A Voice Through a Cloud by Denton Welch

Author:Denton Welch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Arts & Entertainment
Publisher: Galley Beggar Press
Published: 2014-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

18

It was just as I was about to go for one of those little walks on a Saturday that my aunt arrived with my brother. He had been asked down for the week-end to see me in my new surroundings.

The afternoon was grey and sullen, with the trees weakly swaying against the dull, hopeless sky. We all smiled, but there seemed no link. We were quite divided. And I bitterly regretted the family I had been born into. It was not that they were wrong or that I was wrong. It was the connection that was freakish, invalid, arbitrary.

After the first few words, my aunt left us. ‘I know you two will have lots to talk about together,’ she said. But when we were alone we seemed to become even more numbed. My brother went to look out of the window. He stood there dejectedly, asking me all over again if I had everything I wanted, if I liked the nursing home, if he could do anything for me in London. But all the time his eyes were fixed rather desperately on the dying stalks of the flowers, the scatter of yellow leaves over the grass and the beds, the holes in the thatch of the summer-house where the birds had nested.

Nurse Goff brought tea in early, and I thought, ‘Now something may melt, something may happen; we may be able to talk.’

I looked at my brother’s face. The absent smile was still there, the anxiety to please, yet to escape. And when I saw him hurrying through his rock-cake, gulping the hot tea, I knew that nothing could be done. I sat still, just dully waiting for him to go. Even my anger and sorrow at the failure were becoming clouded and submerged.

At last he contrived to get himself out of the chair and to the door; while he was standing there, saying good-bye, the flood of shame and relief and sheer indifference that streamed out of both our bodies seemed to engage in the middle of the room and seethe up into something like a water-spout.

His going drained me of everything. I was washed up on a desert beach where all was changed and made impossible. Writing in my notebook, drawing, reading, dreaming, were as unthinkable, as meaningless as playing Patience. All feeling for myself seemed dead, therefore I was evil, snapping down on every impulse to live, to work, demolishing every suggestion that might have helped to break the spell.

I saw all at once that visits, either pleasant or painful, were beginning to leave me with this sensation of power gone, of lack and dislocation. It was the sensation of the prisoner growing in me. I felt that the room, the house, the garden and the strip of road outside were as poisoning as iron­spiked walls. I must get out and away from them. I must go down to the front and see my aunt and brother again; for although we had only just parted and our

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