Guilty: The Lost Classic Novel by Kavan Anna

Author:Kavan, Anna [Kavan, Anna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Peter Owen Ltd
Published: 2007-04-30T20:00:00+00:00

The thorny scratch coming as a sharp reminder, I suddenly realized how I’d taken it for granted that Mr Spector would look after me, though he was under no sort of obligation to do so and obviously overloaded already with heavy responsibilities. It had seemed to me such a matter of course that I hadn’t even thanked him. All my feelings of inferiority revived at this instance of my own graceless behaviour. No wonder people disliked and distrusted me; how could I ever have believed anything different? Even the death of my parents meant nothing to me, I thought, trying to evoke the scene before my imagination but defeated at the start by not knowing how they had looked. True, I knew my mother had been wearing her best shoes, but I couldn’t remember her dresses well enough to know which she would wear to the theatre – most likely she’d bought a new one for the occasion, and this I couldn’t possibly imagine. As for my father, I didn’t get as far as trying to picture him, before the moon escaped abruptly through a ragged hole in the clouds, as though it had gnawed its way out.

In its pallid light, I saw that I’d wandered back unknowingly to the school buildings; I watched them glide, stealthy black masses, into the lighter space where just now only the night had been. For an instant then the horrors of all my childish nightmares were thick about me: tall spectres, petrified in innumerable malign mutations; and one calamitous shape towering above them all, as hideously unnatural as a child’s control of a father’s fate.

If I hadn’t opposed his wish, he and my mother would be alive now. So I’d killed him – killed them both. The thought I’d unconsciously been repressing since I’d heard the news at last thrust itself forward. Now the moon dimmed again, the phantoms blurred and were reabsorbed into darkness, stuff of darkness themselves. I repeated to myself, ‘I’ve killed them both’; and the words ‘So what?’ followed closely enough to deprive the thought of all reality. I would keep it that way, unreal; my instant decision reduced the fact to the region of childish fantasy. Turning my back on the invisible chessmen, I cautiously moved away, my hands outstretched like a blind man’s before my face, my fingers touching now close-clipped leaves, now the unevenness of old brickwork, now the cooler, smooth face of stone.

I was approaching Jaggers’s house, when the picture I’d failed to create formed of its own volition; my mind’s eye saw a city street, traffic and many people, everything shifting, confused, where my parents walked side by side among all the rest, unprotected and unsuspecting. To my callow youth, the pair looked elderly, almost old, and this, for some reason, gave them a curious air of innocence, pathos. And here the vision seems not incorrect; for they indeed belonged to the last of the innocents, of the trusting ones, who trusted their fellows as no man, perhaps, will ever trust others again.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.