Possession Read Online Free Page B

acquaintance, I usually take them lying down. I don’t know whether this supineness is good or bad for our children; in the hopes that it is good, we call it freedom, and extol the closer, more genuine relationships that such rudeness—free speech to us—is supposed to engender within the family. I’m not sure that it does, really. Personally, I am much more reluctant to confide my real feelings to Janice than I would be if she were conditioned to listening politely; and much less willing to sympathise with hers than I would be if she felt constrained to put them in some non-hurtful form. But there it is. We have sold our authority for this thing called freedom, and we do not know, yet, whether it is a good buy, or even whether the goods are to be delivered at all.
    Janice did not interrupt any more, and my remaining few phone calls, all evoking enthusiastic and uncritical congratulations , quite restored my morale. By the end of the evening, my only anxiety stemmed from the realisation that I seemed to have a party on my hands that was going to last from Friday evening till Sunday afternoon, non-stop. You see, without really thinking about it, I had ended each of my phone calls with the words: “And you must come at the weekend and meet him,” and almost everyone, motivated by a natural enough mixture of goodwill and inquisitive glee, had accepted with alacrity. Thus plans about meals, and drinks, and camp beds for the ones who wouldn’t go away, began to supersede all else in my mind; and it wasn’t until the Friday evening, when a motley collection of ill-assorted guests were already beginning to assemble in our frontroom, that I found myself really getting cold feet about it all. In fifteen minutes, or thereabouts, Sarah would be leading her Mervyn in at the door. Under the eyes of all these people I would have to react, or refrain from reacting, to whatever impression he first made on me. Nervous as any leading lady on a first night, I took a hurried, surreptitious peep at my assembled audience. Peggy was there, of course; dear, inquisitive Peggy, always ready to enjoy a crisis and to give moral support as well. Just behind her cowered Harold, her little, distinguished scientist husband, who had only come, I felt sure, because he was frightened of being left at home with his teenage children without Peggy to protect him. The poor man never knew how much noise Pat and Adrian should be allowed to make, how many long-haired strangers should be allowed to pour into the kitchen, and how much food they should be allowed to fall upon and devour. As a scientist, he had naturally tried to study Peggy’s system, but had found it baffling, and devoid of rules in the scientific sense. Sometimes she shouted at the gang; sometimes she shrugged her shoulders and let things rip; the amazing thing was that she always seemed to know which to do. Harold recognised expertise when he saw it; in this highly specialised field of Pat-and-Adrian-control he accepted Peggy as the expert and himself as a non-starter, and concentrated on personal survival in the form of strategic withdrawal; even when withdrawal involved—as now—going to some ghastly party given by the people next door.
    I sympathised with the poor man, but all the same I was glad he had come; his reluctant presence at least constituted no threat to my morale. Nor did that of Trevor, an ex-boy-friend of Sarah’s who, now that he had left university, seemed to spend his days wearily shifting a grand piano from one set of diminutive lodgings to another. He was always to be found drifting about on the fringes of some social gathering or other trying to scrape acquaintance with someone who owned a van, or had two or three muscular unemployed friends, and I guessed that he was here tonight less to yearnover his lost Sarah than to see if her new boy-friend was of tough enough physique and feeble enough moral courage to be enlisted in his reluctant team. The Hardwicks were all