here.”
Horace and Hilda spent an hour in the parlor and drank the rest of the whisky. From what I could hear she was comfortable in there, it seemed to appeal to some submerged yearning she had for gentility. She filled it to overflowing with her presence as she admired the modest fireplace with its polished brass scuttle, its poker and irons, and she expressed pleasure as well in the tiled mantelpiece, the oval mirror above it, and the five china geese hanging on a diagonal across the wall. She also liked the pattern of the wallpaper and the chintz cushion covers. The glass-fronted cabinet with its three pieces of Wedgwood: this pleased her too. “I do like a parlor, Horace,” she said, more than once, “gives a place respectability.” What did my father make of this, staving off, as he was, with whisky, an utter maelstrom of guilt when with every passing hour the murder like a virus gnawed deeper into the tissue of his vital organs?
There was bacon in the house, and after finishing the whisky they moved to the kitchen. They ate their breakfast as night fell; I smelled the bacon from upstairs, and it sharpened the edge of my own ravenous hunger, for I had eaten nothing all day; but I would not go down. I sat at the window and gazed at the glow from the kitchen, which barely penetrated the darkness in the yard. I saw Hilda go through the back door to the outhouse, and I was tempted then to go downstairs but the prospect of encountering her when she came back in deterred me. “You should fix that toilet of yours, Horace,” she said on her return. “Fine state of affairs when a plumber’s own toilet don’t work!”
Ten minutes later they left for the Earl of Rochester, and I came downstairs. There was no bacon left, so I had to make do with bread and dripping.
W ould that awful day never end? I could think no more about it, that long evening I spent alone in the house with the smell of Hilda everywhere in my nostrils. I went out into the fog after my bread and dripping, and made for the canal, where I wandered along in a morose state, at times desperate, at times tearfully furious, kicking stones into the black water and taking what small comfort I could from the foggy darkness of the night. Where was my mother? Where was she? I returned to number twenty-seven after nine and came in through the back door; the house was empty. I ate more bread and dripping then went up to my room and got out my insect collection again. I heard my father come in late, alone; he sat up in the kitchen drinking beer until he passed out. I crept down around midnight and saw him slumped in a chair by the stove, still in his cap and scarf, and a cigarette adhering to his lower lip even as he slept.
The next day was Sunday. As was his habit he went to his allotment. The fog had dissipated somewhat, it was a cool, cloudy morning, and it looked as if it might rain later. As he cycled through the empty streets he was still very much a man in crisis: barely thirty hours had elapsed since the murder, and he had not yet adjusted to the new territory he occupied. Murder sets a man apart, moves him into a separate world, narrow and constricted, bound and constrained by guilt, complicity, and the fear of betrayal. None of this he had fully realized, for he was still to some extent in shock; he pedaled his bicycle past curtained windows behind which slept a world from which he was now exiled forever, though this, as I say, was not yet apparent to him.
That soon changed! There has always seemed to me to be a sort of bleak poetic justice in the fact that the allotment, to which my father had so often fled from his domestic life, should now be charged with the horror of my mother’s murder. He himself felt this only dimly as he pedaled through the streets that Sunday morning, but the closer he came to the railway bridge the stronger the impulse was to turn around and get as far away from the place as possible. But he did not turn round, for he was
Horace and Hilda spent an hour in the parlor and drank the rest of the whisky. From what I could hear she was comfortable in there, it seemed to appeal to some submerged yearning she had for gentility. She filled it to overflowing with her presence as she admired the modest fireplace with its polished brass scuttle, its poker and irons, and she expressed pleasure as well in the tiled mantelpiece, the oval mirror above it, and the five china geese hanging on a diagonal across the wall. She also liked the pattern of the wallpaper and the chintz cushion covers. The glass-fronted cabinet with its three pieces of Wedgwood: this pleased her too. “I do like a parlor, Horace,” she said, more than once, “gives a place respectability.” What did my father make of this, staving off, as he was, with whisky, an utter maelstrom of guilt when with every passing hour the murder like a virus gnawed deeper into the tissue of his vital organs?
There was bacon in the house, and after finishing the whisky they moved to the kitchen. They ate their breakfast as night fell; I smelled the bacon from upstairs, and it sharpened the edge of my own ravenous hunger, for I had eaten nothing all day; but I would not go down. I sat at the window and gazed at the glow from the kitchen, which barely penetrated the darkness in the yard. I saw Hilda go through the back door to the outhouse, and I was tempted then to go downstairs but the prospect of encountering her when she came back in deterred me. “You should fix that toilet of yours, Horace,” she said on her return. “Fine state of affairs when a plumber’s own toilet don’t work!”
Ten minutes later they left for the Earl of Rochester, and I came downstairs. There was no bacon left, so I had to make do with bread and dripping.
W ould that awful day never end? I could think no more about it, that long evening I spent alone in the house with the smell of Hilda everywhere in my nostrils. I went out into the fog after my bread and dripping, and made for the canal, where I wandered along in a morose state, at times desperate, at times tearfully furious, kicking stones into the black water and taking what small comfort I could from the foggy darkness of the night. Where was my mother? Where was she? I returned to number twenty-seven after nine and came in through the back door; the house was empty. I ate more bread and dripping then went up to my room and got out my insect collection again. I heard my father come in late, alone; he sat up in the kitchen drinking beer until he passed out. I crept down around midnight and saw him slumped in a chair by the stove, still in his cap and scarf, and a cigarette adhering to his lower lip even as he slept.
The next day was Sunday. As was his habit he went to his allotment. The fog had dissipated somewhat, it was a cool, cloudy morning, and it looked as if it might rain later. As he cycled through the empty streets he was still very much a man in crisis: barely thirty hours had elapsed since the murder, and he had not yet adjusted to the new territory he occupied. Murder sets a man apart, moves him into a separate world, narrow and constricted, bound and constrained by guilt, complicity, and the fear of betrayal. None of this he had fully realized, for he was still to some extent in shock; he pedaled his bicycle past curtained windows behind which slept a world from which he was now exiled forever, though this, as I say, was not yet apparent to him.
That soon changed! There has always seemed to me to be a sort of bleak poetic justice in the fact that the allotment, to which my father had so often fled from his domestic life, should now be charged with the horror of my mother’s murder. He himself felt this only dimly as he pedaled through the streets that Sunday morning, but the closer he came to the railway bridge the stronger the impulse was to turn around and get as far away from the place as possible. But he did not turn round, for he was
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