Longing

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  It is then that the knowledge of why my father watched planes drops into my head. When he and his friends had been small boys running feral across London bombsites, he’d told me, they collected things. Collected anything: shrapnel, cigarette packets, coins; mostly things that came in series. Things that could be matched and swapped; sets that could be completed. Collecting things like this, I realised, must have stitched together their broken world of rubble, made sense of a world disordered by war. And my father’s aeroplanes were just as much of a set to collect: a series of beautiful, moving things with names and numbers, all deeply concerned with danger and survival. But there was more. Aeroplanes had wings. They took flight, and if you knew them, watched them, understood their movements, you could somehow take flight too; you could watch that Tupolev 104 take off and know it will cross borders you cannot cross except in your imagination. In a few hours it will be on a snowy Soviet airfield. Or any one of a thousand else. In watching the planes, you fly with them and escape. They enlarge your little world and spread it across the seas. The notebooks are full of a fierce attention to things I do not know. But now I know what they are for. These are records of ordered transcendence. A watcher’s diary. My father’s talk of patience had held within it all the magic that is waiting and looking up at the moving sky. I put the notebook back and as I do I see there’s a piece of brown cardboard between the next two notebooks on the shelves. Puzzled, I pull it out. It is a blank piece of thick card cut roughly along one edge. I turn it over. My heart misses a beat, because stuck to the other side is a silver doorkey under three inches of clear tape. And five words written in pencil. Key to flat. Love, Dad Dad had posted it to me last year so I could stay at his flat in London when he was away. I’d lost it, of course. ‘My daughter the absent-minded professor,’ he’d said, rolling his eyes. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll get another one cut.’ But he’d never got round to it, and I’d not thought of it since. I don’t know what it is doing here. I read the words again and think of his hand writing them. And I think of Dad holding my own tiny hand as I put the other one flat against the sarsens at Stonehenge, back when I was very small and there were no fences to stop you walking among the stones. I looked up at the thing that was like a door but had no walls behind it. ‘Is it a house, Daddy?’ I asked him. ‘No one knows,’ he said. ‘It’s very, very old.’

• From Educated (2018)

  The scratch of pencils on paper, the clack of a projector moving to the next slide, the peal of the bells signaling the end of class—all were drowned out by the clatter of iron and the roar of diesel engines. After a month in the junkyard, BYU seemed like a dream, something I’d conjured. Now I was awake. My daily routine was exactly what it had been: after breakfast I sorted scrap or pulled copper from radiators. If the boys were working on-site, sometimes I’d go along to drive the loader or forklift or crane. At lunch I’d help Mother cook and do the dishes, then I’d return, either to the junkyard or to the forklift. The only difference was Shawn. He was not what I remembered. He never said a harsh word, seemed at peace with himself. He was studying for his GED, and one night when we were driving back from a job, he told me he was going to try a semester at a community college. He wanted to study law. There was a play that summer at the Worm Creek Opera House, and Shawn and I bought tickets. Charles was also there, a few rows ahead of us, and at intermission when Shawn moved away to chat up a girl, he shuffled over. For the first time I was not utterly tongue-tied. I thought of Shannon and how she’d talked to people at church, the friendly merriment of her, the way she laughed and smiled. Just be Shannon, I thought to myself. And for five minutes, I was. Charles was looking at me strangely, the way I’d seen men look at Shannon. He asked if I’d like to see a movie on Saturday. The movie he suggested was vulgar, worldly, one I would never want to see, but I was being Shannon, so I said I’d love to. I tried to be Shannon on Saturday night. The movie was terrible, worse than I’d expected, the kind of movie only a gentile would see. But it was hard for me to see Charles as a gentile. He was just Charles. I thought about telling him the movie was immoral, that he shouldn’t be seeing such things, but—still being Shannon—I said nothing, just smiled when he asked if I’d like to get ice cream. Shawn was the only one still awake when I got home. I was smiling when I came through the door. Shawn joked that I had a boyfriend, and it was a real joke—he wanted me to laugh. He said Charles had good taste, that I was the most decent person he knew, then he went to bed. In my room, I stared at myself in the mirror for a long time. The first thing I noticed was my men’s jeans and how they were nothing like the jeans other girls wore. The second thing I noticed was that my shirt was too large and made me seem more square than I was.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Despite the eccentricity of a hawk on his fist, what White was doing was very much of his time. Long walks in the English countryside, often at night, were astonishingly popular in the 1930s. Rambling clubs published calendars of full moons, train companies laid on mystery trains to rural destinations, and when in 1932 the Southern Railway offered an excursion to a moonlit walk along the South Downs, expecting to sell forty or so tickets, one and a half thousand people turned up. The people setting out on these walks weren’t seeking to conquer peaks or test themselves against maps and miles. They were looking for a mystical communion with the land; they walked backwards in time to an imagined past suffused with magical, native glamour: to Merrie England, or to pre-historic England, pre-industrial visions that offered solace and safety to sorely troubled minds. For though railways and roads and a burgeoning market in countryside books had contributed to this movement, at heart it had grown out of the trauma of the Great War, and was flourishing in fear of the next. The critic Jed Esty has described this pastoral craze as one element in a wider movement of national cultural salvage in these years; it was a response to economic disaster, a contracting Empire and totalitarian threats from abroad. It was a movement that celebrated ancient sites and folk traditions. It delighted in Shakespeare and Chaucer, in Druids, in Arthurian legend. It believed that something essential about the nation had been lost and could be returned, if only in the imagination. White, caught up in this conservative, antiquarian mood, walked with his hawk and wrote of ghosts, of starry Orion naked and resplendent in the English sky, of all the imaginary lines men and time had drawn upon the landscape. By the fire, his hawk by his side, he brooded on the fate of nations.

