‘Now let us say, brutally and directly, what is in our minds,’ said Neville. ‘Our isolation, our preparation, is over. The furtive days of secrecy and hiding, the revelations on staircases, moments of terror and ecstasy.’
‘Old Mrs Constable lifted her sponge and warmth poured over us,’ said Bernard. ‘We became clothed in this changing, this feeling garment of flesh.’
‘The boot-boy made love to the scullery-maid in the kitchen garden,’ said Susan, ‘among the blown-out washing.’
‘The breath of the wind was like a tiger panting,’ said Rhoda.
‘The man lay livid with his throat cut in the gutter,’ said Neville. ‘And going upstairs I could not raise my foot against the immitigable apple tree with its silver leaves held stiff.’
The leaf danced in the hedge without anyone to blow it,’ said Jinny.
‘In the sun-baked corner,’ said Louis, ‘the petals swam on depths of green.’
‘At Elvedon the gardeners swept and swept with their great brooms, and the woman sat at a table writing,’ said Bernard.
‘From these close-furled balls of string we draw now every filament,’ said Louis, ‘remembering, when we meet.’
‘And then,’ said Bernard, ‘the cab came to the door, and, pressing our new bowler hats tightly over our eyes to hide our unmanly tears, we drove through streets in which even the housemaids looked at us, and our names painted in white letters on our boxes proclaimed to all the world that we were going to school with the regulation number of socks and drawers, on which our mothers for some nights previously had stitched our initials, in our boxes. A second severance from the body of our mother.’
‘And Miss Lambert, Miss Cutting and Miss Bard,’ said Jinny, ‘monumental ladies, white-ruffed, stone-coloured, enigmatic, with amethyst rings moving like virginal tapers, dim glow-worms over the pages of French, geography and arithmetic, presided;
