Mansfield by C. K. Stead

Author:C. K. Stead
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781409000471
Publisher: Random House

The white sheet bleaching on the hedge,

With hey! the sweet birds, O how they sing!

Doth set my pugging tooth on edge;

For a quart of ale is a dish for a king.

But now he’s got on to the subject of the war and he’s telling her that it doesn’t matter, is best forgotten; that (responding to her snort of surprise and disbelief) no, it does not matter, not to him, not any more. He’s had enough of raging and caring and swearing and complaining. He won’t any longer let it make him angry. Young men are dying needlessly in numbers that take one’s breath away? Very well, that’s the fact, and facts have to be accepted. If the young have decided to share the madness of the old and die with enthusiasm, why should he complain? Let them go to hell in their thousands, in their hundreds of thousands, whole battalions at a time if that’s their wish. Europe is sick. Europe has chosen its purge. So be it.

She knows this isn’t a mood that will last but, expressed without too much of the usual bitterness, it’s welcome. Spring has come, his winter sicknesses are passing, and Frieda can see it, as so often before, the life welling up in him. He turns to her with his slightly crooked grin and says, in the accent that makes her think he must be quoting something heard in childhood: “Why should I howl if grandfather is pushed over a cliff? Goodbye, grandfather, now it’s my turn.”

“Only it’s not grandfather that’s going over,” she says. “And it ought to be.”

Lorenzo is happy because the Murrys are coming. It’s definite, they will arrive quite soon. He still talks as if it doesn’t matter whether they come or not; tells her that Murry is a broken reed; that Katherine will never flower while she remains tied to him; that they can’t be relied on. But that is bluff. In every letter to friends over the past weeks, Frieda has noticed, he mentioned them – that they’re coming, when they’re coming, that they will be living in the cottage next door, that the four of them will form a community, that they are going to be productive and happy together. He wants them to come, but he has taken out an emotional insurance against disappointment.

Frieda is pleased too, and more likely to remain pleased, she thinks, than Lorenzo, whose moods, since the suppression of his novel, have taken more frequent and terrible plunges. If he gave way to grief it mightn’t be so bad; but his pride forbids that. It must be rage, always rage. This is a strength she admires – that he won’t be cowed; but it’s something she has learned also to fear.

They have come to Cornwall to escape from the world – or (as he puts it when he tries to focus his mind on everything they’ve turned their backs on) from the Café Royal. He has erased that literary waterhole from all respect and consideration as surely as if it had been demolished by bombs from a Zeppelin.

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