Dorothy Cleary is fifty‑six years old but keeps young fighting for the rights of animals.
She held an overweight cat called Meme in her arms and stamped her foot in anger. ‘As far as I’m concerned the so‑called dog ranch is just a concentration camp for dogs. They have blind dogs out there just lying there, that should have been put to sleep a long time ago.’
She said she hadn’t been to the ranch because they wouldn’t let her in. ‘But I stood outside the gates and I could look inside and see everything. I was trying to bring in a shepherd dog to be held until I got it a good home. A fellow at the gate warned me away, saying, ‘If the dog comes in it can never come out. No dog that comes in here can ever go out.’ So I took the dog away and he’s probably alive and happy today and not one of those poor things inside.
Miss Cleary felt the dogs should be destroyed rather than ‘sit out there day after day, month after month, year after year’. In private houses, she said, they could run and have attention instead of just waiting to die.
Sally pulled off her cap, swung her little velvet shoes up on to the sofa, opened her bag and began powdering: ‘I’m most terribly tired. I didn’t sleep a wink last night. I’ve got a marvellous new lover.’
I began to put out the tea. Sally gave me a sidelong glance:
‘Do I shock you when I talk like that, Christopher darling?’
‘Not in the least.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ cried Sally, ‘don’t start being English! Of course it’s your business what you think!’
‘Well then, if you want to know, it rather bores me.’
This annoyed her even more than I had intended. Her tone changed: she said coldly: ‘I thought you’d understand.’ She sighed: ‘But I forgot ‑ you’re a man.’
‘I’m sorry, Sally. I can’t help being a man, of course . . . But please don’t be angry with me. I only meant that when you talk like that it’s really just nervousness. You’re naturally rather shy with strangers, I think: so you’ve got into this trick of trying to bounce them into approving or disapproving of you, violently. I know, because I try it myself, sometimes . . . Only I wish you wouldn’t try it on me, because it just doesn’t work and it only makes me feel embarrassed.’
Mr. Midnight
did not have to tell me what a perfect horde of invitations had accumulated
during his recent short absence from Town. He has been obliged to decline
most of them, occasioning much bitter disappointment, but he did find a moment,
he tells me, to look in on Desmond Elliott’s little river party. Desmond
is a special favourite of his, a dear fair‑haired boy who has become the
most exciting ‑ or at least, excitable ‑ of our young British
publishers. Only Desmond, indeed, could conceive of issuing, in this
present season, a novel which describes the obliteration of
A small river cruiser set off from Charing Cross Pier, carrying many of Mr. Midnight’s dearest friends from the book trade. It is always such a pleasure, he tells me, to be in the company of these vital young men with their heavy suits, their oily chins, unbuttoned shirts and that unmistakable common stance deriving, perhaps, from weight of intellect, perhaps from discs about to slip. On the right‑hand bank, a briskly‑burning warehouse added colour to the scene. And hither and thither on the deck ran dear Desmond, looking sweet in a pleated white suit, leading his protégé, Richard Doyle, an emaciated young man with an expression of permanent surprise, as if he had just trodden in a cowpat.
SATURDAY 16
morning. Spent all in visits and enquiries after people I could not
find. Every one here tells me it will be absolutely necessary to get a
passport for my leaving the kingdom. This is a new regulation since I was
last in
I had
another very comfortable and agreeable conference this morning with Mr.
Lumisden ‑ found two sensible Scotsmen with him, obtained many
satisfactory informations relative to
‘Just give me a glass of cognac, Brown. I’ll go on in a moment, Gregory ... ‘Well, I felt to the right, and my fingers touched something curved, that felt ‑ yes ‑ more or less like leather; dampish it was, and evidently part of a heavy, full thing. There was nothing, I must say, to alarm one. I grew bolder, and putting both hands in as well as I could, I pulled it to me, and it came. It was heavy, but moved more easily than I had expected. As I pulled it towards the entrance, my left elbow knocked over and extinguished the candle. I got the thing fairly in front of the mouth and began drawing it out. Just then Brown gave a sharp ejaculation and ran quickly up the steps with the lantern. He will tell you why in a moment. Startled as I was, I looked round after him, and saw him stand for a minute at the top and then walk away a few yards. Then I heard him call softly, ‘All right, sir,’ and went on pulling out the great bag, in complete darkness. It hung for an instant on the edge of the hole, then slipped forward on to my chest, and put its arms round my neck.
