Nostalgia

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 The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  So Valérie went to the telephone there and then and pro- ceeded to call up the landlord. The appointment was made for eleven the next morning. “ It’s rather a sad old house,’ she warned, ‘no one has troubled to make it a home for some time, but you'll alter all that if you take it, because I suppose you’ll make it your home.’ Stephen flushed: ‘ My home’s in England,’ she said quickly, for her thoughts had instantly flown back to Morton. But Valérie answered: “One may have two homes — many homes. Be courteous to our lovely Paris and give it the privi- lege of being your second home — it will feel very honoured, Miss Gordon.’ She sometimes made little ceremonious speeches like this, and coming from her, they sounded strangely old- fashioned. Brockett, rather subdued and distinctly pensive as sometimes happened if Valérie had snubbed him, complained of a pain above his right eye: ‘1 must take some phenacetin,’ he said sadly, ‘I’m 282 THE WELL OF LONELINESS always getting this curious pain above my right eye—do you think it’s the sinus? ’ He was very intolerant of all pain. His hostess sent for the phenacetin, and Brockett gulped down a couple of tablets: ‘ Valérie doesn’t love me any more,’ he sighed, with a woebegone look at Stephen. “I do call it hard, but it’s always what happens when I introduce my best friends to each other — they foregather at once and leave me in the cold; but then, thank heaven, I’m very forgiving.’ They laughed and Valérie made him get on to the divan where he promptly lay down on the lute. ‘Oh God!’ he moaned, ‘ now I’ve injured my spine — I’m so badly upholstered.’ Then he started to strum on the one sound string of the lute. Valérie went over to her untidy desk and began to write out a list of addresses: ‘ These may be useful to you, Miss Gordon.’ ‘Stephen!’ exclaimed Brockett, ‘Call the poor woman Stephen! ’ “May I?’ Stephen acquiesced: ‘ Yes, please do.’ “Very well then, I’m Valérie. Is that a bargain? ’ ‘ The bargain is sealed,’ announced Brockett. With extraor- dinary skill he was managing to strum ‘O Sole Mio’ on the single string, when he suddenly stopped: ‘I knew there was something — your fencing, Stephen, you’ve forgotten your fenc- ing. We meant to ask Valérie for Buisson’s address; they say he’s the finest master in Europe.’ Valérie looked up: ‘ Does Stephen fence, then? ’ ‘ Does she fence! She’s a marvellous, champion fencer.’ “He's never seen me fence,’ explained Stephen, ‘ and I’m never likely to be a champion.’ ‘ Don’t you believe her, she’s trying to be modest. I’ve heard that she fences quite as finely as she writes,’ he insisted. And somehow Stephen felt touched, Brockett was trying to show off her talents.

• From Confessions of a Mask (1958)

  As my companions were two girls—Sugiko and another cousin—playing at war was hardly a suitable game. Still less did the opposing Amazons show any signs of enthusiasm. My reason for proposing the game also lay in my inverted sense of social duty: in short, I felt that I must not fawn upon the girls, but must somehow give them a hard time. Although mutually bored, we continued playing our clumsy game of war in and out of the twilit house.From behind a bush Sugiko was imitating the sound of a machine gun: "Bang! bang! bang!" I finally decided it was about time to put an end to the business and led a wild flight into the house. The female soldiers came running after me, giving a continuous fusillade of bang-bang-bang's. I clutched at my heart and collapsed limply in the center of the parlor. "What's the matter, Kochan?" they asked, approaching with worried faces. "I'm being dead on the battlefield," I replied, neither opening my eyes nor moving my hand. I was enraptured with the vision of my own form lying there, twisted and fallen. There was an unspeakable delight in having been shot and being on the point of death. It seemed to me that since it was I, even if actually struck by a bullet, there would surely be no pain. . . . The years of childhood . . . My memory runs head-on into a scene that is like a symbol of those years. To me as I am today, that scene represents childhood itself, past and irrecoverable. When I saw the scene I felt the hand of farewell with which childhood would take its leave of me. I had a premonition at that instant that all my feeling of subjective time, or timelessness, might one day gush forth from within me and flood into the mold of that scene, to become an exact imitation of its people and movements and sounds; that simultaneous with the completion of this copy, the original might melt away into the distant perspectives of real and objective time; and that I might be left with nothing more than the mere imitation or, to say it another way, with nothing more than an accurately stuffed specimen of my childhood. Everyone experiences some such incident in his childhood. In most cases, however, it assumes such a slight form, hardly worthy of being called even an incident, that it is apt to pass by unnoticed. . . . The scene of which I speak took place once when a crowd celebrating the Summer Festival came surging in through our gate.

