Clean Straw for Nothing and a Cartload of Clay by George Johnston

Author:George Johnston
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Angus & Robertson
Published: 2013-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

LONDON, 1962

The big room is pale and cool and the daffodils are everywhere, the first of the crop, the daffodils I brought up two days ago from Gloucestershire. Miriam, affected as she always is by the seasonal harbingers, has massed them in bowls on the side tables and bookshelves, below the pedestal of the Giacometti figure, on the ledges of the windows where the curtains are flung wide and where they have become quite incandescent against the dingy darkness of mid-afternoon in Kensington. They remind me of Athens and the lighting of the Parthenon for the Son et Lumière.

Yes, they do remind me of that, with a genuine sadness of feeling and recall, but with that unembittered kind of melancholy one associates with autumns and certain times of dusk; they remind me of dead Morgan, of Big Grace, of opportunities that have slipped away. Whatever happens to opportunities when they have slipped away? Are there racks somewhere where secondhand opportunities are kept? Foreclosed opportunities? Reject opportunities? A council pound for stray and unwanted opportunities?

Absurd thoughts. But while I am waiting for Miriam to return it is probably wiser to consider absurdities than to start brooding over things again. The disaster of today, for example. The whole ghastly disaster of this return to England. These matters are just too depressing, and, besides, I can hardly communicate them to Miriam, because it was really at her insistence that we exchanged houses and came back to England. Another consideration is that if I confide in her the totality of the disaster it would be tantamount to, at best, a plea for charity and at worst a kind of moral blackmail. She would take it that I was asking for help, and would feel an obligation about it because she would consider herself responsible for having landed us in this situation.

Miriam is stately, but by no means rich. She gives a very distinct impression of wealth and position — it is as much a part of her as the short-cropped grey hair, her pearls, the stick she carries, the faint fragrance of cleanliness that goes with her — but she has to do a lot of scraping to preserve this impression. She has the house, of course, which is very lovely, and this room in particular is the epitome of wealth and good taste — the pale rubbed lime of the panelling, the Adam fireplace, the Stubbs horse and the Constable landscape, the Chagall above the sideboard, the little Samuel Palmer etching, the Giacometti and the old chandelier with some of the pendant drops missing — but all this is the inherited shape around her, no more to be dispensed with than a tortoise its shell. Anyway, she has been kind and helpful, and she can do no more for us than she has already done.

Today, moving back from Fleet Street to the Strand, I really did feel suicidal. The smog was heavy and foul-smelling and acrid — the red-glowing buses at eleven in

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