Spencer Anarchists In Love

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ISBN: 978-0-571-32497-2
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 304 Seiten

'A marvellous and remarkable book.' Melvyn Bragg 'A life-affirming novel.' Telegraph First published in 1963, Anarchists in Love was the first of a quartet of novels by Colin Spencer concerning the Simpson family. This volume centres on Sundy Simpson, who, on a warm May evening in Brighton, runs into Reg Pearson in a bar. They begin an affair: she paints, he writes, and on the surface they seem well matched. Reg, however, is a keeper of secrets. In a new preface to this edition Colin Spencer recalls the controversy that attended its first publication, and his wish to celebrate Brighton, 'which appeared to me in my twenties to be as complicated as the human soul'.

Colin Spencer

Autoren/Hrsg.

Spencer, Colin

Leseproben

CHAPTER ONE

SUNDY breathed a sigh of relief as she slammed the door shut. It was her house, but it had been invaded this weekend, of all weekends, by part of her family; her sister, Julie, and Julie’s two children. Brighton was beautiful, especially on Whit Saturday night with the sun just cooling off in the sky and the sea vividly green beneath the sun’s orange glow. Brighton was gay, Brighton was something, on a night like this and she’d got away, right away, well almost. The small terrace house that her grandmother Rosie had left her sat beside the brewery and the hospital in Kemp Town, so that now she ran down towards the front and quickly walked along, high up, above the sea, and the pier, towards the pubs. She felt happy. She’d put on her pink trousers that were, well a little tight over the seat, and of course her seat could have been smaller, and her purple shirt which was really Eddy’s, her father’s, but she’d pinched it from home and then dyed it; she was tanned and feeling wild, with a kind of frenzied happiness which would make her dance on the pink sun-spotted pavement, just wild, because she loved Brighton and the sun had shone for a week now and she’d bathed and sunbathed and then gone home and painted like mad that old harpist. There he sat in the upper room of the house which she used for her studio, a little mournful, a little amused, and played his harp as she painted. The background, the streets and houses of Brighton were all deliciously orange, pink, and red, and she’d painted them like that because she felt full of sun and it had all somehow spilt out into the town over the gold of the harp and the harpist’s mobile hands.

She saw the crowds about her, strolling below her, towards the silver pointed pier and she smelt the sea and the slight warm wind that came down from the south-west and she thought, Julie’s a fool. Fancy having a sister like that; no soul, that’s the matter with her. What had she said?

“Sundy, let’s have a party. Why don’t you go out and get some people in? I’m bored.” Sundy adored parties but hated giving them because she was always nearly broke; besides, the kind of people Sundy liked Julie wouldn’t. Julie was smart, she was sophisticated. She was kind of colonial, just back from Singapore, left her husband there too, been there for four years and knew nobody in England; well she was all right but they hadn’t got anything in common. When Julie looked at her paintings, she wrinkled up her well-powdered nose and made the usual remarks, like, “Which way up?” That’s the trouble with philistines, Sundy thought, they’re not even original. You could have forgiven them if they were; one bright witty remark might even illuminate something. She remembered their mother, Hester, had rung Sundy a few weeks ago and said, “You know what Eddy’s like over the children, he can’t bear them in the house. I can’t tell Julie that when she’s been away for four years and when she’s so worried over the divorce and everything. I know a few days at Brighton over Whitsun would do her the world of good.”

“Oh, Mother,” Sundy cried, “how can I work with all them in the house?”

There was a pause and then Hester had said, her voice clipped and rather bitter. “Well then, I shall pay for them to go to a hotel.”

“You know you can’t afford that.” For Eddy kept her short of money.

“I’ve got a little in the bank.” She made Sundy feel mean and selfish so that she had to say,

“No, of course it will be all right. I’d love to have them. As long as they bring some food because I haven’t got any.”

Hester clucked her tongue disapprovingly. “I don’t know what my girl lives on. Well anyway you don’t look bad on it.” She added, “Now are you quite sure that’s all right?”

“Yes. You can say I suggested it.” She knew in fact that that was exactly what Hester would do.

So they had arrived yesterday and Julie had taken them down on to the beach immediately, for Sundy was working on the painting of the harpist. Then in the evening they’d all eaten spaghetti and Sundy had tried her best to be aunt-like to David, who was very pale and only five and Angela, who was seven, tall with rather stick-like limbs which seemed to work mechanically. They thought her very odd, and she tended to react from this picture of her by being even more odd. She wore her loudest clothes and all her wooden beads at once and made out that they weighed so much that she had to sink to the floor and move around on her stomach like a serpent. Angela had hysterics thinking it was so funny, but David kept on hopefully insisting that she was pretending, that her beads weren’t that heavy at all. It began to worry him. “Auntie Sundy. Auntie Sundy,” he cried mournfully, “Mummy, Auntie Sundy’s on the floor and she can’t get up. No, she can’t get up because the beads, the beads, what she’s got on. is so heavy.”