• From Confessions of a Mask (1958)

  It was a brand-new basin, its wooden surface planed to a fresh and silken smoothness; and when I looked from inside, a ray of light was striking one spot on its brim. The wood gleamed only in that one spot and seemed to be made of gold. Tongue-tips of water lapped up waveringly as though they would lick the spot, but never quite reached it. And, whether because of a reflection or because the ray of light streamed on into the basin as well, the water beneath that spot on the brim gleamed softly, and tiny shining waves seemed to be forever bumping their heads together there. . . . The strongest disproof of this memory was the fact that I had been born, not in the daytime, but at nine in the evening: There could have been no streaming sunlight. Even though teased with a "So then, it must have been an electric light," without any great difficulty I could still walk into the absurdity of believing that no matter if it had been midnight, a ray of sunlight had surely been striking at least that one spot on the basin. In this way the brim of that basin and its flickering light lingered on in my memory as something I had surely seen at the time of my first bath. I was born two years after the Great Earthquake. Ten years earlier, as a result of a scandal that occurred while he was serving as a colonial governor, my grandfather had taken the blame for a subordinate's misdeeds and resigned his post. (I am not speaking euphemistically: until now I have never seen such a totality of foolish trust in human beings as that my grandfather possessed.) Thereafter my family had begun sliding down an incline with a speed so happy-go-lucky that I could almost say they hummed merrily as they went—huge debts, foreclosure, sale of the family estate, and then, as financial difficulties multiplied, a morbid vanity blazing higher and higher like some evil impulse. . . . As a result I was born in not too good a section of Tokyo, in an old rented house. It was a pretentious house on a corner, with a rather jumbled appearance and a dingy, charred feeling. It had an imposing iron gate, an entry garden, and a Western-style reception room as large as the interior of a suburban church. There were two stories on the upper slope and three on the lower, numerous gloomy rooms, and six housemaids. In this house, which creaked like an old chest of drawers, ten persons were getting up and lying down morning and evening—my grandfather and grandmother, father and mother, and the servants. At the root of the family troubles was my grandfather's passion for enterprises and my grandmother's illness and extravagant ways.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  In the wood all was utterly inert and motionless, only great drops fell from the bare boughs, with a hollow little crash. For the rest, among the old trees was depth within depth of grey, hopeless, inertia, silence, nothingness. Connie walked dimly on. From the old wood came an ancient melancholy, somehow soothing to her, better than the harsh insentience of the outer world. She liked the _inwardness_ of the remnant of forest, the unspeaking reticence of the old trees. They seemed a very power of silence, and yet a vital presence. They, too, were waiting: obstinately, stoically waiting, and giving off a potency of silence. Perhaps they were only waiting for the end; to be cut down, cleared away, the end of the forest, for them the end of all things. But perhaps their strong and aristocratic silence, the silence of strong trees, meant something else. As she came out of the wood on the north side, the keeper's cottage, a rather dark, brown stone cottage, with gables and a handsome chimney, looked uninhabited, it was so silent and alone. But a thread of smoke rose from the chimney, and the little railed-in garden in the front of the house was dug and kept very tidy. The door was shut. Now she was here she felt a little shy of the man, with his curious far-seeing eyes. She did not like bringing him orders, and felt like going away again. She knocked softly, no one came. She knocked again, but still not loudly. There was no answer. She peeped through the window, and saw the dark little room, with its almost sinister privacy, not wanting to be invaded. She stood and listened, and it seemed to her she heard sounds from the back of the cottage. Having failed to make herself heard, her mettle was roused, she would not be defeated. So she went round the side of the house. At the back of the cottage the land rose steeply, so the backyard was sunken, and enclosed by a low stone wall. She turned the corner of the house and stopped. In the little yard two paces beyond her, the man was washing himself, utterly unaware. He was naked to the hips, his velveteen breeches slipping down over his slender loins. And his white slim back was curved over a big bowl of soapy water, in which he ducked his head, shaking his head with a queer, quick little motion, lifting his slender white arms, and pressing the soapy water from his ears, quick, subtle as a weasel playing with water, and utterly alone. Connie backed away round the corner of the house, and hurried away to the wood. In spite of herself, she had had a shock. After all, merely a man washing himself; common-place enough, Heaven knows!

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  Clifford steered cautiously down the slope of the knoll from the hall, and Connie kept her hand on the chair. In front lay the wood, the hazel thicket nearest, the purplish density of oaks beyond. From the wood's edge rabbits bobbed and nibbled. Rooks suddenly rose in a black train, and went trailing off over the little sky. Connie opened the woodgate, and Clifford puffed slowly through into the broad riding that ran up an incline between the clean-whipped thickets of the hazel. The wood was a remnant of the great forest where Robin Hood hunted, and this riding was an old, old thoroughfare coming across country. But now, of course, it was only a riding through the private wood. The road from Mansfield swerved round to the north. In the wood everything was motionless, the old leaves on the ground keeping the frost on their underside. A jay called harshly, many little birds fluttered. But there was no game; no pheasants. They had been killed off during the war, and the wood had been left unprotected, till now Clifford had got his gamekeeper again. Clifford loved the wood; he loved the old oak trees. He felt they were his own through generations. He wanted to protect them. He wanted this place inviolate, shut off from the world. The chair chuffed slowly up the incline, rocking and jolting on the frozen clods. And suddenly, on the left, came a clearing where there was nothing but a ravel of dead bracken, a thin and spindly sapling leaning here and there, big sawn stumps, showing their tops and their grasping roots, lifeless. And patches of blackness where the woodmen had burned the brushwood and rubbish. This was one of the places that Sir Geoffrey had cut during the war for trench timber. The whole knoll, which rose softly on the right of the riding, was denuded and strangely forlorn. On the crown of the knoll where the oaks had stood, now was bareness; and from there you could look out over the trees to the colliery railway, and the new works at Stacks Gate. Connie had stood and looked, it was a breach in the pure seclusion of the wood. It let in the world. But she didn't tell Clifford. This denuded place always made Clifford curiously angry. He had been through the war, had seen what it meant. But he didn't get really angry till he saw this bare hill. He was having it replanted. But it made him hate Sir Geoffrey. Clifford sat with a fixed face as the chair slowly mounted. When they came to the top of the rise he stopped; he would not risk the long and very jolty downslope. He sat looking at the greenish sweep of the riding downwards, a clear way through the bracken and oaks. It swerved at the bottom of the hill and disappeared; but it had such a lovely easy curve, of knights riding and ladies on palfreys.

