Elizabeth Bowen - Excerpt from The Last September lyrics

He took up the Spectator, read an article on Unrest and thought of the Empire. Mechanically his hand went up to his tie. He looked ahead to a time when it should be accurately finally fenced about and all raked over. Then there should be a fixed leisured glow, and relaxation, as on coming in to tea from an afternoon's gardening with his mother, in autumn. He turned in thought to confident English country, days like the look in a dog's eye, rooms small in the scope of fire-light, neighborly lights through trees. He thought of a woman, kind and palpable, who should never produce this ache, this absence. . . A door dragged forward its portiére, Lois came in from the dining-room, brushing rain from her frieze coat. He stood for a moment in a kind of despair at her agitation, as though he were trying to take her photograph. Then he stepped forward and kissed her, his hands on her wet shoulders. "Oh--but look here--" cried Lois. But she was his lovely woman: kissed. He shone at her, she helpless. She looked out at the hopeless rain. "I love --" "Oh but look here --" "But I love --" "What are you doing in the drawing room?" "I've come to lunch" "Do they know?" "I haven't seen anyone" "I don't know who to tell," she said distractedly. "They have all disappeared; they always are disappearing. You'd think this was the emptiest house in Ireland--we have no family life. It's no good my telling Brigid because she forgets, and the parlourmaid is always dressing. I suppose I had better lay you a place myself--but I don't where were the knives are kept. I can't think why you are being so sudden all of a sudden, in every way; you never used to be. I haven't even done the flowers yet. I do wish you wouldn't Gerald--I mean be so actual. And do be natural at lunch, or I shall look such a goat. You really might have asked me, I never mind talking things over. But now the gong will go at any moment. And how do you know I'm not in love with a married man? "You wouldn't be so neurotic, I mean, like a novel. I mean: do be natural Lois." "Don't look so, so inflamed . . . Miss Norton is here, she's a girl--at least a kind of girl. She's awfully attractive." "I think I met her. She awfully--well, not beautiful, but . . . Oh, Lois . . . ." "Do be normal: do play the piano." "I can't start playing the piano before I've even told them I've come to lunch. I may be musical, Lois, but I am not artistic." "All right," she said, and walked away from him round the room. So that was being kissed: just an impact, with inside blankness. She was lonely, and saw there was no future. She shut her eyes and tried--as sometimes when she was seasick, locked in misery between Holyhead and Kingstown--to be enclosed in nonentity, in some ideal no-place perfect and clear as a bubble. Or she was at a party, unreal and vivid, or running on hard sands. "It wouldn't have mattered so much at the seaside," she said to Gerald. "But we never are at the seaside." She opened a sandalwood box and looked in: three blue beads and a receipt of her own from Switzers: three-and-eleven for yellow velvet pansies, worn at a dance and spoilt. "It't not even as though we were at a dance," she added. "Lois, I've been thinking about you all night, up in the mountains--right up there when you were asleep. You were wonderful." "Haven't you been to bed at all?" "No, you know I--" "Oh, Gerald--Oh . . . darling--But you did have breakfast?" The gong sounded: great bra** balls went bouncing about the empty rooms. The parlourmaid looked in perfunctorily. "Lunch?" said Gerald to Lois. "No one is in--and I don't suppose lunch is even ready. Gerald, did you have breakfast?" "An enormous breakfast at Ballydarra-- What were you saying Lois; what did you call me then . . . before the gone?" But now she flushed and answered: "I'm sopping wet; I'm steaming, I smell like a dog. I should have thought you would want me to go and change. I should have thought you'd be -- protecting." "You know I'd die for you." They looked at each other. The words had a solemn echo, as though among high dark arches in a church where they were standing and being married. She thought of d**h and glanced at his body, quick, lovely, present and yet destructible. Something pa**ed sensation and touched her consciousness with a kind of weight and warmth; she glimpsed a quiet beyond experience, as though for many nights he had been sleeping besides her. "What did I say--then? Say it" "'Darling.' . . . " But she turned away from some approach in his look.