• From Educated (2018)

  In some moments I believed her, this wise woman with an answer to every question; but I could never quite forget the words of that other woman, that other mother, who was also wise. There’s no such thing as magic. One day Mother announced that she had reached a new skill level. “I no longer need to say the question aloud,” she said. “I can just think it.” That’s when I began to notice Mother moving around the house, her hand resting lightly on various objects as she muttered to herself, her fingers flexing in a steady rhythm. If she was making bread and wasn’t sure how much flour she’d added. Click click click. If she was mixing oils and couldn’t remember whether she’d added frankincense. Click click click. She’d sit down to read her scriptures for thirty minutes, forget what time she’d started, then muscle-test how long it had been. Click click click. Mother began to muscle-test compulsively, unaware she was doing it, whenever she grew tired of a conversation, whenever the ambiguities of her memory, or even just those of normal life, left her unsatisfied. Her features would slacken, her face become vacant, and her fingers would click like crickets at dusk. Dad was rapturous. “Them doctors can’t tell what’s wrong just by touching you,” he said, glowing. “But Mother can!” —THE MEMORY OF TYLER haunted me that winter. I remembered the day he left, how strange it was to see his car bumping down the hill loaded with boxes. I couldn’t imagine where he was now, but sometimes I wondered if perhaps school was less evil than Dad thought, because Tyler was the least evil person I knew, and he loved school—loved it more, it seemed, than he loved us. The seed of curiosity had been planted; it needed nothing more than time and boredom to grow. Sometimes, when I was stripping copper from a radiator or throwing the five hundredth chunk of steel into the bin, I’d find myself imagining the classrooms where Tyler was spending his days. My interest grew more acute with every deadening hour in the junkyard, until one day I had a bizarre thought: that I should enroll in the public school. Mother had always said we could go to school if we wanted. We just had to ask Dad, she said. Then we could go. But I didn’t ask. There was something in the hard line of my father’s face, in the quiet sigh of supplication he made every morning before he began family prayer, that made me think my curiosity was an obscenity, an affront to all he’d sacrificed to raise me. I made some effort to keep up my schooling in the free time I had between scrapping and helping Mother make tinctures and blend oils. Mother had given up homeschooling by then, but still had a computer, and there were books in the basement.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  From here, the city is mild and small, and looks all of a piece with the landscape around it. The beauty of a vantage like this is that it obscures the roads and walls with trees, makes Cambridge a miniature playset of forest-set blocks and spires. These days, when I go into town, I’m increasingly finding excuses to park my car in the multi-storey car park, because from the open-air fourth floor I can stare at these fields. They run like a backbone across the horizon, scratched with copse-lines and damped with cloud-shadow. A strange complication arises when I look at them. Something of a doubling. Leaning out over the car-park rail, I feel myself standing on the distant hill. There’s a terrible strength to this intuition. It’s almost as if my soul really is up there, several miles away, standing on thistly clay watching my soul-less self standing in the car park, with diesel and concrete in her nose and anti-skid asphalt under her feet. With the car-park self thinking if she looked very, very hard, perhaps through binoculars, she might see herself up there. I feel I might be up there, because now the hill is home. I know it intimately. Every hedgerow, every track through dry grass where the hares cut across field-boundaries, each discarded piece of rusted machinery, every earth and warren and tree. By the road, half an acre of fenced-off mud, scaled with tyre-tracks and water reflecting pieces of sky. Wagtails, pallets, tractors, a broken silo on its side like a fallen rocket stage. Here is the sheep-field, there is the clover ley, now mown and turned to earth. Further up the track are tracts of mugwort: dead now from frost, seeds clinging to stems and branches like a billion musty beads on ragged Christmas trees. Piles of bricks and rubble run along the left-hand side of the track, and the earth between them is soft and full of rabbits. Further up the hill the hedges are higher, and by the time I get to the top the track has narrowed into grass. Cow parsley. Knapweed. Wild burdock. The argillaceous shimmer of tinder-fine clay. Drifts of chalk beneath. Yellowhammers chipping in the hedges. Cumulus rubble. The maritime light of this island, set as it is under a sky mirrored and uplit by sea.

