Past Perfect, Present Tense by Richard Peck

Author:Richard Peck [Peck, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2006-04-06T04:00:00+00:00

Waiting for Sebastian

Oh how I love the evening. Long summer evenings when the shadows of the trees creep in silent shapes across the lawn until they merge with night. I watch from this high window, framed by the old curtains held back by silk cords. I toy with the cords and watch the world dim.

When I was very small, too small to climb up on this windowseat, I didn’t like being put to bed when the window was still bright with summer light. I fought sleep and woke again to velvet dusk, hearing the sounds of the house beneath my cot. Only a cot then for my infant self—not like the proper grown-up bed in the room now.

The whole house and I listened to the parties Mama and Papa gave, the crystal sounds of the dinner table floating up the flights. The bark of the men’s laughter and the rising scent of their cigars after the silken sound of the ladies retiring. I love summer evenings because they take their time, dangling the dark before you.

But winter evenings warm my heart. I don’t feel the cold. I watch from this window as the sun drops like a blazing penny through the bare branches, and darkness comes like a surprise.

It’s winter now, the shortest day, and the sun is hurrying into the earth. This is the evening I wait for all through the year. I am curled in the windowseat at the top of the house with the cat alert in my lap. This cat is a tortoiseshell, up from the barn and quite wild, but she likes me. She gazes up, perplexed and admiring. Nanny used to say that I too had been born in a barn, when I was smaller and naughtier. “Born in a barn,” when I forgot to close the door behind me or grew tiresome in the bath.

From here the cat and I can see right to the end of the drive now the leaves have fallen. Even the house around us waits. The statues in the lawn turn all their strange faces to the distant point where the drive meets the road. We all wait, breathless. Nothing trembles but my heart.

We get very little snow here, but in winter we are apt to get gales. They whip off the sea and cry in the attics and bend the trees double. This old window clatters in its frame, and the curtains billow, and the cord coils. Then the next morning the sky is scoured clean, and the gardener—Abel or whatever he is called—is out dragging the branches and lifting the twigs.

But this evening is still as a painting. This is the evening when my brother will be brought up from the station, home from school. The world waits for the car to turn in at the foot of the drive.

My brother Sebastian is coming home for his Christmas holidays, and I won’t breathe or smile till he is here and this house is ringing with him. My brother Sebbie is coming home.

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