The Weather in the Streets by Rosamond Lehmann

Author:Rosamond Lehmann
Language: eng, fra
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2015-03-04T15:33:08+00:00

Part Three

I

Driving away from Victoria, she thought: I can let myself in, put cool sheets on the bed, be hidden, sleep for a few hours anyway. Face facts to-morrow, see what to do … Get hold of Rollo. But I don’t want to … I don’t want to see him or think of him. How can this be, in twenty-four hours? Is it a symptom, does it seal my fate? … The female, her body used, made fertile, turning, resentful, in hostile untouchability, from the male, the enemy victorious and malignant … Like cats or bitches … Ugh!

London in the scorched irritable airless end of day was an extension of the mind’s loathing and oppression. Petrol fumes were nausea; the traffic a fatuous, reluctant, laborious progress towards a pointless destination; the picture-houses, with mock-oriental fronts, proclaiming within a blend of cool darkness and hot passions, were tawdriness, satiety, cynical sham and cheapness. The main thoroughfares looked empty and discouraged. Only in the by-streets, where mews and slum just touch, just unaggressively nudge the more classy residential quarters, groups of children, submerged in the fuller season, had come up and overflown upon the pavements: London’s strident August undergrowth, existing like cactuses in waterless stone; shouting, running, taking communal licks at ice-cream cornets; deprecated by the charitable passer-by, wish-transferred with spade and bucket to the seaside, where it would be better for them to be … But they look tough, cheerful enough, perhaps some Fund is sending them soon, one really should contribute …

Outside the pub on the corner, a yellow mongrel lay stretched on the stone in the shade, tongue dripping, teased by flies. A couple of urchins in ragged bathing-suits were watering one another out of a watering-can … Oh, to be under a fountain, sprinkled from head to foot with fresh reviving spray; to be dissolved in the crisp break of a cold salt green wave! …

Lifting heavy weights is a good thing to do. She dragged her suitcase to the second landing. Etty’s bedroom door flew open, and who should appear but Etty, in her dressing-gown.

“Darling!”

“Etty! I didn’t expect you’d be here.” She pulled her face together to smile a delighted greeting. “I was just going to creep in for the night and collect a few things and go on home. What are you doing in London?”

Etty had come back, she explained, for two nights on the same errand: to refurbish her wardrobe before joining Mona and some others on a Mediterranean cruise.

“My dear, Greece! Isn’t it too marvellous? I shall really see all that. I’ve been most studiously informing myself about the Acropolis and all those temples. They have Zecturers on board, too—I shall come back a perfect blue-stocking.”

“Etty, it is nice to find you.”

It was: a comfort … possibly salvation. Etty’d be sure to know of someone, in case … Everything would be all right. Of course. Already the nausea had let up a bit, retreated to manageable distance.

“Come and sit down and tell me all about it.

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