• From Educated (2018)

  Unwilling to suffer a humiliating defeat, cut down one by one as they tried to break through the cavalry, they mounted their horses and charged off the face of the mountain. When the Apache women found their broken bodies on the rocks below, they cried huge, desperate tears, which turned to stone when they touched the earth. Grandma never told us what happened to the women. The Apaches were at war but had no warriors, so perhaps she thought the ending too bleak to say aloud. The word “slaughter” came to mind, because slaughter is the word for it, for a battle when one side mounts no defense. A slaughter was the likely outcome of the warriors’ bravery. They died in heroic thunder; their wives in collective silence. A void in the shared history, a blank page. As we drove to the trailer, the sun dipping in the sky, its last rays reaching across the highway, I thought about the Apache women. Like the sandstone altar on which they had died, the shape of their lives had been determined years before—before the armies assembled, before the horses began their gallop, their sorrel bodies arching for that final collision. Long before the warriors’ leap it was decided how the women would live and how they would die. By the warriors, by their attachers, by the women themselves. Decided. Choices, numberless as grains of sand, had layered and compressed, coalescing into sediment, then into rock, until all was set in stone. —I HAD NEVER BEFORE left the mountain and I ached for it, for the sight of the Princess etched in pine across the massif. I found myself glancing at the vacant Arizona sky, hoping to see her black form swelling out of the earth, laying claim to her half of the heavens. But she was not there. More than the sight of her, I missed her caresses—the wind she sent through canyons and ravines to sweep through my hair every morning. In Arizona, there was no wind. There was just one heat-stricken hour after another. I spent my days wandering from one side of the trailer to the other, then out the back door, across the patio, over to the hammock, then around to the front porch, where I’d step over Dad’s semiconscious form and back inside again. It was a great relief when, on the sixth day, Grandpa’s four-wheeler broke down and Tyler and Luke took it apart to find the trouble. I sat on a large barrel of blue plastic, watching them, wondering when we could go home. When Dad would stop talking about the Illuminati. When Mother would stop leaving the room whenever Dad entered it. That night after dinner, Dad said it was time to go. “Get your stuff,” he said. “We’re hitting the road in half an hour.” It was early evening, which Grandma said was a ridiculous time to begin a twelve-hour drive.

• From City of Night (1963)

  He was an Oklahoma cowboy, discovered on the range—who came to the newyork Rodeo (I am not referring to the one in Madison Square Garden: Im referring to the Rodeo of this city itself), and whom I was able—my lucky star was shining—to corral in my own small patio—sadly not large enough for him who was used to The Plains—but briefly, briefly, I had that earthangel, but the bronco god called him, and off he galloped: to the vaster plains of Broadway—and I heard later he changed his name to Cam Rider—rather, the agent who Sponsored him changed it; the agent was fond of saying: ‘He jes cam’ ridin into my life.’... How could the good assistant, with all his science, have indicated Cam Rider, née Joe Jones, on his graph? Impossible!... And at the party which these two youngmen gave to entertain the assistant (although he would not have called it ‘entertainment’—it was always Material! Research! Study! Science!)—at that party, he would ask for specific performances. I must say the boys in the group had never had such a marvelous time—with no fear of a raid, since the assistant was well protected: And thus, in the future, you will see life imitating science!... It was after Robbie had left that I went to that party. I saw Robbie after that magic first night, at different places, but I could not afford him. Once I had given him $25.00, I couldnt give him less. I wasnt—let me again remind you—doing well—uh—‘breadwise,’ then: It was a dry period: And I thought that Heaven had allowed me only that brief time with Robbie. And then one day he called me: My Robbie! ‘Professor,’ he said, ‘can I come up?’ My heart died to speak the next words: ‘Angel-child,’ I said, ‘I cannot afford you at the moment—in fact, the memory of you is so precious to me, that I cannot even afford that—but it is one of those rare prizes of life that memories have no price!’ And then, after a brief wordless interlude in which my heart refused to budge, my guardian Angel sighed into the telephone: ‘Professor, havent you ever heard of love?’ ... I had never dared to hope—me, a mountain of spent flesh—and that supple magnificent youngman.... And yet there it was: The Word: The Magic Word: Love.... I called up a friend of mine—for once, I was not too proud. I needed money badly, I told him. That afternoon, when Robbie came over, I gave him $100.00. He looked hurt when I gave it to him. ‘This was for love,’ he told me. ‘Child,’ I told him, ‘Robbie—Angel—the money is also an inadequate expression of my Love.’ And I pressed it into his hand.... Ah! if indeed it were possible to shatter this sorry scheme of things—I would begin by replacing that first sharp slap which brings us howling into life—I would replace it... with a Kiss.... I would breathe Love into each child....

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  I watched in disbelief as she charmed the uncharmable Knights. My protective sisters, my shy mother, my autocratic father, they were no match for her. Especially my father. When she shook his hand, she melted something hard at his core. Maybe it was growing up among the Candy Bar People, and all their mogul friends—she had the kind of self-confidence you run across once or twice in a lifetime. She was certainly the only person I’d ever known who could casually drop Babe Paley and Hermann Hesse into the same conversation. She admired them both. But especially Hesse. She was going to write a book about him one day. “It’s like Hesse says,” she purred over dinner one night, “happiness is a how, not a what.” The Knights chewed their pot roast, sipped their milk. “Very interesting,” my father said. I brought Sarah down to the worldwide headquarters of Blue Ribbon, in the basement, and showed her the operation. I gave her a pair of Limber Ups. She wore them when we drove out to the coast. We went hiking up Humbug Mountain, and crabbing along the scalloped coastline, and huckleberry picking in the woods. Standing under an eighty-foot spruce we shared a huckleberry kiss. When it was time for her to fly back to Maryland, I was bereft. I wrote her every other day. My first-ever love letters. Dear Sarah, I think about sitting beside that

