Without ado, Megan and I were joined by our spouses last night as they stepped off the same ferry. Kathleen’s brother, Kevin, stepped off as well. We made our way back through the town, stopping here and there for this and that (croissants, ice cream, and, it goes without saying, milk). We did not stay up long, once we had returned to the house.

Waiting outside Whitney’s Pantry at some point, I overheard one young man say to another, “We introduced them a long time ago, back in twenty-ten.” The idea that 2010 could be described as distant raised a quiet smile, but the “twenty-ten” lodged in my forebrain like a pebble. I realized that I’ve been saying “two thousand ten, two thousand eleven, two thousand twelve” — when was this going to stop? After all, I don’t say “a thousand sixty-six.” 

In other developments, I’m enjoying have a phone again. Of course, it doesn’t do much, yet. I’ve got to set everything up again. Saturday afternoon is probably not the optimal time for such a project, but I’m not letting that stop me.

***

I picked up Elizabeth Taylor’s stories yeterday, and began reading the collection entitled The Blush. Good as the stories in the first collection are, those in the second are uniformly superior, if only by a perceptible hair. They are longer, as well. I can understand why some critics (such as biographer Nicola Beauman) prefer the stories to the novels, although for my part I shouldn’t want to do without either. Some stories, such “The Rose, the Mauve, the White — a lovely sketch of three young girls going to their first dance (“At last they opened the door and thundered along the passage to their bedroom where they began to make the kind of untidiness they had left behind them in the bathroom.”) — would fit quite well as an episode in one of the novels (although not in any of the novels that Taylor actually wrote). A story such as “Hare Park” — the adventures of a duke’s young son on the day that his ancestral home is first opened to the paying public — might be the beginning of a very droll novel. But then there are stories like “A Troubled State of Mind” — two school friends must sort out the mess that results when one of them marries the other’s widowed father — that could not possibly be extended; they play with being too long as it is. There is also, in the second collection, an experiment with ghosts (ghosts from the future, it turns out), “Poor Girl,” that suggests the influence of Henry James narratives and Ivy Compton-Burnett’s narrative style. Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach is drolly prefigured in “Perhaps a Family Failing.” I find that I can’t stop reading them. And I can’t stop thinking how completely they would have gone over my head if I’d read as a young man.

Will has just returned from the town with his parents, and is insisting that we all shush, lest we frighten the family of deer just beyond the back deck. If only that were likely. Every time I walk to the beach, a foraging best pauses to follow my progress, not the least alarmed. It is I who am alarmed (of deer ticks), I who dread being followed home. These animals are not shy.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Saturday, August 25th, 2012 at 3:05 pm.