Spencer The Tyranny of Love

Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-32565-8
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 336 Seiten

First published in 1967, The Tyranny of Love was the second in a quartet of novels by Colin Spencer concerning the Simpson family. At the forefront of this story is Matthew, only son of Eddy and Hester Simpson. He loathes his lecherous father and wants to avenge his mother's misery. He begins an obsessive, sexless relationship with Jane, the girl next door, but his driving passion tends in another direction, and threatens to cause chaos. This edition of the novel includes a new preface by Colin Spencer. '[The novel] has a passionate feeling for the sensuous world; the characters live at full blast, a family driven by dark and uncontrollable forces, but always flesh and blood people.' London Illustrated News

Colin Spencer

Autoren/Hrsg.

Spencer, Colin

Leseproben

l

HESTER SAT knitting upon the beach, hemmed in by towels, the tumbled clothes of the children, an empty carpet bag and a Thermos flask. Behind her tufts of grass showed where the dunes ended. Her black hair, parted in the centre of her head, was pulled tightly back into a bun, that now by midday had untied itself and fell in a loop over her right shoulder.

Her friend, Maud, sat up and fingered the curls of her blonde hair, pinched her waist in with her fingertips, lit a cigarette, then loosened one strap of her striped bathing costume. The sky, cloudless and cornflower blue, felt to Maud like a warm sponge. ‘Mmmm, the heat,’ she murmured, ‘lovely,’ and moved her body sensually. Then she added sharply, ‘I still think you do too much.’ And she frowned and turned over on to her stomach. Her figure was that of a young girl, firm and without fat, yet she moved with the clumsiness and weight of a large insensitive animal.

Hester, who had been momentarily jolted by this last move, said, ‘Ah.’

Maud sat up.

Hester sighed, and thought, How she does fidget.

‘If only the sand didn’t get everywhere,’ Maud cried, and began to shake her knickers.

Hester noticed that though the knickers were silk and edged with lace they were also discoloured, while hers, she thought with some satisfaction, though only of cotton, were clean on every day.

‘You do too much, too much,’ Maud was still saying, shaking her head and picking grains of sand out of the silk seams.

I don’t know how she can still wear them, Hester thought; then she sighed, partly because of the discrepancy in personal cleanliness and partly because that made her feel alone and solitary. ‘I used to think …’ she said, putting her knitting down and gazing out to sea.

Then she saw the calm undisturbed beauty of the scene: the sea a thin blue ribbon that lay ice cold in colour against the wide bronze sweep of sand, the ancient dark breakwaters split by the savage fury of winter storms, their heavy limbs weighed down by the weed and molluscs, and the children, tiny, black, sticklike, far out on the sea’s edge, looking like marks from a hidden pencil moving across a page.

‘… it would be lovely to have a place by the sea for the kids and everything.’

‘I know.’ Maud’s voice was velvet, indulgent, cosy. ‘I know,’ she said again.

Hester, with an ear that was sensitive to even the slightest insincerity, sighed within her again, but the desire to talk, to explain was stronger than her own fastidious demand for the truth. She dropped two stitches and carefully picked them up again.

‘I can’t understand why your Mum paints in dark glasses.’ Maud stared over at Rosie who was sitting in a deckchair placed in the only triangle of shade that the beach now seemed to afford.

‘She never seems to paint in water colours,’ Hester said absent-mindedly, still staring at her knitting and feeling somehow that the garment looked wrong. ‘Perhaps they gave me one ball of wool that wasn’t the right colour?’

‘I don’t see how she can see anything wearing those.’ Maud turned to Hester and said with spirit, ‘Well, it is lovely isn’t it?’ But you do too much. You let him ask all those people down here every week-end and you’re tired out when Monday comes. You might just as well be in Croydon. Oh, I know it’s lovely for the kids, but you’re worn out, worked to a frazzle …’ Maud’s wide painted mouth opened and shut, her large false teeth glinting white in the sun. She ground her cigarette out vehemently upon a pebble.

‘Are the children all right?’ Hester said anxiously, half getting up. ‘They’re a long way out.’

‘Isn’t it supposed to be a rest for you?’ Maud felt in the carpet bag for a mirror, took one out, and staring into it she pulled at her eyelashes. ‘Leslie gave me this, it’s called Blue Moon,’ she muttered.

‘Eddy says it’s all right, the way he just floats out in that rubber ring, but I do wonder.’

‘Oh, you know what that little duck is, he’ll be halfway to France by now.’

‘Oh don’t, Maud, don’t.’

Hester, seeing that the children had now come out from the sea, sat down again, relieved. ‘Sundy’s looking after him so he’ll be all right.’

Maud laughed. ‘He’s got a way with him even now.’