• From Educated (2018)

  Just the play over in town, where his youngest daughter was singing the lead. Dad didn’t stop me from auditioning for the next play, or the one after that, even though he worried about me spending so much time away from home. “There’s no telling what kind of cavorting takes place in that theater,” he said. “It’s probably a den of adulterers and fornicators.” When the director of the next play got divorced, it confirmed Dad’s suspicions. He said he hadn’t kept me out of the public school for all these years just to see me corrupted on a stage. Then he drove me to the rehearsal. Nearly every night he said he was going to put a stop to my going, that one evening he’d just show up at Worm Creek and haul me home. But each time a play opened he was there, in the front row. Sometimes he played the part of an agent or manager, correcting my technique or suggesting songs for my repertoire, even advising me about my health. That winter I caught a procession of sore throats and couldn’t sing, and one night Dad called me to him and pried my mouth open to look at my tonsils. “They’re swollen, all right,” he said. “Big as apricots.” When Mother couldn’t get the swelling down with echinacea and calendula, Dad suggested his own remedy. “People don’t know it, but the sun is the most powerful medicine we have. That’s why people don’t get sore throats in summer.” He nodded, as if approving of his own logic, then said, “If I had tonsils like yours, I’d go outside every morning and stand in the sun with my mouth open—let those rays seep in for a half hour or so. They’ll shrink in no time.” He called it a treatment. I did it for a month. It was uncomfortable, standing with my jaw dropped and my head tilted back so the sun could shine into my throat. I never lasted a whole half hour. My jaw would ache after ten minutes, and I’d half-freeze standing motionless in the Idaho winter. I kept catching more sore throats, and anytime Dad noticed I was a bit croaky, he’d say, “Well, what do you expect? I ain’t seen you getting treatment all week!” —IT WAS AT THE Worm Creek Opera House that I first saw him: a boy I didn’t know, laughing with a group of public school kids, wearing big white shoes, khaki shorts and a wide grin. He wasn’t in the play, but there wasn’t much to do in town, and I saw him several more times that week when he turned up to visit his friends. Then one night, when I was wandering alone in the dark wings backstage, I turned a corner and found him sitting on the wooden crate that was a favorite haunt of mine. The crate was isolated—that was why I liked it. He shifted to the right, making room for me.

• From City of Night (1963)

  A streetangel. I bought him pairs of shoes! And Paris, that magnificent city of statues, glowed for me as if lighted by heaven itself. Alas, he was a robbing angel,” he sighed, feeling absently for his wristwatch. “But what I had gotten from him! Ah!” He turned heavenward. “My friend, the playwright—” He mentioned a French writer. “—was fond of saying, ‘We take when we must take, and we give when we must give.’ Oh, he was chic!... Now about you. What is the appeal that the streets hold for you? What do you look for? And, mainly, what do you find? The streets: where one can find a glorious child without shoes—or someone to buy them for him. In the streets where I found, in Paris, another vivid angel: with his father and mother. He was perhaps sixteen; he wore a tiny cross around his neck, and it fell on his chest, the shirt open almost to his lovely navel. And the mother and father saw me and said good day. They invited me to their drab home—too drab to house such an angel as their child—and so, understanding that, they let me have him: He lived with me—for a space of time, a glorious space of time. And for that glorious time, in gratitude, I saw that the father and mother had glorious wine on their table—daily.... The mother looked like a witch, Oh, yes! I believe in witches! There is much in the occult, you know. How is it possible for our time to believe in the fairytale of God and not in the other dark powers? Which is more difficult to believe? I have seen witches, I have seen them work, but I have not seen God.... I knew a woman in California who practiced witchcraft: Her power was Awesome. (She had a medium, a youngman... another affair!)... And when she discovered—brutally—that people came to her as one goes to see a clever fraud—not really believing in her Powers—when she discovered that, she willed herself to death. Yes—she announced she would die, and she did: trying futilely to prove by dying what she realized suddenly she had not proved by living: that she believed what she said.... People—people—” he started almost painfully: “people—die—when they see life—at last—without—Illusions—For some, it takes many, many years; for others, much less. And so each of us commits suicide: when we will our own deaths: That is the only Death....” He paused, studying the tape-measure. “But enough about the dark powers of the heart—yes, deceitful above all things!... On to more pleasant things!... A friend of mine—a director—said: ‘You are a talent scout, Professor.’ And indeed, I always search out Talent, dear, dear, child—angel—uncategorized angel. (Am I being unfaithful to you, Robbie? Robbie! Guard me, watch over me!)...