Sir,
On Saturday night I went to the Opera. I wore the costume imposed on me by the regulations of the house. I fully recognise the advantage of those regulations. Evening dress is cheap, simple, durable, prevents rivalry and extravagance on the part of male leaders of fashion, annihilates class distinctions, and gives men who are poor and doubtful of their social position (that is, the great majority of men) a sense of security and satisfaction that no clothes of their own choosing could confer. The objections to it are that it is colourless and characterless; that it fails to guarantee sobriety, cleanliness, and order on the part of the wearer. All such objections are thoroughly un‑English....
Now let me
describe what actually happened to me at the Opera.
I was in my seat in time for the first chord of the overture. At 9 o’clock (the Opera began at 8) a lady came in and sat down very conspicuously in my line of sight. She had very black hair and had stuck over her right ear the pitiable corpse of a large white bird, which looked exactly as if someone had killed it by stamping on its breast. If I had presented myself at the doors with a dead snake round my neck, a collection of black-beetles pinned to my shirt-front, and a grouse in my hair, I would have been refused admission. Why then is a woman allowed to commit such a public outrage?
I graduated
from a university which was as functional as a toffee‑factory, and I’ve always
harboured a sour, redbrick mistrust of the mystique of Oxford and Cambridge. ...
With the soft patter of a sprinkler watering the bright green baize of a
Fellows’ Lawn, it’s hard to remember what the University stands for:
The University, for all its cultivated appearance of idle elegance is a labour‑intensive manufacturing industry: it produces books, monographs, learned papers ‑ and graduates. ‘BA (Cantab)’ is a fiercely‑competed‑for stamp of prime academic beef.
Yet by any
standards except those of
One afternoon, in a particularly bright and glowing August, some years before I knew I was happy, George Hooping, whom we called Little Cough, Sidney Evans, Dan Davies, and I sat on the roof of a lorry travelling to the end of the Peninsula. It was a tall, six‑wheeled lorry, from which we could spit on the roofs of the passing cars and throw our apple stumps at women on the pavement. One stump caught a man on a bicycle in the middle of the back, he swerved across the road, for a moment we sat quiet and George Hooping’s face grew pale. And if the lorry runs over him, I though calmly as the man on the bicycle swayed towards the hedge, he’ll get killed and I’ll be sick on my trousers and perhaps on Sidney’s too, an we’ll be arrested and hanged, except George Hooping who didn’t have an apple.
But the lorry swept past; behind us, the bicycle drove into the hedge, the man stood up and waved his fist, and I waved my cap back at him.
‘You shouldn’t have waved your cap,’ said Sidney Evans, ‘he’ll know what school we’re in.’ He was clever, dark, and careful, and had a purse and a wallet.
The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry. The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and horse to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty miles off, such a vehicle proving of quite sufficient size for the departing teacher’s effects. For the school‑house had been partly furnished by the managers, and the only cumbersome article possessed by the master, in addition to the packing‑case of books, was a cottage piano that he had bought at an auction during the year in which he thought of learning instrumental music. But the enthusiasm having waned he had never acquired any skill in playing and the purchased article had been a perpetual trouble to him ever since in moving house.
The rector had gone away for the day, being a man who disliked the sight of changes. He did not mean to return till the evening, when the new school‑teacher would have arrived and settled in, and everything would be smooth again.
Classical history carried its full quota of surprises; not always as pleasant as they might have been; and equal in its dismaying potency to the stir Leda caused with her egg was the surprise that assailed Althea when Sextus appeared through the curtains and stood glowering down at her.
