help herself, she had to be rid of it. As Edward shrank before her, she turned and scrambled to her knees, snatched a pillow from under the bedspread and wiped herself frantically. Even as she did so, she knew how loathsome, how unmannerly her behavior was, how it must add to his misery to see her so desperate to remove this part of himself from her skin. And actually, it was not so easy. It clung to her as she smeared it, and in parts it was already drying to a cracked glaze. She was two selves—the one who flung the pillow down in exasperation, the other who looked on and hated herself for it. It was unbearable that he should watch her, the punishing, hysterical woman he had foolishly married. She could hate him for what he was witnessing now and would never forget. She had to get away from him.
In a frenzy of anger and shame she sprang from the bed. And still, her other watching self appeared to be telling her calmly, but not quite in words,
But this is just what it’s like to be mad
. She could not look at him. It was torture to remain in the room with someone who knew her like this. She snatched her shoes from the floor and ran through the sitting room, past the ruin of their meal, and out into the corridor, down the stairs, out through the main entrance, around the side of the hotel and across the mossy lawn. And even when she reached the beach at last, she did not stop running.
FOUR
I n the brief year between his first encounter with Florence in St. Giles and their wedding in St. Mary’s less than half a mile away, Edward was often an overnight guest at the large Victorian villa off the Banbury Road. Violet Ponting assigned him to what the family called the “small room,” on the top floor, chastely remote from Florence’s, with a view over a walled garden a hundred yards long and, beyond, the grounds of a college or an old people’s home—he never troubled to discover which. The “small room” was larger than any of the bedrooms at the Turville Heath cottage, and possibly larger than its sitting room. One wall was covered in plain white-painted shelves of Loeb editions in Latin and Greek. Edward liked the association with such austere learning, though he knew he fooled no one by leaving out copies of Epictetus or Strabo on the bedside table. Like everywhere else in the house, the walls of his room were exotically painted white—there was not a scrap of wallpaper in the Ponting domain, floral or striped—and the floor was bare, untreated boards. He had the top of the house to himself, with an extensive bathroom on a half-landing, with Victorian windows of colored glass and varnished cork tiles—another novelty.
His bed was wide and unusually hard. In a corner, under the slope of a roof, was a scrubbed deal table with an Anglepoise lamp and a kitchen chair, painted blue. There were no pictures or rugs or ornaments, no chopped-up magazines, or any other remains of hobbies or projects. For the first time in his life he made a partial effort to be tidy, for this was a room like no other he had known, one in which it was possible to have calm, uncluttered thoughts. It was here one brilliant November midnight that Edward wrote a formal letter to Violet and Geoffrey Ponting declaring his ambition to marry their daughter, and did not quite ask their permission so much as confidently expect their approval.
He was not wrong. They appeared delighted, and marked the engagement with a family lunch one Sunday at the Randolph Hotel. Edward knew too little about the world to be surprised by his welcome into the Ponting household. He politely took it as his due, as Florence’s steady boyfriend and then fiancé, that when he hitchhiked or took the train from Henley to Oxford, his room was always there for him, that there were always meals at which his opinions about the government and the world situation would be solicited, that he would have the run of the library and the garden with its croquet and marked-out
In a frenzy of anger and shame she sprang from the bed. And still, her other watching self appeared to be telling her calmly, but not quite in words,
But this is just what it’s like to be mad
. She could not look at him. It was torture to remain in the room with someone who knew her like this. She snatched her shoes from the floor and ran through the sitting room, past the ruin of their meal, and out into the corridor, down the stairs, out through the main entrance, around the side of the hotel and across the mossy lawn. And even when she reached the beach at last, she did not stop running.
FOUR
I n the brief year between his first encounter with Florence in St. Giles and their wedding in St. Mary’s less than half a mile away, Edward was often an overnight guest at the large Victorian villa off the Banbury Road. Violet Ponting assigned him to what the family called the “small room,” on the top floor, chastely remote from Florence’s, with a view over a walled garden a hundred yards long and, beyond, the grounds of a college or an old people’s home—he never troubled to discover which. The “small room” was larger than any of the bedrooms at the Turville Heath cottage, and possibly larger than its sitting room. One wall was covered in plain white-painted shelves of Loeb editions in Latin and Greek. Edward liked the association with such austere learning, though he knew he fooled no one by leaving out copies of Epictetus or Strabo on the bedside table. Like everywhere else in the house, the walls of his room were exotically painted white—there was not a scrap of wallpaper in the Ponting domain, floral or striped—and the floor was bare, untreated boards. He had the top of the house to himself, with an extensive bathroom on a half-landing, with Victorian windows of colored glass and varnished cork tiles—another novelty.
His bed was wide and unusually hard. In a corner, under the slope of a roof, was a scrubbed deal table with an Anglepoise lamp and a kitchen chair, painted blue. There were no pictures or rugs or ornaments, no chopped-up magazines, or any other remains of hobbies or projects. For the first time in his life he made a partial effort to be tidy, for this was a room like no other he had known, one in which it was possible to have calm, uncluttered thoughts. It was here one brilliant November midnight that Edward wrote a formal letter to Violet and Geoffrey Ponting declaring his ambition to marry their daughter, and did not quite ask their permission so much as confidently expect their approval.
He was not wrong. They appeared delighted, and marked the engagement with a family lunch one Sunday at the Randolph Hotel. Edward knew too little about the world to be surprised by his welcome into the Ponting household. He politely took it as his due, as Florence’s steady boyfriend and then fiancé, that when he hitchhiked or took the train from Henley to Oxford, his room was always there for him, that there were always meals at which his opinions about the government and the world situation would be solicited, that he would have the run of the library and the garden with its croquet and marked-out
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