‘I do want him to be polite to women. You know what Eddy’s like.’ She knew she meant something else, something more than politeness, but she couldn’t put that into words; besides she had to keep so many resentments within her that she hardly understood the nature of them.

‘Like,’ Maud was shrieking, ‘like,’ so loudly that Rosie turned, took off her glasses and peered up at them. ‘Yesterday when we went into that hotel I could have hit him over the head with the potted fern. Oo, I was furious. You never said anything, not a thing. I was waiting for you to say something. I’ve never seen anything like it. He just barged in first and let the glass door bang back into your face.’

Hester smiled weakly. ‘Well,’ she shrugged, ‘at least one can see the funny side of it. I believe you would,’ she added, ‘I believe you would.’

‘What?’

‘Hit him over the head with the potted fern.’

‘Did you see that Will Hay film? What was it called? Oh I did laugh. Leslie and I, we howled.’ Maud went on to explain the film.

Hester thought, Not all men are like that. And she took off her straw sandals and handled them thoughtfully. Eddy was always good fun, always good for a laugh, so is Maud, Maud is good fun too. Why does Mum keep on staring at us so? Sometimes Maud and she would laugh and laugh, just over things, silly things maybe, but things which struck them as funny. Maybe, she thought, if I didn’t laugh, I’d cry. She drew in her breath and sighed.

Maud’s hard voice went on chipping at the silence. ‘And as for Matthew, I always said that you’d have him raising his cap when he was in his pram.’

‘Yes I do want him to grow up …’ The sentence trailed off lamely.

‘Not like his Dad?’ Maud said brightly.

‘I suppose so. It does seem an awful thing to say.’ She didn’t allow herself to see the full extent of what she had just admitted.

‘Have you talked to him?’

‘Eddy?’

‘Yes.’

‘What about?’

‘Well I would have walked right out of that hotel yesterday if Leslie had done that to me.’

Hester thought, How insensitive of you. Why rub it in? And she said crossly, ‘Do you think it would do any good if I did? Don’t you think I want to? I’ve tried, it’s no good.’

Rosie thought, How that woman does chatter. Charging like a carthorse through all Hester’s delicate defences. Leave it alone. Leave it all alone. She scribbled with her chalk. This beach is like a desert. Nobody else on it, except us. A bronze and yellow desert and I’m drawing an old boat which has been left, half of it eroded, eaten away by the sea’s whisper and stealth, half of it gone, yet the soul is still there, you can feel the rhythm of the sea’s movement in its bones. Perhaps all Heath women get left alone? How Hester arches her fingers when in pain, like a sufferer from rheumatism, and the child Sundy does it too, when she’s upset. What are they doing? As if to pluck their insides out. Rosie’s chalk broke and fell to the sand.

Maud got up and rearranged her towel. She shaded her eyes from the sun, then looked at her watch. ‘Ah, I see Elsie’s gone for her walk again.’ Why can’t you see it? she thought. It’s right there, stuck under your nose. She felt a sudden anger with Hester for being so naïve and stupid.

‘She doesn’t like the beach, that’s what she says,’ Hester said vaguely, going back to her knitting and half wondering whether she ought to begin all over again.

‘What she sees in those fields just beats me. Nothing but grass and sheep, sheep and grass. If you stay here alone you’ll get loony,’ Maud added with a certain tart satisfaction.

‘There are the kids,’ Hester said with pleasure. She stared across the sand at two tiny brown figures who every now and again leapt into me air, running and shouting.

Matthew thought Sundy was a princess who ruled her kingdom – which lay beneath the beach – with a sublime and regal dignity. Now she burst out from the sea and sand like a gold shaded flower, her lithe thin body all rhythm and line, part of the air, as it ran singing through the wind. Oh, how devoted he was, how passionately he felt the misery of never being quite as beautiful or as sublime as she. But now, hysterical with laughter, trying to keep up with her, he felt himself floating, becoming part of the sand and air. The blood within him seemed to be churning just beneath his skin and Sundy was laughing and laughing – princesses were cruel and teased one so – but if only he could just catch up with her, just be able to reach her.

‘Good God, she’ll run his little legs off,’ Hester shouted. ‘Sundy be careful.’ But it was too far away for them to hear.

‘Funny she goes in the same direction every afternoon.’ Maud took a quick look at Hester’s face. It was smiling happily down towards the children. Maud stiffened and said, ‘Want a choc?’

‘That’s all we do,’ Hester said, taking one with a nut on it, ‘eat. We just chew and chew all day because we’re bored.’

‘Mm, but they’re nice,’ Maud said, chewing, her mouth and lower jaw seeming to have a sudden life of their own.

‘You look as if...