Cannibalising something else and hanging a turn. The writing is too stiff or arch or imitative or something, but what the heck, this is more like brainstorming now.

Amor: part seven

They came home changed. That was said and it was true as far as it went, only that ‘changed’ was such a general word that in it there could be heard, already, the sound of brooms sweeping the unpalatable, hard-to-speak specifics under the carpet. For those of them who had suffered imprisonment there was added, to the burden of things seen and done, the stigma of capture and captivity and the memories of torture, starvation and humiliation. The exchange of letters with home had not been permitted. They wanted a homecoming but did not know how, when the day came, they would be received. No one knew better than they how the living move on with their lives, leaving the dead and the good-as-dead behind.

The young major, freshly demobbed, found that he was relieved rather than frustrated when a hold up on the line forced a stop at the town, McAlister was its name, which he noticed, on its freshly painted white-and-blue sign, as he noticed everything, the state of hyper-alertness in which he had existed for five years not having abated.

Strong sunlight, the clear light of the inland, filled the tea room at the handsome brick station, incongruous bulk in the one storeyed weatherboard town, a building of some grandeur, stamped with an air of confidence in prosperity, with lavish mullioned windows through which the sun flooded, impartial to the last. (He remembered the commandant’s eyes: you could lay your burdens down in those eyes, drown your troubles like unwanted kittens.)

A green corrugated roof overhung a white wall which rose above an unpainted timber fence with a lattice top decorated with a yellow merremia. A window was the usual abyss, with cheap, depressing lace net curtains. Between the fence and the tea room, on a square of lawn ten or twelve feet across, was the station garden, whose flowerbeds, beaming with cinerarias, carnations and freesias, suffered the domination of an inexplicable adventure in planting: in a square bed, gladioli surrounded a centrepiece of tall stiff ornamental grass with red plumes, from which it was almost impossible not to absorb an impression of monumental botanical tribute, perhaps to some station official who had served in his post with distinction, or, alternatively to some tragic soul who had suicided on the tracks; to a local celebrity, or even to an idea or theme, such as progress, or friendship, or charity, or, indeed, victory, which had apparently been won.

An embossed paper dado ran around the walls at the height of the windowsills and a complicated cornice supported a high ceiling of pressed tin. A glass counter, containing cakes which, in their elaborations of icing, looked, to his eyes, as if they did not belong in the world, receded into a sunlit infinity, a corridor of eternal day, which he, gazing into and down, envisaged, for some several moments, entering without regret or return. But as he placed himself there, with a diver’s sensation of trusting the water below his descent to receive him, it shocked him by burning and suffocating. Coming back to his body, he found that he was hyperventilating loudly in a state of panic. Acutely embarrassed, he tried to ascertain whether his runner’s breathing had been noticed, but no—no, he was unnoticed in the flood, the other flood, of Mr Talier permitting himself a second slice of the lemon sponge—‘Since we might as well call this afternoon tea—’, Miss Rusden’s ethereal complaints—the bread was dry, the cake sat too heavily in her stomach—Miss Gordonstove’s delicate cough, Dr Sleeman’s passionate encomium to bentonite, Mrs Rogay’s admonishments to Neville and Justine for the peccadilloes of rocking on a chair and chewing on a lower lip, respectively: all surveyed by characters, godlike in their elevation on the walls—the pretty young woman who drank Pemberton’s carbonated drinks, the cherubic boy who washed with Bluebird soap, the stagecoach driver who smoked Charioteers, the bulldog mascot of Maxol breath mints, the Jubilee ice-cream snowman, and others unfamiliar to him, and a which had the air of a relic, of a grey-haired officer in a decorated uniform, the type of man, he thought, judging physiology and expression, who you pleaded with yourself not to become. Where they would hang you, in the end—it was a diverting question; whether the gallows, or a provincial wall—or, indeed, one and then the other. You could, potentially, last a jolly long time up there, he reflected, embosomed between the Bluebird boy and Bayswater gowns, overseeing the consumption of teas and cakes, listening to the massed clinking percussion of cutlery, driven mad at times by a flapping curtain, soothed by rain—he lit the cigarette his nerves were clamouring for—the bread had indeed been rather dry, and he had not finished his sandwich, the remains of which had been taken away by the waitress. The bones of his wrist had something to say to the jacket cuff of his secondhand suit, too short for him, a donated item he had been given. There was some miscommunication and his hand shook violently, so that he spilled his coffee. It was not that much and not that hot, but still he had to grip the napkin until the awful childish need to cry was conquered, and once in charge of himself again he dried his hand and smoothed the napkin out. He wondered if the rest of life would be this stumbling—again, he saw an image of a child—stumbling after etiquette, the old thoughtless grace of your former life gone like a twig down a raging river.