To her credit she displayed none of it in the natural way she pushed Brutus Secundus off her lap and rose to greet him.
‘This is all very unexpected and delightful, Sextus,’ she said cordially. ‘Come in.’
Sextus inclined his head.
‘Still the same playful little Althea, I see,’ he observed with civility.
Brutus Secundus scrambled to his feet with righteous indignation.
‘Here!’ he said hotly, ‘who let you in? What right have you‑‘
‘Get out,’ said Sextus.
There was deceptive politeness in his voice, and Brutus felt the irregularity of the situation keenly; but his feet propelled him with mechanical insistence to the door. Sextus’ foot, in a metal sandal, caught him rhythmically as he passed, and turned his departure to a flight that took him swallow‑like across the ante‑room, and the guards helped him the rest of the way down the stone steps of Collatinus’s entrance.
Viola giggled. ‘Please, M’am,’ she dared, ‘are you ever going to let the poor man have his bed?’
‘Of course
not,’ snapped
‘So please you, M’am,’ said Viola, ‘I would like to go to Shakespeare.’
‘Master
Will?’ said
‘Nothing can distract him,’ said Viola. ‘He can write his plays while they build a theatre round him. He will take no notice of me. Besides,’ she added ‘he will think I am a boy.’
‘That’s what
I meant,’ said
She rose to her feet and made a gesture of dismissal. ‘That will be all, child. You may go.’
‘But, said Viola, ‘you have not told me. May I go to Master Shakespeare? Is it settled?’
Dostoievsky reminds me of El Greco, and if El Greco seems the greater artist it is perhaps only because the time at which he lived and his environment were more favourable to the full flowering of the peculiar genius which was common to both. Both had the same violence of emotion, the same passion. Both give the effect of having walked in unknown ways of the spirit in countries where men do not breath the air of common day. Both are tortured by the desire to express some tremendous secret, which they divine with some sense other than our five senses and which they struggle in vain to convey by use of them. Both are in anguish as they try to remember a dream which it imports tremendously for them to remember and yet which linger always just at the rim of consciousness so that they cannot reach it. With Dostoievsky too the person who people his vast canvases are more than life‑size, and they too express themselves with strange and beautiful gestures which seem pregnant of a meaning which constantly escapes you. Both are masters of that great art, the art of significant gesture. Leonardo da Vinci, who knew somewhat of the matter, vowed it was the portrait‑painter’s greatest gift.
‘You are very young,’ he said, ‘You are ten or fifteen years younger than I am. What could you see to attract you in a man like me?’
‘It was something in your face. I thought I’d take a chance. I’m good at spotting people who don’t belong. As soon as I saw you I knew you were against them. Them, it appeared, meant the Party, and above all the Inner Party, about whom she talked with an open jeering hatred which made Winston feel uneasy, although he knew that they were safe here if they could be safe anywhere. A thing that astonished him about here was the coarseness of her language. Party members were supposed not to swear, and Winston himself very seldom did swear, aloud, at any rate. Julia, however, seemed unable to mention the Party, and especially the Inner Party, without using the kind of words that you saw chalked up in dripping alley‑ways. He did not dislike it. It was merely one symptom of her revolt against the Party and all its ways, and somehow it seemed natural and healthy, like the sneeze of a horse that smells bad hay. They had left the clearing and were wandering again through the chequered shade, with their arms round each other’s waists whenever it was wide enough to walk two abreast. He noticed how much softer her waist seemed to feel now that the sash was gone.
The sorry state of Soviet agriculture and the prospect of record grain imports in the coming year are expected to dominate today’s special session of the Communist party central committee, though key leadership changes cannot also be ruled out.
The committee, which has more than 300 full members from all walks of the Soviet party establishment, normally meets twice a year to take decisions which are then promptly ratified by the Supreme Soviet (Parliament).