• From Confessions of a Mask (1958)

  As my companions were two girls—Sugiko and another cousin—playing at war was hardly a suitable game. Still less did the opposing Amazons show any signs of enthusiasm. My reason for proposing the game also lay in my inverted sense of social duty: in short, I felt that I must not fawn upon the girls, but must somehow give them a hard time. Although mutually bored, we continued playing our clumsy game of war in and out of the twilit house.From behind a bush Sugiko was imitating the sound of a machine gun: "Bang! bang! bang!" I finally decided it was about time to put an end to the business and led a wild flight into the house. The female soldiers came running after me, giving a continuous fusillade of bang-bang-bang's. I clutched at my heart and collapsed limply in the center of the parlor. "What's the matter, Kochan?" they asked, approaching with worried faces. "I'm being dead on the battlefield," I replied, neither opening my eyes nor moving my hand. I was enraptured with the vision of my own form lying there, twisted and fallen. There was an unspeakable delight in having been shot and being on the point of death. It seemed to me that since it was I, even if actually struck by a bullet, there would surely be no pain. . . . The years of childhood . . . My memory runs head-on into a scene that is like a symbol of those years. To me as I am today, that scene represents childhood itself, past and irrecoverable. When I saw the scene I felt the hand of farewell with which childhood would take its leave of me. I had a premonition at that instant that all my feeling of subjective time, or timelessness, might one day gush forth from within me and flood into the mold of that scene, to become an exact imitation of its people and movements and sounds; that simultaneous with the completion of this copy, the original might melt away into the distant perspectives of real and objective time; and that I might be left with nothing more than the mere imitation or, to say it another way, with nothing more than an accurately stuffed specimen of my childhood. Everyone experiences some such incident in his childhood. In most cases, however, it assumes such a slight form, hardly worthy of being called even an incident, that it is apt to pass by unnoticed. . . . The scene of which I speak took place once when a crowd celebrating the Summer Festival came surging in through our gate.

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  “Oh, that’s quite a long story!” Elise laughed. “You won’t have time to hear all that before you leave for the train.” “I’ll eat two waffles, at least, and we will too have time, if you start now while everything’s cooking. I must have a story, Elise, please, I was so good last night and they probably won’t tell the little girls any stories at this dismal place you’re shipping me off to.” “You know perfectly well that Hightowers is a fine institution, the very best finishing school we could find for you, and you will hardly suffer any—” “Elise,” wailed Clarissa, “pleeeease!” “Well! Yes, if you promise not to interrupt.” “Goody!” Clarissa wielded the silver strawberry huller with enthusiasm, making a small mountain of green tops, and plopped berry after berry into the colander. “Come on, tell me, tell me!” “I’m pouring. Don’t distract me.” Elise held the bowl over the hot waffle iron. She ladled batter onto the black teeth, then closed the lid and turned over her timer. The timer was a small sculpture: two women, one upside down, bound together by their hair. The sand ran down a crystal column, which they were also bound to by their long, flowing locks. “Your grandmamma—my mother—was an opera singer,” she began. “We never stopped traveling, and we never knew what the next train stop would bring. Sometimes Mamma was a success, her role would be all the rage, she would be the most fashionable woman in town. Then we were well received. We would stay in expensive hotels and life would be a mad whirl, a series of gala events. Mysterious messengers would deliver letters, flowers, perfume, and even more exotic gifts. We would receive a constant stream of visitors—millionaires, society matrons, opium-eaters, pretty young men who would eye Mamma’s paint-pots and costumes with thinly concealed longing. There were always conspiracies, music, candy, wine, new sights to see, a blooming passion or a plot to crush some enterprising social climber’s hopes. I can’t remember sleeping during any of Mamma’s popular periods. I can’t even remember lying down.” “But, it wasn’t always that way, was it?” prompted Clarissa. “No,” Elise said, shaking her head. “Sometimes Mamma was out of voice. Then we would stay in cheap, dirty hotels or arrive uninvited at the homes of old friends. We would scrimp and scheme to save just one fine outfit apiece, to go calling on Mamma’s old backers and composers and fellow singers. We would be cold and hungry, and Berenice would struggle to keep Mamma’s spirits up so she would not begin to drink and lose her voice altogether, and all our hopes with it.

