Imagined Corners by Willa Muir

Author:Willa Muir [Willa Muir]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781847677990
Publisher: Canongate Books
Published: 2009-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Precipitation

ONE

‘And my cats?’ said Madame Mütze, pausing on the terrace. ‘You will be good to them while I am away, Madeleine?’

‘Bou Di,’ said Madeleine, the tears running down her broad cheeks. ‘But I shall fatten them up for the return of Madame. Madame is too good to all the creatures.’

‘If it comes very cold leave the little shed open for them.’

Madame looked up the valley towards the col, which was powered with snow. Behind the long low house the hillside rose steeply, thickly grown with thorny scrub, in which sheltered the stray cats who so mysteriously appeared every morning at the back door of the Villa Soleil. The sky was grey. Madame turned slowly round and looked over the sea, marvelling as she still did after three years at the persistent blue of the water in spite of the grey sky above it.

In her childhood she had imagined heaven as a space of luminous blue, behind the bright blue sky of the hymn, and the magic of that infantile heaven still cast a glamour over the Mediterranean; for the sea remains changeful and mysterious even to those who are disillusioned about the sky. Yet although the sense of magic suffused Elizabeth Mütze when she looked at the blue sea her characteristic passion for analysis insisted that a colour so independent of the sky must be caused by minute particles of some kind held in suspension in the water. In another person the analytical passion might have dispelled the sense of magic, but Elizabeth Mütze had preserved them both; and on this dull day she wondered as usual whether it was limestone or salt in the water that made this southern sea so magically blue whenever one looked at it with one’s back to the sun.

She turned to Madeleine again.

‘Au revoir. Madeleine, I shall return soon; in three weeks, perhaps two, if I am very frozen in Scotland.’

That Madame should be going to the ends of the earth in the middle of winter! Madeleine’s protestations broke out anew, but her mistress laughed and said: ‘Be at ease. I shall return long before the snakes come, Madeleine, and that is what you really fear, is it not?’

A broad smile irradiated Madeleine’s tears.

‘But it is true, that about the snakes! Madame is learned; she does not believe it; but it is true!’

Madeleine’s husband, the old Antoine, carried Madame’s suitcase to the carriage, in which the young Antoine was already cracking his whip. It was not far down the winding hill-road to the station; Madame’s seat was booked, she had nothing to do but to think. Madeleine, craning her neck after the cloud of white dust, said to herself: The poor Madame, she goes away to forget.

Elizabeth Mütze might have said that she was going to remember. The two halves of herself which Karl had held together were now falling apart again. When she first met him, ten years ago, she had told him that she was like an ill-regulated alarm clock; the hour struck at the right time, but the alarm did not go off until days after, when it was too late.

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