Possession Read Online Free

directed, and what the prize. But we all know, instantly and without any doubt, who is winning at any given moment, and we know how the points are allotted. When someone’s children go off youth-hostelling at an earlier age than the rest; when they put on a play all by themselves; when they read old-fashioned children’s books, or come top in Maths, or play games that cover them in mud and tear their jeans—all these are point-scoring phenomena for the mother concerned, though it would be hard indeed to say on what scale these very diverse activities can possibly be measured. But that doesn’t matter. We don’t need to know what the scale is; we merely know that it is, and we can assess our own and each other’s position on it with unerring accuracy. Thus I knew without any doubt that Sarah’s getting engaged at nineteen, before Pat, or Rosemary, or Linda, or any of them—I knew at once that this had pushed me almost to the top. At a single stroke it cancelled out entirely the fact that she hadn’t got into university, enjoyed watching television, and had never hitch-hiked across Europe with insufficient money.
    So I was very happy as I sat there dialling numbers, and hearing my triumph played back to me by so many various voices. Everyone was very kind and congratulatory, even Granny, who usually dislikes happenings of any kind. Onething leads to another, she says darkly: and after eighty-one years I suppose she ought to know. Still, on this occasion she declared herself well-pleased, and so did all my friends, with just that proper tinge of envy in their voices which is a congratulation in itself. Only once was a jarring note struck, and that, surprisingly enough, came from my old school friend, Cissie. I say surprisingly, because Cissie adores our family, she thinks we are perfect in every way and that everything that happens to us is marvellous. I have noticed that one’s unmarried contemporaries tend to go to extremes in this respect; either they develop an uncritical worship of family life, and believe that your existence is one of unimaginable fulfilment and success in the company of an ideal husband and perfect children, or else they grow an armour of censorious scorn towards the whole business; they watch you letting yourself go, they remember the career you might have had, and they wait complacently for your husband to leave you and for your children to become drug-addicts. Whichever category they belong to, these unmarried friends give one the slightly uneasy sense of performing before an audience; in the case of the admiring ones you are consumed by anxiety to prove them right; in the case of the censorious, to prove them wrong.
    Cissie, bless her, belongs to the first category, and in spite of the strain involved in living up to her vision of us, she is still a great asset. The girls dote on her—with her beautiful clothes, her exciting job, and her aura of jet-planes and up-to-the-minute sophistication, she has always been their favourite visitor, and her reverence for our humdrum household has been highly flattering. So it was all the more dismaying that it should be she, of all people, who should have said, with a note of shocked surprise in her voice: “Do you mean you haven’t even seen him, Clare? Then why are you sounding so pleased? I mean, how do you know you are going to like him?”
    “ Of course I shall like him—” I began: and it was only as I said the words that I realised how devastatingly true theywere. I knew then that I was already determined—utterly and blindly determined—to like Mervyn no matter what he was like. There was something terrifying about such a determination, arrived at with so little data, so little conscious deliberation. But there was no time to analyse it now, for Cissie was speaking again:
    “I mean, Clare, don’t think I’m not delighted for you—of course I shall be, if it’s all as nice as you say. It’s just that Sarah is such a lovely girl, I