• From Confessions of a Mask (1958)

  It was a brand-new basin, its wooden surface planed to a fresh and silken smoothness; and when I looked from inside, a ray of light was striking one spot on its brim. The wood gleamed only in that one spot and seemed to be made of gold. Tongue-tips of water lapped up waveringly as though they would lick the spot, but never quite reached it. And, whether because of a reflection or because the ray of light streamed on into the basin as well, the water beneath that spot on the brim gleamed softly, and tiny shining waves seemed to be forever bumping their heads together there. . . . The strongest disproof of this memory was the fact that I had been born, not in the daytime, but at nine in the evening: There could have been no streaming sunlight. Even though teased with a "So then, it must have been an electric light," without any great difficulty I could still walk into the absurdity of believing that no matter if it had been midnight, a ray of sunlight had surely been striking at least that one spot on the basin. In this way the brim of that basin and its flickering light lingered on in my memory as something I had surely seen at the time of my first bath. I was born two years after the Great Earthquake. Ten years earlier, as a result of a scandal that occurred while he was serving as a colonial governor, my grandfather had taken the blame for a subordinate's misdeeds and resigned his post. (I am not speaking euphemistically: until now I have never seen such a totality of foolish trust in human beings as that my grandfather possessed.) Thereafter my family had begun sliding down an incline with a speed so happy-go-lucky that I could almost say they hummed merrily as they went—huge debts, foreclosure, sale of the family estate, and then, as financial difficulties multiplied, a morbid vanity blazing higher and higher like some evil impulse. . . . As a result I was born in not too good a section of Tokyo, in an old rented house. It was a pretentious house on a corner, with a rather jumbled appearance and a dingy, charred feeling. It had an imposing iron gate, an entry garden, and a Western-style reception room as large as the interior of a suburban church. There were two stories on the upper slope and three on the lower, numerous gloomy rooms, and six housemaids. In this house, which creaked like an old chest of drawers, ten persons were getting up and lying down morning and evening—my grandfather and grandmother, father and mother, and the servants. At the root of the family troubles was my grandfather's passion for enterprises and my grandmother's illness and extravagant ways.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  ALL ALONE in the brown and white salle 4 manger, Stephen and Puddle ate their Christmas dinner. And Puddle had bought a small Christmas tree and had trimmed it, then hung it with coloured candles. A little wax Christ-child bent downwards and sideways from His branch, as though He were looking for His presents — only now there were not any presents. Rather clumsily Stephen lit the candles as soon as the daylight had almost faded. Then she and Puddle stood and stared at the tree, but in silence, because they must both remember. But Pierre, who like all who have known the sea, was a child at heart, broke into loud ex- clamations. ‘Oh, comme c’est beau, l’arbre de Noël!’ he ex- claimed, and he fetched the dour Pauline along from the kitchen, and she too exclaimed; then they both fetched Adéle and they all three exclaimed: ‘Comme c’est beau, l’arbre de Noël!’ So, that after all the little wax Christ-child did not very much miss His presents. That evening Pauline’s two brothers arrived — they were Poilus stationed just outside Paris — and they brought along with 288 THE WELL OF LONELINESS them another young man, one Jean, who was ardently courting Adéle. Very soon came the sound of singing and laughter from the kitchen, and when Stephen went up to her bedroom to look for a book, there was Adèle quite flushed and with very bright eyes because of this Jean — in great haste she turned down the bed and then flew on the wings of love back to the kitchen.

• From The Incendiaries (2018)

  She riffed like this until I stopped. If I tried again, insisting she find help, Phoebe’s smile widened. It lit the girl up. In a glade of light, she slipped away. It was an act; I knew that, but I suppose I let it happen. Even now, I’ll admit, if I recall these night fits, part of me wants to protest that this wasn’t Phoebe: that the girl I loved, for instance, during a childhood trip to Delphi, went jumping through its ruins. Since she hadn’t told me much else about it, I’d filled in the details until I might have been there, too, our earliest lives conjoined. On the crowded bus ride from Athens to Delphi, this Phoebe slept against my arm. The guide lectured into a microphone. It’s the omphalos, he said. The holiest site, navel of the Hellenic world. In time, the bus rolled to a halt. Phoebe stood in the white, hot wash of sun; she rubbed light-blind eyes. Despite the heat, I held Phoebe’s hand. I kept it in mine while we leaped the ancient stones, raising exuberant brumes of dust. – The day after the Cape Cod trip, as we left the apartment, I asked if I could attend the next Jejah meeting. Right, Phoebe said, with a laugh. I explained I wasn’t kidding. Pulling on a white pashmina, she looked at me through its soft folds. It was raining again. I held the umbrella for both of us. We walked to Latham Hall while I told Phoebe partial truths. I’ve noticed the effect it’s had on you, I said. You’ve spent so much time with this group. I want to know more about it. Since it’s important to you, I can’t help being curious. She kept her face tucked down, hidden in the cashmere pile, until, lifting her head, she said she’d give John Leal a call. We’d arrived at the Latham gate. She hesitated, phone in hand. I left Phoebe the umbrella, and I said I’d walk ahead. I waited in front of the dining hall, shielded from rain by the stone arcade. Croquet wickets littered the ground. That morning, I’d passed a group of old men in pastels and wan hats, batting mallets: alumni, I figured. But in the fog they’d been wraiths, sprung from time. Balls tocked, skinkling, through delicate arches. My head pulsed. I’d had too much to drink the previous evening. She was still on the phone. I watched as she talked. Hanging up, she came to tell me he’d apologized, but it wasn’t possible. The group just didn’t have the space. Not yet, at least. –

