My Husband Simon by Mollie Panter-Downes

Author:Mollie Panter-Downes [Panter-Downes, Mollie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: adultery, middle classes, Venice, author, New York, Writer, publishing, affair
ISBN: 9780712353120
Publisher: British Library Publishing
Published: 2020-03-29T04:00:00+00:00

VII

Granny died in July. We both went up to Gloucestershire for the funeral, which depressed me very much. Aunt Lorna was there, and all the uncles and cousins. Everyone looked strange and uncomfortable in their black clothes. Aunt Lorna’s pale face was puffy and discoloured with crying; it came to me as quite a shock that she would miss Granny and was sorry that the old woman was dead. I remembered how my grandmother used to shout: “Lorna, you’re a fool. And an old maid. Can’t abide fools or old maids!” Yet there was my aunt sniffing quietly into her handkerchief instead of lighting bonfires and dancing about in the road. I had a sudden impulse to be very kind to her. I told myself that we would have her up to stay with us and somehow, in one indignant week, make up for a dreary and uncomplaining lifetime spent as a safety-valve for Granny’s temper. In my heart I knew that we would do nothing of the sort, and that if we did it would be more than futile. Theatres and breakfast in bed every morning as a return for Aunt Lorna’s wasted youth! But it made me feel better momentarily.

It was odd how all the personality had gone out of the funny little stucco house. It seemed stagnant, waiting to hear the peremptory summons of Granny’s bell startle the hot afternoon silence. We sat in the drawing-room, that familiar jumble of pot-pourri bowls, huge photographs of my father in full uniform, tiger-skins and all the Indian junk that she had collected in my grandfather’s soldiering days. Now that her fierce old personality was not there to bind them into some sort of harmonious whole, that was what they seemed. Junk. Already the room had the purposeless air of an auction-sale; one looked for the Lot tickets on the water-colour sketches and the grinning brass idol. Aunt Lorna would go on living here until she died, and then, this queer collection of stuff would be broken up; the little house and the old lilac-bush that we loved as children would go finally out of our lives.

All the old servants from Falconer Court had turned up for the funeral. I reflected grimly that Mrs. Quinn’s feudal Tracy-Yarborough mind would be pleased at this. It was stiflingly hot. The grass in the churchyard had just been cut; it smelt cool and sweet. The air was showered with the song of birds, and over the wall leant a rose-bush covered with velvety bright red roses. It seemed to shout “Life! Life! Life!” The smell of newly-turned earth was strong and vigorous, and that, too, instead of shouting “Death! Death!” shouted “Life! Life!”

“He cometh up, and is cut down like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.”

I could not bring myself to feel very sorry. Death seemed something fantastic and improbable when all round us was hot, teeming life, the smell of grass and earth.

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