“It’s only a game, silly,” Angela said.

Sundy with her nose in the dust thought, I shall have to get to a pub tomorrow or I shall scream, for ever since Rosie’s death, Bank Holidays at Brighton had taken on a macabre significance.

“Mummy,” David cried, his voice rising to a melancholic wail. “She’s stuck on the floor with her beads.”

Angela tossed her head. “Isn’t he silly, Auntie? Can’t he see it’s a game? They’re not heavy really, are they?”

Sundy looked along at Angela’s thin pale legs with her large brown shoes and white socks and then could only remember Rosie, her grandmother, two years ago on Easter Saturday on the bandstand and what she’d said, or what she’d tried to say before the stroke had silenced her. But if she thought of Rosie, she thought of Reg, how he’d followed them and how strange it all was. It had never added up, it was disturbing.

“They’re not heavy really, Auntie, are they?”

“No, Angie, they’re not heavy really,” she said feeling suddenly tired. “That’s Mummy calling. And now you’ll have to go to bed.”

Julie had brought down a bottle of sherry. After the children were in bed they sat in Sundy’s room, sipping it. They both felt bitter. They sat there in the room littered with paints and canvases and Julie complained of the muddle and the dirt.

“All right,” Sundy cried. “It’s dirty, it’s in a muddle. But so is your private life.” And she nodded with mock sagacity.

Julie shrugged her shoulders then drained her glass. “It’s all Dad’s fault,” she murmured. “If he hadn’t been such hell I wouldn’t have married at seventeen.”

“You could have just left as I did.”

“Oh, he’s not so bad,” Julie murmured. “If I’d been older I could have dealt with him.”

“But you weren’t. You were powerless; one always is,” Sundy added mournfully.

“That’s ridiculous.” Julie lifted her thin shoulders slightly in disdain.

Sundy, as she drank her sherry, wondered why they ever began to talk at all. Julie could never understand anything Sundy said; it had been the same when they were children.

“You see things differently when you’re away from them,” Julie said, crossing her legs, then leaning down and putting her seam straight. “Mum and Dad seemed all right then.”

Sundy nodded. “They would,” she murmured. “If you’re not on top of it, it’s all right. Anyway, no one can understand unless they’re in the middle of it all.” Sundy thought of her brother, Matthew. What could it be like for him at sixteen?

“I don’t think that’s true,” Julie said with a rather condescending smile. “As I said, one often sees most clearly when one’s away from it all.”

Sundy lowered her head and looked at her, then shrugged. Julie felt her scorn, bit her lip, and said, “I suppose you understand everything, don’t you?”

“No,” Sundy said. “I just went away like you. I couldn’t stand seeing Mum’s face every morning. It was enough to turn the marmalade …”

“What do you mean?”

“What do you think I mean?” she said crossly. “Mum suffers.” Then she leant forward and said the word again, “Suffers”; then she spelt it out.

“Yes. Yes,” Julie said, waving one neat and manicured hand at Sundy impatiently.

Sundy sat back. “It’s the religion that does it. She believes in God and a Christian marriage and it’s martyred her.”

“Well, you needn’t talk about it so disparagingly. It can be a help. It certainly helped me in Singapore. I was desperate.”

Sundy said quietly, keeping the cynicism out of her voice, “Oh Julie, did you find God there then?”

Her sister sighed and twiddled the sherry round in the glass. “I knew what Mum meant when she used to talk to me. I don’t know what I would have done without – without …”

“Him?” Sundy said succinctly.

“Yes,” Julie said.

Somehow after that Sundy found herself speechless. Once they had brought in God and Julie’s conversion, Sundy felt even more bitter. She knew what a mess their home was and she resented the fact that Hester had taken religion like a drug and Eddy had taken sex, and that Julie seemed to be following up with a mixture of the two; for she had already mentioned to Sundy that a boyfriend might be driving down on the Saturday night. Really, Sundy felt, they might all have tried to understand why it had happened as it had. She had puzzled over it for the last six years. She was twenty-one now, and had felt crucified between them, between Eddy’s almost rabelaisian hedonism and Hester’s naïve good nature. Their marriage and their...