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Anyone with half an eye could see that my heart lay all with Kitty Butler now; anyone might guess that, having once been offered the chance of a future at her side, and kept from it, I could never return to my father’s kitchen and be happy there, as I had been before. So when, an hour or so after Kitty’s departure, I nervously put her plan before my parents, and argued and pleaded for their blessing, they listened to me wonderingly, but carefully; and when, the next day, Father stopped me on my way down to the kitchen to draw me into the parlour where it was quiet and still, his face was sad and serious, but kind. He asked me, first, whether I had not changed my mind? I shook my head, and he sighed. He said, if I was quite decided, then Mother and he could not keep me; that I was a grown-up woman, almost, and should be allowed to know my own mind; that they had thought to see me marry a Whitstable boy, and settle close at hand, and so have a share in my little happinesses and troubles - but that now, he supposed, I would go and hitch up with some London fellow, who wouldn’t understand their ways at all. But children, he concluded, weren’t made to please their parents; and no father should expect to have his daughter at his side for ever... ‘In short, Nance, even was you going to the very devil himself, your mother and I would rather see you fly from us in joy, than stay with us in sorrow - and grow, maybe, to hate us, for keeping you from your fate.’ I had never known him so grave before, nor so eloquent. I had never seen him weep either; but now as he spoke his eyes glistened, and he blinked, twice or thrice, to hold the tears back, and his voice grew thin. I placed my head against his shoulder and let my own tears rise and spill. He put an arm about me, and patted me. ‘It breaks our hearts to lose you, dear,’ he went on. ‘You know it does. Only promise us that you won’t forget us, quite. That you’ll write to us, and visit us.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  Whenever I go back to Eugene, and walk the campus, I think of her. Whenever I stand outside Hayward Field, I think of the silent race she ran. I think of all the many races that each of us have run. I lean against the fence and look at the track and listen to the wind, thinking of Bowerman with his string tie blowing behind him. I think of Pre, God love him. Turning, looking over my shoulder, my heart leaps. Across the street stands the William Knight Law School. A very serious-looking edifice. No one ever jackasses around in there. I CAN’T SLEEP. I can’t stop thinking about that blasted movie, The Bucket List. Lying in the dark, I ask myself again and again, What’s on yours? Pyramids? Check. Himalayas? Check. Ganges? Check. So… nothing? I think about the few things I want to do. Help a couple of universities change the world. Help find a cure for cancer. Besides that, it’s not so much things I want to do as things I’d like to say. And maybe unsay. It might be nice to tell the story of Nike. Everyone else has told the story, or tried to, but they always get half the facts, if that, and none of the spirit. Or vice versa. I might start the story, or end it, with regrets. The hundreds—maybe thousands—of bad decisions. I’m the guy who said Magic Johnson was “a player without a position, who’ll never make it in the NBA.” I’m the guy who tabbed Ryan Leaf as a better NFL quarterback than Peyton Manning. It’s easy to laugh those off. Other regrets go deeper. Not phoning Hiraku Iwano after he quit. Not getting Bo Jackson renewed in 1996. Joe Paterno. Not being a good enough manager to avoid layoffs. Three times in ten years—a total of fifteen hundred people. It still haunts. Of course, above all, I regret not spending more time with my sons. Maybe, if I had, I could’ve solved the encrypted code of Matthew Knight. And yet I know that this regret clashes with my secret regret—that I can’t do it all over again. God, how I wish I could relive the whole thing. Short of that, I’d like to share the experience, the ups and downs, so that some young man or woman, somewhere, going through the same trials and ordeals, might be inspired or comforted. Or warned. Some young entrepreneur, maybe, some athlete or painter or novelist, might press on. It’s all the same drive. The same dream.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  It had been good to talk of Kitty - so good that, seated at the supper-table later, between silent Alice and nasty Rhoda with her tiny, flashing sapphire, I missed her all the more. I was due to spend another day with them, but now I thought I could not face it. I said, as we started on our puddings, that I had changed my mind and would take the morning, rather than the evening train tomorrow - that I had remembered things that I must do at the theatre, that I shouldn’t put off till Thursday. They didn’t seem surprised, though Father said it was a shame. Later, as I kissed them good-night, he cleared his throat. ‘There you are,’ he said, ‘back up to London in the morning, and I’ve barely had time for a proper look at you.’ I smiled. ‘Have you had a nice time with us, Nance?’ ‘Oh yes.’ ‘And you will take care of yourself, in London?’ asked Mother. ‘It seems very far away.’ I laughed. ‘It’s not so far.’ ‘Far enough,’ she said, ‘to keep you from us for a year and a half.’ ‘I’ve been busy,’ I said. ‘We have been terribly busy, both of us.’ She nodded, not much impressed: she had heard all this before, in letters. ‘Just make sure it’s not so long before you come home again. It is very nice to get your parcels; it was very nice to get those gifts; but we would rather have you, than a hairbrush or a pair of boots.’ I looked away, abashed; I still felt foolish when I thought about the presents. Even so, I didn’t think she needed to be quite so rusty about it, quite so hard. Having made the decision to leave sooner, I grew impatient. I packed my bags that night, and rose, next morning, even earlier than Alice. At seven, when the breakfast things were cleared away, I was ready to go. I embraced them all, but my parting was not so sad, nor so sweet, as it had been the first time I had left them; and I had no premonition of anything to come, to make it sadder. Davy was kind, and made me promise I would come home for his wedding, and said I might bring Kitty if I liked, which made me love him all the more.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  If she moved towards King’s Cross again, I should miss her. At last she stowed the paper in a satchel that was slung, crosswise, over her chest, and turned - to her left, towards me. I kept to my step and, as I had before, I watched her; slowly she drew level with me until, once again, there was no more than the width of the road between us. I saw her eyes flick once towards mine, then away, and then, as she felt the persistence of my gaze, to mine again. I smiled; she slowed her step and, with a show of uncertainty, smiled back: but I could see that she had not the least idea who I might be. I couldn’t let the moment pass. While my eyes still held her questioning, amiable gaze, I lifted my hand to my head and raised my hat, and said in the same low tone that I had used on her before: ‘G’mornin’.’ As before, she started. Then she glanced up at the balcony above my head. And then she pinked. ‘Oh! It was you then - was it?’ I smiled again, and gave a little bow. My stays creaked; it felt all wrong, being gallant in a skirt, and I had a sudden fear that she might take me not for an impertinent voyeur, but for a fool. But when I raised my eyes to hers again her flush was fading, and her face showed neither contempt, nor discomfiture, but a kind of amusement. She tilted her head. A van passed between us, followed by a cart. In lifting my hat to her this time I had thought only, and vaguely, to correct the earlier misunderstanding; perhaps, to make her smile. But when the street was once again clear and she still stood there it seemed a kind of invitation. I crossed, and stood before her. I said, ‘I’m sorry if I frightened you the other night.’ She seemed embarassed at the memory, but laughed. ‘You didn’t frighten me,’ she said, as if she were never frightened. ‘You just gave me a bit of a start. If I’d known you were a woman — well!’ She blushed again - or it may have been the same blush as before, I couldn’t tell. Then she glanced away; and we fell silent. ‘Where’s your friend the musician?’