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Happy days; happy evenings when the glow of the summer lingered for hours above the grim hills, lingered on long after the flickering lamps had been lit in the cottage windows of Beedles. The piper would at last decide to go home, but they two would wander away to the moorland, there to lie down for a space side by side among the short, springy turf and the heather. Children they had been, having small skill in words, or in life, or in love itself for that matter. Barbara, fragile and barely nine- teen; the angular Jamie not yet quite twenty. They had talked be- cause words will ease the full spirit; talked in abrupt, rather shy broken phrases. They had loved because love had come naturally to them up there on the soft, springy turf and the heather. But after a while their dreams had been shattered, for such dreams as theirs had seemed strange to the village. Daft, the folk had thought them, mouching round by themselves for hours, like a couple of lovers. Barbara’s grand-dame, an austere old woman with whom she had lived since her earliest childhood — Barbara’s grand-dame had mistrusted this friendship. ‘I dinna richtly unnerstan’ it,’ she had frowned; ‘her and that Jamie’s unco throng, It’s ne richt for lass-bairns, an’ it’s no proaper! ’ And since she spoke with authority, having for years been the THE WELL OF LONELINESS 407 village post-mistress, her neighbours had wagged their heads and agreed. ‘ It’s no richt; ye hae said it, Mrs. MacDonald! ’ The gossip had reached the minister, Jamie’s white-haired and gentle old father. He had looked at the girl with bewildered eyes — he had always been bewildered by his daughter. A poor house- wife she was, and very untidy; if she cooked she mucked up the pots and the kitchen, and her hands were strangely unskilled with the needle; this he knew, since his heels suffered much from her darning. Remembering her mother he had shaken his head and sighed many times as he looked at Jamie. For her mother had been a soft, timorous woman, and he himself was very retiring, but their Jamie loved striding over the hills in the teeth of a gale, an uncouth, boyish creature. As a child she had gone rabbit stalking with ferrets; had ridden a neighbour’s farm- horse astride on a sack, without stirrup, saddle or bridle; had done all manner of outlandish things. And he, poor lonely, bewildered man, still mourning his wife, had been no match for her.

• From The Story of My Experiments with Truth (An Autobiography) (1927)

  chess for an hour daily. The ship’s doctor gave me a Tamil Self- Teacher which I began to study. My experience in Natal had shown me that I should acquire a knowledge of Urdu to get into closer contact with the Musalmans, and of Tamil to get into closer touch with the Madras Indians. At the request of the English friend, who read Urdu with me, I found out a good Urdu Munshi from amongst he deck passengers, and we made excellent progress in our studies. The officer had a better memory than I. He would never forget a word after once he had seen it; I often found it difficult to decipher Urdu letters. I brought more perseverance to bea, but could never overtake the officer. With Tamil I made fair progress. There was no help available, but the Tamil Self-Teacher was well-written book, and I did not feel in need of much outside help. I had hoped to continue these studies even after reaching India, but it was impossible. Most of my reading since 1893 has been done in jail. I did make some progress in Tamil and Urdu, in jails Tamil in South African jails, and Urdu in Yeravda jail. But I never learnt to speak Tamil, and the little I could do by way of reading is now rusting away for want of practice. I still feel what a handicap this ignorance of Tamil or Telugu has been. The affection that the Dravidians in South Africa showered on me has remained a cherished memory. Whenever I see a Tamil or Telugu friend, I cannot but recall the faith, perseverance and selfless sacrifice of many of his compatriots in South Africa. And they were mostly illiterate, the men no less than the women. The fight in South Africa was for such, and it was fought by illiterate soldiers; it was for the poor, and the poor took their full share in it. Ignorance of their language, however, was never a handicap to me in stealing the hearts of these simple and good countrymen. They spoke broken Hindustani or broken English, and we

• From The Incendiaries (2018)

