it lingeringly between my teeth, like meringue. Tea tastes of other lives. I close my eyes and see the pickers bending on the green hillsides, their saffron robes and slender, leaf-brown hands; I see the teeming docks where half-starved fellows with legs like knobkerries sticking out of ragged shorts heave stencilled wooden chests and call to each other in parrot shrieks; I even see the pottery works where this cup was spun out of cloud-white clay one late-nineteenth-century summer afternoon by an indentured apprentice with a harelip and a blind sister waiting for him in their hovel up a pestilential back lane. Lives, other lives! a myriad of them, distilled into this thimbleful of perfumed pleasure –
Oh, stop.
The philosopher asks: Can the style of an evil man have any unity?
The lounge.
The day outside was darkening. A bundled, lead-coloured cloud burning like magnesium all along its edge had reared up in the window. A crepitant stillness gathered, presaging rain. I wonder what causes it, this expectant hush? I suppose the air pressure alters, or the approaching rain damps down the wind somehow. I should have studied meteorology, learned how it all works, the chaotic flood and flow of things, air currents, wind, clouds, these vast nothingnesses tossing to and fro over the earth.
Flora is dreaming of the golden world.
Worlds within worlds. They bleed into each other. I am at once here and there, then and now, as if by magic. I think of the stillness that lives in the depths of mirrors. It is not our world that is reflected there. It is another place entirely, another universe, cunningly made to mimic ours. Anything is possible there; even the dead may come back to life. Flaws develop in the glass, patches of silvering fall away and reveal the inhabitants of that parallel, inverted world going about their lives all unawares. And sometimes the glass turns to air and they step through it without a sound and walk into my world. Here comes Sophie now, barefoot, still with her leather jacket over her shoulders, and time shimmers in its frame.
She stopped inside the door and looked about her at the big dark pieces of furniture huddled in the brownish gloom, and immediately there started up in her head the rattly music of a barrel organ and she saw a little girl standing at a window above a wide avenue, with grey light like this lingering and dead leaves in the wind stealthily scurrying here and there over the pavement. Assailed, she sank down into a corner of the sagging couch, drawing up her legs and folding them under her and gingerly massaging her bruised instep. There were so many things she was tired of remembering, the happy as well as the bad. The apartment onKirchenallee, the upright piano by the window where she practised scales through the endless winter afternoons, her fingers stiff from the cold and her kneecaps numb. Smell of almonds and ersatz coffee, of the dust in the curtains where she leaned her head, looking down on the people passing by on the broad, bare pavements of the ruined city, hunched and hurrying, carrying bags or clutching parcels under their arms, like people in a newsreel. Her mother in the kitchen selling silk stockings and American
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