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  The cloud-base is low today. It does not matter. He is not flying today. He is walking. He is walking with his hawk, and he and Gos have traversed five fields to get here. Now he stands by the ruins of the chapel of St Thomas the Martyr. Once it was a chapel, then it was a house, and now it is a ruin, a great, collapsing carcass of stained ironstone. The roof is a broken ribcage heaped with rotting thatch. Lintels sag over windows and doors blocked with laths and limestone rubble. Great banks of nettles grow here, rich and green. Ash trees rise in lacy fists and the fields fall away each side. It is very quiet. He hears the ticking of a robin somewhere, like falling water. This place is soundly cursed against man, he thinks. The stink of the dead sheep he found dumped in a drain is still caught in his nose, a sorry, sodden wreck of fleece pullulating with maggots. He does not mind the smell. It is a bracing stench. It is the smell of mortality. He looks down at the rabbit-cropped turf. Beneath him, the people that lived and died and were buried here are here still, he thinks; their old bones would be grateful to see a goshawk again. He walks around the chapel, imagining the earth beneath him turning and muttering as it senses the familiar hawk above, as the bones of farm labourers mutter when agricultural machinery passes over their forgotten tombs. I thought of the small race now underground, strangers of a vanished species safe from comprehension, almost from imagination: monks, nuns, and the eternal villein. I was as close to them as anybody now, close even to Chaucer, ‘with grey goshawk in hond’. They would understand my hawk with their eyes, as a farmer understood an elevator. We loved each other. White’s visit to Chapel Green was my favourite part of The Goshawk when I was young. It was a communion with something lost and forgotten, and somehow a hawk was at the heart of it. It always gave me a sense of kinship with White – although I couldn’t imagine why farmers should have special knowledge of elevators. That made no sense at all. Maybe he meant to write ‘tractor’, I thought, for I didn’t know then what a bale elevator was, nor that White had been lately watching the Wheelers, who farmed the land around him, using one. But I could imagine the chapel quite clearly when I was small, and now it was clearer than ever. If I shut my eyes I saw White lifting Gos on his fist and shutting his own eyes very tight, as if it were possible for the whole mess of the twentieth century to slip aside, and the world of centuries before be resurrected, a lost community with him at its heart. He would have been loved. He would have been understood.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  The poet W. H. Auden had written those lines in 1930, and I hadn’t thought of them for years. To have the commanding view of the hawk and airman: to be lifted free from the messy realities of human life to a prospect of height and power from which one can observe the world below. To have safe vantage, from which death may descend. Safety. I think of the American airmen stationed here seventy years ago flying aircraft just like this one, scrambling to the iceboxes that were cockpits, wearing heated suits that didn’t work, breathing oxygen through rubber hoses that furred with crystalline ice, so that at altitude they had to bend and crush them between their fingers to get sufficient oxygen to breathe. They slept on cots in an alien land of rain and fog, dressed in silence for dawn briefings before running to their ships, holding the throttles forward, tight-chested as the engines spooled up, climbing through cloud, eyes locked on the manifold pressure gauges and the rpm displays, navigators calling headings in degrees. And then the hours of flight to and from Germany where they dropped their appalling cargo through skies thick with exploding shells. One in four did not complete their tour of duty. The sky was not a place of safety, no matter how commanding their view. What happened to them was terrible. What they did was terrible beyond imagining. No war can ever be just air. The hawk is on my fist. Thirty ounces of death in a feathered jacket; a being whose world is drawn in plots and vectors that pull her towards lives’ ends. She finishes the last scraps of rabbit, strops her beak, rubs strands of pale fur onto the glove. Then she shakes her feathers into place and gazes up at the empty sky where the bomber had been. And I feel it then, the tug. How did Auden’s poem go, after those lines? The clouds rift suddenly – look there I look. There it is. I feel it. The insistent pull to the heart that the hawk brings, that very old longing of mine to possess the hawk’s eye. To live the safe and solitary life; to look down on the world from a height and keep it there. To be the watcher; invulnerable, detached, complete. My eyes fill with water. Here I am, I think. And I do not think I am safe.