  I haven’t had a minute with you all night. Tell me about the lunch shift. Did you find out who hid the pipe in the trash? – In the Seoul before you and I lived, John Leal told us, a unified land, everyone learned the same songs. It wasn’t unusual, he said, in this city of Phoebe’s birth, to have one person begin singing a ballad in public. Others would join in. He loved to picture it, the heads lifting to sing in chorus. If this Seoul hadn’t existed, he still wanted to think it had. Korea dispatched more Christian apostles abroad than any nation but the U.S. Per capita, it placed first. It could well take the lead. The next fount of revival, he called it. No one was more spiritual than Koreans could be; no believers, more devoted. It was a land of purists. He talked about present-day Seoul, where lit-up, blinking signs jutted out like flags on a pole. You’ll have to see it, he said. – I’m not sure when I began to suspect the act had turned real, that I was staying in Jejah as much to help myself as Phoebe. If I was going to put this time into the group, I thought, I might as well give it a chance. It felt like the last attempt. Often, I thought of an afternoon I’d spent evangelizing in San Francisco. In the evening, before driving home to Carmenita, I met with my cohort of Jubilee students to hold closing prayers on Fisherman’s Wharf. Docked boats shone in fading light. We raised linked hands, calling out in tongues. People with no experience of God tend to think that leaving the faith would be a liberation, a flight from guilt, rules, but what I couldn’t forget was the joy I’d known, loving Him. Thou hast turned for me my mourning into dancing—the old, lost hope revived. I was tantalized with what John Leal said was possible: I wished him to be right. – She’d always been more Julian’s friend than Phoebe’s, and it was Julian who called with the news. There wasn’t a final note, no sign of intent. No one could tell if she’d slipped on the Midwest ice, if it was an accident, but Liesl had fallen from a third-story attic windowsill of the St. Paul house. It wasn’t a long fall. She should have survived; instead, she cracked her head open on a fence post. Within hours of arriving at the hospital, she’d died. Edwards students flew to St. Paul for the funeral, Phoebe included. I said I’d go along. Don’t, she said. She spent the night in a hotel, with Julian. He then decided he’d stay an extra night in St. Paul, so I picked Phoebe up from the airport. She looked exhausted, ponytail unwashed. I have a fresh pot of lentil chili, I said. I’ve ordered laziji, too.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  Clifford steered cautiously down the slope of the knoll from the hall, and Connie kept her hand on the chair. In front lay the wood, the hazel thicket nearest, the purplish density of oaks beyond. From the wood's edge rabbits bobbed and nibbled. Rooks suddenly rose in a black train, and went trailing off over the little sky. Connie opened the woodgate, and Clifford puffed slowly through into the broad riding that ran up an incline between the clean-whipped thickets of the hazel. The wood was a remnant of the great forest where Robin Hood hunted, and this riding was an old, old thoroughfare coming across country. But now, of course, it was only a riding through the private wood. The road from Mansfield swerved round to the north. In the wood everything was motionless, the old leaves on the ground keeping the frost on their underside. A jay called harshly, many little birds fluttered. But there was no game; no pheasants. They had been killed off during the war, and the wood had been left unprotected, till now Clifford had got his gamekeeper again. Clifford loved the wood; he loved the old oak trees. He felt they were his own through generations. He wanted to protect them. He wanted this place inviolate, shut off from the world. The chair chuffed slowly up the incline, rocking and jolting on the frozen clods. And suddenly, on the left, came a clearing where there was nothing but a ravel of dead bracken, a thin and spindly sapling leaning here and there, big sawn stumps, showing their tops and their grasping roots, lifeless. And patches of blackness where the woodmen had burned the brushwood and rubbish. This was one of the places that Sir Geoffrey had cut during the war for trench timber. The whole knoll, which rose softly on the right of the riding, was denuded and strangely forlorn. On the crown of the knoll where the oaks had stood, now was bareness; and from there you could look out over the trees to the colliery railway, and the new works at Stacks Gate. Connie had stood and looked, it was a breach in the pure seclusion of the wood. It let in the world. But she didn't tell Clifford. This denuded place always made Clifford curiously angry. He had been through the war, had seen what it meant. But he didn't get really angry till he saw this bare hill. He was having it replanted. But it made him hate Sir Geoffrey. Clifford sat with a fixed face as the chair slowly mounted. When they came to the top of the rise he stopped; he would not risk the long and very jolty downslope. He sat looking at the greenish sweep of the riding downwards, a clear way through the bracken and oaks. It swerved at the bottom of the hill and disappeared; but it had such a lovely easy curve, of knights riding and ladies on palfreys.

• From The Incendiaries (2018)

