Dusk hides the river’s eddies and currents, leaving only its slow-moving majesty. The sky is purplish, the poplars black. Soames, musing on his balcony, thinks how strange it is that he, a cautious but canny investor, should have made a habit of putting all his emotional eggs in one basket. First with Irene and now Fleur, who even as a newborn lying in her cradle in Annette’s bedroom, regarding him with eyes of sleepy depth, made his heart feel warm and queerly elated.
Fleur is affectionate but capricious. She is – ah! – fine, in the French sense. He has no idea what’s really going on in her shingled head.
And now Annette is (according to the poison pen letter crumpled in his left hand) conducting an affair with one of their regular house guests.
Piano music drifts from below – Annette playing a Nocturne. Scents of lilac and hawthorn cling to the air. No, he won’t divorce Annette, since he has Fleur’s reputation to consider. She is everything to me, everything, do you understand – he’ll say to any prospective suitor, any hopeful young chap.
Who’ll no doubt reply: She’s everything to me too, Sir.
Pah, he’s getting old. A lonely business, life. What you love you can never keep to yourself. He pulls a red rambler rose from a cluster blocking the window. Hears the tiny splash of a fish, the shaking of an aspen’s leaves in a puff of breeze, the distant rumble of a night train.
The moon has dropped down. Cattle still graze in the water meadows, feeling with their tongues for the grass they can’t see, while sheep on the Downs lie quiet as stones. He wants Fleur to return from London or wherever she is. To come up softly behind him and put her arms round his neck in her dear familiar way.
Author's Note:
Much of the natural description in this piece is taken from here and there in book 3 of John Galsworthy's The Forsyte Saga. The characters are his too. So you could say it's me Namjooning in Galsworthy (who, importantly, is out of copyright).
Frances Gapper’s flashes and micros have been published in four Best Microfiction anthologies and online in places including the South Florida Poetry Journal, Splonk, Forge, Twin Pies, Wigleaf, trampset, 100 Word Story, New Flash Fiction Review, Fictive Dream. She lives in the UK’s Black Country.
Commenti