The regular autumn session is normally held in November or December to set the next year’s economic targets, but this week’s special meeting seems to indicate recognition that management of the farm sector needs further reshaping before the rest of the 1985 plan can fall into place.
The man in overall charge of agriculture appears likely, as usual, to side-step criticism. Since he took over agriculture, first in 1978 as a central committee secretary and then four years ago as a full politburo member, Mr. Mikhail Gorbachev has glided ever higher.
With recently added responsibilities for foreign policy, party administration and ideology, he is the only politburo member whose purview spans foreign and domestic affairs.
This power‑base seems relatively impregnable, even though, in a classic piece of Kremlin tea‑leaf reading, Mr. Gorbachev was noticed last week to have appeared on the fringe, not in the middle of a photographic line‑up of the politburo in the Soviet Press.
The doctor made the main speech of the afternoon. ‘Remember,’ he remarked, ‘that you leave behind you nothing but our warmest good wishes. You are bound to us by ties that none will forget. Time will only deepen our sense of debt to you. If at any time in the future you should grow tired of your life in the world, there will always be a welcome for you here. Your post will be open.’
A dozen or
so variously afflicted lunatics hopped and skipped after him down the drive
until the iron gates opened and Mr. Loveday stepped into his freedom. His
small trunk had already gone to the station; he elected to walk. He
had been reticent about his plans, but he was well provided with money, and the
general impression was that he would go to
It was to the surprise of all that he returned within two hours of his liberation.
‘But, Loveday, what a short holiday. I’m afraid that you have hardly enjoyed yourself at all.’
‘Oh yes, sir, thank you, sir, I’ve enjoyed myself very much. I’d been promising myself one little treat, all these years. It was short, sir, but most enjoyable.’
Half a mile up the road from the asylum gates, they later discovered an abandoned bicycle. Quite near it in the ditch lay the strangled body of a young woman, who, riding home to her tea, had chanced to overtake Mr. Loveday, as he strode along, musing on his opportunities.
At seven he was woken by his wife whose insistence that early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, comfortably off and wise had never ceased to irritate him. As she bustled about the bedroom with a lack of concern for the feelings of other people which characterised her philanthropy, Sir Godber studied once more those particulars of his wife which had been such a spur to his political ambitions. Lady Mary was not an attractive woman. Her physical angularity made manifest the quality of her mind.
“Time to get up,” she said, spotting Sir Godber’s open eye.
“Ours not to reason why, ours but to do or die,” thought Sir Godber, sitting up and fumbling for his slippers.
“How did the Feast go?” Lady Mary asked, adjusting the straps of her surgical corset with a vigour that reminded Sir Godber of a race meeting.
“Tolerably, I suppose,” he said with a yawn. “We had swan stuffed with some sort of duck. Very indigestible. Kept me awake half the night.”
“You should be more careful about what you eat.” Lady Mary sat down and swung one leg over the other to put on her stockings. “You don’t want to have a stroke.”
“It’s called a Porterhouse Blue.”
“What is?”
“A stroke,” said Sir Godber.
“Please go through,” Piatigorskaia said, opening a door off the hallway. “I will ask my mother to make some tea.”
Swithinbank found himself in a very warm living room brilliantly lit by the winter sunshine. He went over to the window and sat down at the table.
He still could not decide how he was going to approach the subject.
“Here you are: a glass of tea, sugar, sweets...please help yourself.”
He half got up again, and stammered in Russian:
“Thank you very much...I do like Soviet tea!”
“Of course, of course...And I still have some of the Earl Grey left that your firm gave me in 1979!”
“Did you enjoy your visit then?”
“I have very
fond memories of
“Yes
indeed. I understand what you mean. It is such a pleasure for me to
come to
She looked down at the table cloth and carefully unwrapped a sweet.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw a little old woman come out from behind the church opposite and start scattering seeds on the hard snow for the birds. Concentrate, concentrate!