  She riffed like this until I stopped. If I tried again, insisting she find help, Phoebe’s smile widened. It lit the girl up. In a glade of light, she slipped away. It was an act; I knew that, but I suppose I let it happen. Even now, I’ll admit, if I recall these night fits, part of me wants to protest that this wasn’t Phoebe: that the girl I loved, for instance, during a childhood trip to Delphi, went jumping through its ruins. Since she hadn’t told me much else about it, I’d filled in the details until I might have been there, too, our earliest lives conjoined. On the crowded bus ride from Athens to Delphi, this Phoebe slept against my arm. The guide lectured into a microphone. It’s the omphalos, he said. The holiest site, navel of the Hellenic world. In time, the bus rolled to a halt. Phoebe stood in the white, hot wash of sun; she rubbed light-blind eyes. Despite the heat, I held Phoebe’s hand. I kept it in mine while we leaped the ancient stones, raising exuberant brumes of dust. – The day after the Cape Cod trip, as we left the apartment, I asked if I could attend the next Jejah meeting. Right, Phoebe said, with a laugh. I explained I wasn’t kidding. Pulling on a white pashmina, she looked at me through its soft folds. It was raining again. I held the umbrella for both of us. We walked to Latham Hall while I told Phoebe partial truths. I’ve noticed the effect it’s had on you, I said. You’ve spent so much time with this group. I want to know more about it. Since it’s important to you, I can’t help being curious. She kept her face tucked down, hidden in the cashmere pile, until, lifting her head, she said she’d give John Leal a call. We’d arrived at the Latham gate. She hesitated, phone in hand. I left Phoebe the umbrella, and I said I’d walk ahead. I waited in front of the dining hall, shielded from rain by the stone arcade. Croquet wickets littered the ground. That morning, I’d passed a group of old men in pastels and wan hats, batting mallets: alumni, I figured. But in the fog they’d been wraiths, sprung from time. Balls tocked, skinkling, through delicate arches. My head pulsed. I’d had too much to drink the previous evening. She was still on the phone. I watched as she talked. Hanging up, she came to tell me he’d apologized, but it wasn’t possible. The group just didn’t have the space. Not yet, at least. –

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  Mrs. Bolton was most attentive and polite, seemed quite nice, spoke with a bit of a broad slur, but in heavily correct English, and from having bossed the sick colliers for a good many years, had a very good opinion of herself, and a fair amount of assurance. In short, in her tiny way, one of the governing class in the village, very much respected. "Yes, Lady Chatterley's not looking at all well! Why, she used to be that bonny, didn't she now? But she's been failing all winter! Oh, it's hard, it is. Poor Sir Clifford! Eh, that war, it's a lot to answer for." And Mrs. Bolton would come to Wragby at once, if Dr. Shardlow would let her off. She had another fortnight's parish nursing to do, by rights, but they might get a substitute, you know. Hilda posted off to Dr. Shardlow, and on the following Sunday Mrs. Bolton drove up in Leiver's cab to Wragby, with two trunks. Hilda had talks with her; Mrs. Bolton was ready at any moment to talk. And she seemed so young! the way the passion would flush in her rather pale cheek. She was forty-seven. Her husband, Ted Bolton, had been killed in the pit, twenty-two years ago, twenty-two years last Christmas, just at Christmas time, leaving her with two children, one a baby in arms. Oh, the baby was married now, Edith, to a young man in Boots Cash Chemists in Sheffield. The other one was a school-teacher in Chesterfield, she came home weekends, when she wasn't asked out somewhere. Young folks enjoyed themselves nowadays, not like when she, Ivy Bolton, was young.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Sometimes Puddle must really give up and rest, in spite of the aggressive chin and the tonic. Then all alone in the Paris hotel, she would suddenly grow very homesick for England — absurd of course and yet there it was, she would feel the sharp tug of England. At such moments she would long for ridiculous things; a penny bun in the train at Dover; the good red faces of English porters — the old ones with little stubby side-whiskers; Harrods Stores; a properly upholstered armchair; becon and eggs; the sea front at Brighton. All alone and via these ridiculous things, Puddle would feel the sharp tug of England. And one evening her weary mind must switch back to the earliest days of her friendship with Stephen. What a lifetime ago it seemed since the days when a lanky colt of a girl of fourteen had been licked into shape in the schoolroom at Morton. She could hear her own words: ‘ You’ve forgotten something, Stephen; the books can’t walk to the bookcase, but you can, so suppose that you take them with you,’ and then: ‘ Even my brain won't stand your complete lack of method.’ Stephen fourteen — that was twelve years ago. In those years she, Puddle, had grown very tired, tired with trying to see some way out, some way of escape, of fulfilment for Stephen. And always they seemed to be toiling, they two, down an endless road that had no turning; she an ageing woman herself unfulfilled; Stephen still young and as yet still courageous — but the day would come when her youth would fail, and her courage, because of that endless toiling. She thought of Brockett, Jonathan Brockett, surely an un- worthy companion for Stephen; a thoroughly vicious and cyni- THE WELL OF LONELINESS 277

• From Vox (1992)

  37 "That interested me quite a bit. And she's too old to live in the room with the littler kids—I remember that. I must have been about twelve. I saw it with my friend Pamela, who I think has turned out to be a lesbian, bless her soul. We used to build tents in her bedroom and eat Saltines and read the medical encyclopedia together. It showed the dotted lines where the surgeon would cut cartilage from the ears if you were having an operation to make your ears flare out less. And at the end of each entry it would say, it was done in a question-and-answer format, it would say, 'When can marital relations be resumed?' And the answer always was four to six weeks. No matter where the dotted lines were, it seemed you could always resume marital relations after four to six weeks. I used to read the articles aloud to her. And once she read a whole romance novel aloud to me in one night. I fell asleep somewhere in the middle and woke up again later—Pamela was a little hoarse, but she was still reading. And once, maybe it was that same night, I told her a sexual fantasy I'd had a few times, in which I'm at a place where I'm told I have to take off all my clothes and get into this tube." "Sorry, get into what?" "This tube, a long tube," she said. "I slide in, feet first, and I begin moving down this very long tube, on some sort of slow current of oil. I'm sure you remember those water slides that you set up on the lawn, that destroyed the grass? This was not as fast-moving as that, much

