Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Author:Sylvia Townsend Warner
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781590174050
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2011-11-14T04:15:56+00:00

PART 3

IT WAS THE third week in August. The weather was sultry; day after day Laura heard the village people telling each other that there was thunder in the air. Every evening they stood in the village street, looking upwards, and the cattle stood waiting in the fields. But the storm delayed. It hid behind the hills, biding its time.

Laura had spent the afternoon in a field, a field of unusual form, for it was triangular. On two sides it was enclosed by woodland, and because of this it was already darkening into a premature twilight, as though it were a room. She had been there for hours. Though it was sultry, she could not sit still. She walked up and down, turning savagely when she came to the edge of the field. Her limbs were tired, and she stumbled over the flints and matted couch-grass. Throughout the long afternoon a stock-dove had cooed in the wood. “Cool, cool, cool,” it said, delighting in its green bower. Now it had ceased, and there was no life in the woods. The sky was covered with a thick uniform haze. No ray of the declining sun broke through it, but the whole heavens were beginning to take on a dull, brassy pallor. The long afternoon was ebbing away, stealthily, impassively, as though it were dying under an anesthetic.

Laura had not listened to the stock-dove; she had not seen the haze thickening overhead. She walked up and down in despair and rebellion. She walked slowly, for she felt the weight of her chains. Once more they had been fastened upon her. She had worn them for many years, acquiescently, scarcely feeling their weight. Now she felt it. And, with their weight, she felt their familiarity, and the familiarity was worst of all: Titus had seen her starting out. He had cried: “Where are you off to, Aunt Lolly? Wait a minute, and I’ll come too.” She had feigned not to hear him and had walked on. She had not turned her head until she was out of the village, she expected at every moment to hear him come bounding up behind her. Had he done so, she thought she would have turned round and snarled at him. For she wanted, oh! how much she wanted, to be left alone for once. Even when she felt pretty sure that she had escaped she could not profit by her solitude, for Titus’s voice still jangled on her nerves. “Where are you off to, Aunt Lolly? Wait a minute, and I’ll come too.” She heard his very tones, and heard intensely her own silence that had answered him. Too flustered to notice where she was going, she had followed a chance track until she found herself in this field where she had never been before. Here the track ended, and here she stayed.

The woods rose up before her like barriers. On the third side of the field was a straggling hedge; along it sprawled a thick bank of burdocks, growing with malignant profusion.

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