Aunt Ada came to live with us at the end of the summer holidays. Before, we’d only seen her at Christmas and didn’t realise just how awful she was. Now, we had her all the time.
She was tall and pale with a face like a melon. Her eyes were the colour of cherrystones. Her skirts came almost to her ankles. And her voice went non-stop.
“Don’t you eat that orange in here, miss! Take it in the garden. Let me see those hands, young man. Just as I thought. You go straight off and wash them. What is that dog doing on that bed?”
“Can’t you stop her, Mum?” I asked, but Mum said helplessly, “She is your father’s elder sister, you see...”
Aunt Ada took over the shopping from Mum, she said that was only fair. What wasn’t fair, she expected me to help her, after I got home from school.
Which was why we were coming out of the shops at half-past five on a cold October afternoon, each carrying two frightfully heavy bags of shopping.
Clearly Tolstoi could have no patience with a chaotic, detailed writer like Shakespeare. His reaction to Shakespeare is that of an irritable old man who is being pestered by a noisy child. “Why do you keep jumping up and down like that? Why can’t you sit like me?” he seems to be saying. In a way the old man is right, but the trouble is that a child has a feeling in its arms, legs and body which the old man has lost. And if in fact the old man knows of the existence of this feeling, the result is merely to increase his irritation: he would like to make children old, if he could.
Tolstoi does not know, perhaps, exactly what it is that he feels is lacking in Shakespeare, but he is aware that he misses something, and he is determined that others shall be deprived of it as well. By nature he was passionate as well as egotistical. Well after he was grown up he would occasionally strike his servant in moments of anger. Somewhat later, according to his biographer, he “felt upon the slightest provocation a frequent desire to slap the faces of those with whom he disagreed”. One does not necessarily get rid of that temperament by becoming a Christian.
I once had a friend called Andrey. He was quite good looking, but he was obsessed by the size of his nose. The reason was simple. When he was an impressionable sixteen-year old, one of the girls at his school teased him, calling him Cyrano de Bergerac. It could even be said that that silly comment of hers killed him. The seed of doubt that she sowed gave birth to a massive complex. He became so ashamed of his appearance, that he started to avoid people. He never wanted to meet strangers, found all social life an ordeal, and feared invitations like the plague. He managed to alienate his own family and lost even the support of friends. One day he caught a simple cold. But he feared doctors no less than others, and decided to cure himself. The complications resulting from the cold brought about his untimely end.
Afterwards,
Cordelia remembered the river picnic as a series of brief but intensely clear
pictures, moments in which sight and sense fused and time seemed momentarily
arrested while the sunlit image was impressed on her mind. Sunlight
sparkling on the river and gilding the hairs of Davie’s chest and forearms; the
flesh of his strong upper arms speckled like an egg; Sophie lifting her arm to
wipe the sweat from her brow as she rested between thrusts of the punt
pole; green-black weeds dragged by the pole from mysterious depths to writhe
sinuously below the surface; a bright duck cocking its white tail before
disappearing in a flurry of green water. When they had rocked under
Beatrice Blaine! There was a woman! A brilliant education she had. The sort of education that will be quite impossible ever again; measured by the number of things and people one could be contemptuous of and charming about.
In her
less important moments she returned to
When
Amory was five he was already a delightful companion for her. He was an
auburn-haired boy, with great, handsome eyes, an imaginative mind and a taste
for fancy dress. From his fourth to his tenth year he travelled the country
with his mother in her father's private car. So, while more or less fortunate
little rich boys were defying nannies on the beach at
"Amory."
"Yes, Beatrice." (Such a quaint name for his mother; she encouraged it.)
"Dear, don't think of getting out of bed yet. I've always suspected that early rising makes one nervous."
"All right."
"I
am feeling very old to-day, Amory," she would sigh. "My nerves are on
edge - on edge. We must leave this terrifying place to-morrow and go searching
for sunshine." Amory's green eyes would look at his mother. Even at
this age he had no illusions about her.