The Shutter of Snow (Faber Editions) by Emily Holmes Coleman

Author:Emily Holmes Coleman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2023-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

XII

Now it was all true and there would never again be doubt. She was God she was God. If it could not be known by the singing this at least was proof. She could write again. Again as in the lanes and among the periwinkles with her father she had wandered to the cowbells’ marching, when she had built towns and settlements in her forehead with a long branched stick and had invented the names for all, now this was again and it could be put down. She had all the paper and Mrs Fearing gave her some more. It would all be written down and the thousands of pages would be her witness. She had said it all, now it was all to be written, and this would be the proof as had been the Lion and the Bull.

The fever came upon her to write and the fever was her distress. If she could sit still to write that would make it come, but instead she refused pills with her feet strung against up the wall as she had done in nightmares at school when they had found her screaming, and leaped in her bed when the mattress was being aired and led the orchestras she had so long understood. These things prevailed, the singing and the orchestra. Down to the left where piped the flicking flute, heels clicked and up to the drums. And above all she must have a swimming pool for sliding with facile shoulder to the island beyond. The dancing she could not give enough to, and in her wide-sleeved storks she made decorous the gestures of the walls.

I could walk in the water they could show me the water and it would be very easy. The dream is the only thing and in a dance across the pond I would make a crevice for their sighs. She sharpened the pencils, and across the white frailty of the scrap paper went the black strong torrent of her dream.

It had been in the hay with a box of chocolate almonds, in the rain, and a sudden leap from the high cave into the hay. Down into its smell and depth she plunged, down to the settled straw beneath it. And always on the ladder on the other side her father whistled the Mill Song and the Sextette. He would have to go back to the city to push an assured pen across to the end to the period and back again to the period after the M. It was he, he contained within that rigid fence. But this was he, this more than ever her father, munching apples from the tree and saying come away dont look when the bull was in the pen. That was the part she did not understand and this was the part he gave her to understand.

That night she cried aloud in her sleep and the nurse was afraid. You will wake them all up, there will be a scene. The nurse moved her bed out of her room and down the hall to the desk.

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