• From City of Night (1963)

  And so, with Eminent contiadictions (I must warn you), the wayward saga of Miss Destiny unfolds—that night at the 1-2-3, in the ocean of searching faces: “Naturally,” she continued, “I got into the Finest circles. Philadelphia society and all that—and Im sippin muh cocktail at this party when in walks the most positively gorgeous youngman I have evuh seen. And he stares at me! Walked away from the hostess—who was a real lady (a society model, baby, and later she became a Moviestar and married that king—you know)—” muttering bitch after Pauline who just then passed brushing my shoulder purposely to bug Miss Destiny “—and this gorgeous youngman, why, he comes to me and says—just like that—‘You Are My Destiny!’ and I thought he said, ‘You are Miss Destiny,’ mistaking me you know for some other girl, and when the hostess says Im the most beautiful fish shes evuh seen, what is my name, Im terrified the gorgeous youngman will drop me if Im not who I think he thinks I am, so I say, ‘I am Miss Destiny,’ and he thinks I said, ‘I am his destiny’ (he told me later), and he says, ‘Yes oh yes she is,’ and from then on ‘I am Miss Destiny—” (Oh they go home that night and Miss Destiny must confess she is not a real woman, but, oh, oh, he doesnt care, having of course flipped over her, and he takes her to his country estate, his family naturally being Fabulously rich, and they simply Idolize Miss Destiny....) “His name was Duke,” Miss Destiny sighed, “and when I met him, oh I remember, they were playing La Varsouviana (thats ‘Put Your Little Foot,’ dear)—you see, although it was a cocktail party, it was so Elegant that they had an orchestra—and how I loved him, and I know thats a strange name—Duke—but it was his real name, not a nickname—but he would be a wild rose by any other name and smell as sweet!... Being aristocrats, all his family had strange names: his mother’s name was ah Alexandria, just like the ah queen of ah ancient Sparta who killed the ah emperor in Greek mythology (those are very old stories, dear)—” Suddenly here is Darling Dolly Dane back gasping tugging at Miss Destiny, who of course resents the intrusion in the middle of her autobiography. “Destiny, Destiny, quick,” Darling Dolly pleads, “Ive got to have the key to your pad right away quick hurry!” I notice Darling Dolly is carrying a small bundle that looks suspiciously like a pair of pants. All right, all right—and what does Darling Dolly want the key for? Darling Dolly Dane says she just clipped the score she went with who promised her the deuce, remember?

• From City of Night (1963)

  Between them was a very young, handsome boy, his shirt open to the waist. One of the woman’s arms was draped proudly about the boy’s shoulders; the other hand held a bottle of wine toward the camera.)... “This is for the last,” the Professor said, skipping a page, bringing the book to his chest momentarily; goes on: “And this is the most poetic of my poetic angels—he wrote the Most Divine, sensitive poems—crystals!—I helped him to get a grant—not through any foundation, mind you, but part of mine: My life’s source at that time thus contributing to his.” (The youngman in the picture wore his hair poetically over his forehead.) “He was a beautiful poet—” the Professor sighed, “and when I told him I would help him, he told me, passionately, that he would dedicate his first volume to me. Ive wondered if it came out.... Danny, the ice-skater: He glided across my not-so-icy heart.... And this one!—a Mr America candidate!” (The body in the photograph gleamed coldly as if chiseled out of ice.)... There were other photographs—youngmen in Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Mexico, America... several sailors, servicemen, various youngmen in trunks: all staring at the world with a look strangely in common: a look which at first I thought was a coldness behind the smile and then realized must be a kind of muted despair, a franticness to get what the world had offered others and not extended readily to them.... And now the Professor turns back to the page he had skipped. I knew whom the picture would be of: “This—Is—Robbie,” he announced. (I saw a handsome youngman sitting on a foreign car, squinting at the sun, smiling widely as if someday he would own the world; as if the world for him was a mirror. But even in the picture he seemed to resent the brightness of the sun, greater than his own.) “I have here,” the Professor sighed, hugging the album closely again, “the indefinable shape of love—to which, dear child, you must not deny my adding your photograph....” I wondered suddenly if. I would photograph with the same hard look.... I remember Mr King: “Pictures in a fuckedup album.”) “Yes, Love, indeed,” the Professor said, “which has many forms. Who loved the most? I? They? Who was the taker, who the giver? Who can tell? Someday—at the last of my Research—I shall know.... Now,” he said, “take the chair and come stand near me—please....” I placed the album under the heavy book with the Professor’s name on the cover. I could feel the bulging eyes on me as I lifted the book, slipped the album under it on the shelf. I went and stood by the bed. When I was ready to leave, the Professor waved as usual. Again he sighed after me: “God Is Love!” Outside, the malenurse stared frozenly at me.

