Two Stories by Virginia Woolf

Author:Virginia Woolf
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473549487
Publisher: Random House

ST BRIDES BAY

She was sitting on a wooden bench in the darkening garden of a bed and breakfast on the edge of Solva, under a tartan blanket purloined from an airing cupboard that was almost certainly meant to be locked. She was smoking for the first time in twenty-five years and drinking whisky of all things. Golden Virginia, green Rizlas and a quarter-bottle of Glenfiddich impulse-bought from the Nisa Local on the walk back from her daughter’s wedding reception. She’d forgotten the physical pleasure of rolling a cigarette, the hands remembering after all this time, the stripy watermark in the paper, the shine of the gummed strip. Tales of trawlermen making them with one hand in the pocket of an oilskin as the boat pitched in the Long Forties. There was a slice of sea between the roofs and, sitting in it, the low silhouette of Skomer. She took a deep drag. Formaldehyde, ammonia, cyanide, arsenic… It tasted fabulous. The sun was bleeding into the horizon and a single light shone on the water, far out.

She felt a little unmoored.

Mullions. Proprietors Roger and Barbara Hicks. She’d only met the small, cardiganed husband. Bags of lavender in the wardrobe and hand-knitted cosies in the shape of Spanish dancers whose skirts hid the spare toilet roll. Shades of her grandmother’s house. Advocaat and samplers. She was going to feel rough in the morning.

They made time run downhill, that was always the appeal of cigarettes. Take your feet off the pedals and coast for five minutes.

Two gulls drifted over the garden, high up, catching the last of the daylight, bright, peach-coloured Ws against the blue, briefly stationary until they tilted their wings to grip the breeze and were carried inland.

Mother of the Bride. It sounded like the title of a horror film.

The light far out. It was an oil tanker, perhaps, or a container ship. Two hundred thousand tonnes at anchor on the black water. A great bank of luminous screens and a bearded captain underlit. They transported three-quarters of everything we used, apparently. Press your ear to a new kettle and you could hear the fading echo of muezzins on the Bosphorus.

Nikki had married another woman. It seemed both astonishing and utterly ordinary. In a church, to boot. Candles and gilt, dead saints and wood polish. Though they had to travel three hundred and fifty miles to find a place that would do it. God bless the Nonconformists.

You never got the future you expected. She’d fought for nuclear disarmament and the overthrow of American-backed dictators in Central America. Now it was same-sex marriage and fascism resurgent on the far side of the Atlantic. Was that the source of this deep churning? It doesn’t come wearing jackboots. It comes promising gifts for the poor. The fear that it was ending, this brief liberal summer. The old cruelty reasserting itself.

Do you, Samantha Jane Nixon, take this woman, Nicola Foster Hayle, to be your lawfully wedded wife?

Sonorous am-dram voice the man had. Sam shortening their names in the responses.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.