Midsummer Night in the Workhouse by Diana Athill

Author:Diana Athill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: House of Anansi Press Inc.
Published: 2011-10-03T04:00:00+00:00

AN AFTERNOON OFF

Roger Paul, who in his good tweed suit looked more like an intelligent soldier than a publisher, began to walk slowly down the street. He saw a stationer’s noticeboard on which a muscular and broad-minded young man offered to massage either ladies or gentlemen, followed by six Italian shoes of different colours. Then a string of onions hung above a wicker basket of red peppers, two copper moulds in the shape of fish crowned an arrangement of wooden pepper-mills, an old man with one arm played a small concertina strapped to his chest and a Negro or half-Negro prostitute with blonde hair wore a sugar-pink duffel coat. Thursday afternoon in Soho, bright and clear, each object suddenly startling to Roger Paul. Even a torn poster saying And Woman Was Created, half covering another poster saying Around The World in.

He had finished his last lunch with Herr Becker, whom he had put into a taxi and dispatched to his hotel to pack. Naomi would take him to the airport. She and Roger, who was recently divorced, had fewer social obligations than the others and undertook most of such duties. The week of bear-leading through press conferences and television studios was over and at lunch Becker had talked again, and talked well, about his life among the Berbers while Roger had watched his face and thought beastly bloody kraut. The German, once a prisoner of war in the Western Desert, had made an unlikely escape and had survived in a way which would have been impossible if he had not been brave, intelligent and likeable, at least to Berbers; which, indeed, the book he had written suggested that he was. But he had a steep narrow forehead and small light eyes set at a slant; and Roger, who for twenty years, since he was seventeen, had been scrupulous in thinking of everyone he met of what- ever race or reputation according to that person’s individual merits, had smiled at him and thought beastly bloody kraut. Expecting to be shocked by the thought, he had only had another, still more surprising: can this be what a fat woman feels when she gets home from a day’s shopping, goes up to her bedroom and unhooks her corsets?

He had shaken Herr Becker’s hand with extra warmth (for this did not concern Becker, it concerned only himself), then he had crossed to the sunny side of the street and had begun to look at things, which had responded by bursting out of their disguises of familiarity like chestnut buds. He had a lot to do, and he had not exactly forgotten it. He might, though, have wrapped the impending afternoon in a bulky parcel and dropped it into a pool of some opaque substance through which it was now sinking. A Thursday afternoon in March submerged.

The sun was benevolent on Roger’s face, the things he looked at were astonishing, and it occurred to him that he was not going back to the office. He,

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