• From City of Night (1963)

  2 “Now, sit near me,” he said. “Yes, do bring that chair over. Not that one: the other one, it’s more comfortable, and I want you to be Comfortable.... Careful, now—my manuscripts. Push them aside, child—neatly, neatly—I was looking through some things before you came.” Sighing deeply, he waves a chubby hand over the room, indicating the books and manuscripts littering the floor. “They are: Relics—from another life!... Now, first of all, let me explain some exterior situations: You see me here, now, in this hospital bed, where Ive been for months and months; Suffice it to say: an Eternity! An automobile struck me—and it would have been Poetic Justice, yes, if I could say I had been hit by a gigantic truck—driven by a young handsome truckdriver, who knelt to gather my shattered heap of flesh (you see: I say ‘shattered heap of flesh’—I am frank with myself: Life wrecks all illusions—but you will find that out later), and to whom—had it been just such a handsome young truckdriver, though the very instrument of my infirmity—I would owe my life: There would have been something extravagantly Sexual—” He affected a slight tremor. “—about being struck by a truck—ummm—Well!... But, oh, the perversity of life: no such magnificent luck. It was no such earthangel who ran into me: but—ah, perversity, dear boy, keep it in mind: Perversity!—I was hit by a nervous, high-strung, skinny, homely, ineffectual, simpering oldmaid from Oklahoma, vainly trying to compete with our own glorious system of cabs! Not that I have anything against Oklahoma. As you will learn, I have some fond memories of—But that comes later.... And so it has taken all those months. This frail mechanism (if I may be allowed the indiscretion of referring to myself as ‘frail’—ha, ha—but I speak only relatively)—this frail mechanism called the body has refused to heal. In other words, the hip bone is no longer connected to the—How does that song go?... Anyway, you see me now rigged up in a 20th-century torture—not entirely unlike those used by the Inquisitors of old.... But do bring your chair closer, youngman—I want to hear every word you say, every phrase.... You will notice I have a hearing aid—which at times I feel must indeed be connected to an electronic god, who whispers all kinds of naughty electronic gossip to me. And, sometimes, alas! falls deadly silent... But you see, I am a bit of a poet, and you will understand—later, because I hope you will become my angel. (Robbie, forgive me, forgive me! )” He entreated Heaven.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  No, I shall go on my own.’ I said it rather firmly, as if going to the Palace every night was some chore I had been set to do and I had generously decided to do it with the minimum of bother and complaint. There was a second’s almost awkward silence. Then Father said, ‘You are a funny little thing, Nancy. All the way to Canterbury in the sweltering heat - and not even to wait for a glimpse of Gully Sutherland when you get there!’ And at that, everybody laughed, and the second’s awkwardness passed, and the conversation turned to other things. There were more cries of disbelief, however, and more smiles, when I came home from my third trip to the Palace and announced, shyly, my intention of returning there a fourth time, and a fifth. Uncle Joe was visiting us: he was pouring beer from a bottle, carefully, into a tilted glass, but looked up when he heard the laughter. ‘What’s all this?’ he said. ‘Nancy’s mashed out on that Kitty Butler, at the Palace,’ said Davy. ‘Imagine that, Uncle Joe - being mashed on a masher!’ I said, ‘You shut up.’ Mother looked sharp. ‘You shut up, please, madam.’ Uncle Joe took a sip of his beer, then licked the froth from his whiskers. ‘Kitty Butler?’ he said. ‘She’s the gal what dresses up as a feller, ain’t she?’ He pulled a face. ‘Pooh, Nancy, the real thing not good enough for you any more?’ Father leaned towards him. ‘Well, we are told it is Kitty Butler,’ he said. ‘If you ask me’ - and here he winked and rubbed his nose - ‘I think there’s a young chap in the orchestra pit what she’s got her eye on ...’ ‘Ah,’ said Joe, significantly. ‘Let’s hope poor Frederick don’t catch on to it, then ...’ At that, everybody looked my way, and I blushed - and so seemed, I suppose, to prove my father’s words. Davy snorted; Mother, who had frowned before, now smiled. I let her - I let them all think just what they liked - and said nothing; and soon, as before, the talk turned to other matters. I could deceive my parents and my brother with my silences; from my sister Alice, however, I could keep nothing. ‘Is there a feller you’ve got your eye on, at the Palace?’ she asked me later, when the rest of the house lay hushed and sleeping. ‘Of course not,’ I said quietly. ‘It’s just Miss Butler, then, that you go to see?’ ‘Yes.’ There was a silence, broken only by the distant rumble of wheels and faint thud of hooves, from the High Street, and the even fainter sucking whoosh of sea against shingle from the bay. We had put out our candle but left the window wide and unshuttered. I saw in the gleam of starlight that Alice’s eyes were open.