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Arter their first visit they went very often to Mademoiselle’s modest little apartment. Mademoiselle Duphot and her quiet blind sister were indeed their only friends now in Paris, for Brock- ett was in America on business, and Stephen had not rung up Valérie Seymour. Sometimes when Stephen was busy with her work, Puddle would make her way there all alone. Then she and Mademoiselle would get talking about Stephen’s childhood, about her future, but guardedly, for Puddle must be careful to give nothing away to the kind, simple woman. As for Mademoiselle, she too must be careful to accept all and ask no questions. Yet in spite of the inevitable gaps and restraints, a real sympathy sprang up between them, for each sensed in the other a valuable ally who would fight a good fight on behalf of Stephen. And now Stephen would quite often send her car to take the blind Julie for a drive beyond Paris. Julie would sniff the air and tell Burton that through smell- ing their greenness she could see the trees; he would listen to her broken and halting English with a smile — they were a queer lot these French. Or perhaps he would drive the other Mademoiselle up to Montmartre for early Mass on a Sunday. She belonged to 302 THE WELL OF LONELINESS something to do with a heart; it all seemed rather uncanny to Burton. He thought of the Vicar who had played such fine cricket, and suddenly felt very homesick for Morton. Fruit would find its way to the little apartment, together with cakes and large marrons glacés. Then Mademoiselle Duphot would be- come frankly greedy, eating sweets in bed while she studied her booklets on the holy and very austere Thérése, who had certainly not eaten marrons glacés. Thus the spring, that gentle yet fateful spring of 1914, slipped into the summer. With the budding of flowers and the singing of birds it slipped quietly on towards great disaster; while Stephen, whose book was now ‘nearing completion, worked harder than ever in Paris. CHAPTER 34 I AR. The incredible yet long predicted had come to pass. People woke in the mornings with a sense of disaster, but these were the old who, having known war, remembered. The young men of France, of Germany, of Russia, of the whole world, looked round them amazed and bewildered; yet with something that stung as it leapt in their veins, filling them with a strange excitement — the bitter and ruthless potion of war that spurred and lashed at their manhood. They hurried through the streets of Paris, these young men; they collected in bars and cafés; they stood gaping at the ominous government placards summoning their youth and strength to the colours. They talked fast, very fast, they gesticulated: ‘C’est la guerre! C’est la guerre!’ they kept repeating. Then they answered each other: ‘ Oui, cest la guerre.’

• From Vox (1992)

  Actually most of the time it’s the right word. Anyway, she’s got quite small breasts but quite large little hips, and large little thighs, and she’s wearing this tiny little outfit that’s torn or jaggedly cut and barely covers her, and she looks down at herself, a lovely little pouty face, and she puts her hands on her hips as if to measure them, and she shakes her head sadly—too wide, too wide. Oh that got me hot! This tiny sprite with big hips . And then a second later she gets caught in a dresser drawer among a lot of sewing things and she tries to fly out the keyhole but—nope, her hips are too wide, she gets stuck!” “Sounds sizzling hot.” “It was.” “You remember Gentlemen Prefer Blondes , when Marilyn Monroe tries to squeeze through a porthole on a ship, but her hips are too wide?” “I don’t remember that. I better rent that.” “It would be funny if Tinker Bell inspired old Marilyn,” she said. “You know, I found the Disney Peter Pan vaguely sexual, too.” “Well, yeah—J. M. Barrie was a fudgepacker from way back, and clearly some of that forbiddenness sneaks into every version.” “The girl floats around in her nightgown,” she said. “That interested me quite a bit. And she’s too old to live in the room with the littler kids—I remember that. I must have been about twelve. I saw it with my friend Pamela, who I think has turned out to be a lesbian, bless her soul. We used to build tents in her bedroom and eat Saltines and read the medical encyclopedia together. It showed the dotted lines where the surgeon would cut cartilage from the ears if you were having an operation to make your ears flare out less. And at the end of each entry it would say, it was done in a question-and-answer format, it would say, ‘When can marital relations be resumed?’ And the answer always was four to six weeks. No matter where the dotted lines were, it seemed you could always resume marital relations after four to six weeks. I used to read the articles aloud to her. And once she read a whole romance novel aloud to me in one night. I fell asleep somewhere in the middle and woke up again later—Pamela was a little hoarse, but she was still reading. And once, maybe it was that same night, I told her a sexual fantasy I’d had a few times, in which I’m at a place where I’m told I have to take off all my clothes and get into this tube.” “Sorry, get into what?” “This tube, a long tube,” she said. “I slide in, feet first, and I begin moving down this very long tube, on some sort of slow current of oil.