Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing Read Online Free Page B

not help suspecting that it might be a consolation prize, given rather for endurance than achievement. Her distinguished contemporaries had been dying lately, one by one, so it was all very well to be praised for her vitality and intensity, but …, anyway Hilary felt it degrading even to consider the critics. “Old fool, they are your own demons,” she adjured herself, “the never-conquered demons with whom you carry on the struggle for survival against laziness, depression, guilt, and fatigue.” She had hit on the only possible answer to the question. It was completely fruitless to quarrel with the world, whereas the quarrel with oneself was occasionally fruitful, and always, she had to admit, interesting. What sort of questions were those interviewers going to ask? It would be exhilarating to be set what Hilary called “real” questions … in fact she had agreed to this visitation because it appeared to be a challenge. Hopefully, she might be forced to confront certain things in her own life and in her work that seemed unresolved, and she was just about to consider these prickly matters when she heard a familiar whistle under the window.
    “Drat the boy! What does he want?”
    She nearly tipped the whole tray over getting out of bed, and of course Sirenica jumped down at once in a huff. Hilary threw an old Japanese kimono over her shoulders and went to the window, peering down into the strong sun-light. The boy teetered there on the stone wall, head bent, his whole figure betraying unease. She could guess, though she could not see it, that the face under the shock of tow hair, was frowning.
    “What is it?” Hilary shouted. “It’s the day, you know. You might have let me have my breakfast in peace!”
    “What day?”
    “The day the interviewers are coming!”
    “That’s not till four.” Now he looked straight up, and she saw something in that face she thought she knew by heart, something she had never seen before.
    “Up all night, I suppose.” What was it? She asked herself, trying to probe the sullen shadowed eyes looking up at her.
    “I’ve got to see you, Hilary. Just a half hour!”
    “Oh all right, come back in an hour or so. Give me time to pull myself together.”
    He was gone before she closed the window, off and away, while Hilary stood there wondering what sort of night he had spent? Curiously enough she sensed some affinity with her own night of troubled dreams after her long vigil raking up the past—the effect, at least, was the same, for Mar looked exactly as she felt, dissipated, ruffled, a seabird who has been battered by wind, whose wings are stuck with flotsam and jetsam, oil, tar, God knows what.
    “Trapped by life,” Hilary muttered. She almost fell on one of the cardboard boxes. Oh dear, the morning which had begun rather well, all things considered, was already disintegrating into confusion. Back in bed, she leaned her head against the pillows so she could look at the appeasing ocean and forget all that stuff on the floor …, but she could not really rest. She must hurry up if she was to be ready for Mar. Trapped by life. There was, even at seventy, no escape. One did one’s work against a steady barrage of demands, of people … and the garden tool (It was high time she thought about sowing seeds.) It was all very well to insist that art was art and had no sex, but the fact was that the days of men were not in the same way fragmented, atomized by indefinite small tasks. There was such a thing as woman’s work and it consisted chiefly, Hilary sometimes thought, in being able to stand constant interruption and keep your temper. Each single day she fought a war to get to her desk before her little bundle of energy had been dissipated, to push aside or cut through an intricate web of slight threads pulling her in a thousand directions—that unanswered letter, that telephone call, or Mar. It really was not fair of Mar to come this morning with his load of intensity, his