Song at Twilight Read Online Free Page A

and his head up and sang with tremendous gusto.
    After a while, perhaps during the second term of Timothy's first year, I noticed that he was often to be seen about with another boy. A fairly uninteresting looking child with the kind of face which is easily forgotten. But then Timothy, too, had a nondescript face. I was glad to think that the boy had made a friend and supposed that he had at last settled down and might even be quite happy at school. I could never quite explain why my interest in him remained so acute. Perhaps it was just because I felt so sorry for him when I saw him arrive on that first day.
    *
    I had been writing all morning and was quite engrossed with what I was doing when the telephone rang and I was surprised to discover that it was already after half past one. Gloomy Patricia was on the telephone inviting me to lunch on Sunday. Gloomy Patricia often asks me to lunch on Sunday. It is a day on which she feels that the solitary feel particularly lonely – and perhaps she is right. It is certainly kind of her to give me so much thought but I rather wish that she could find a more tactful way of phrasing her invitation.
    "I always think it must be dreadful to have no family on a Sunday," she began with this time. "No one to cook a joint for ."
    Leo, she said, would be back for the week-end, so it would be a real family party.
    Leo, I have noticed, very rarely comes home for the week-end and I agreed, quite sincerely, that it would be a pleasure to see him.
    "I'm not sure that Victor feels the same way," said gloomy Patricia. "Leo and Victor never seem to see eye to eye…" her voice trailed away. "I think there may be something wrong with Leo's attitude to work," she added thoughtfully.
    It seemed to me that there wasn't much wrong with Leo's attitude to work, so much as with Victor's attitude to life. Leo was an actor by profession. He had spent three years at L.A.M.D.A. after leaving school and, like most people in his line of business, he was generally out of work. That hardly seemed to me to be his fault. While unemployed as an actor, he frequently took odd jobs in pubs or on building sites. In my opinion he had rather a healthy attitude to work, but there was no point in discussing the matter with Patricia, and even less so with Victor who abhorred the fact that his son had gone on the stage. He was permanently terrified lest Leo, a handsome young man with a mane of golden hair, be seduced by some predatory homosexual director. Anyway, I rather think that it never, ever crossed Victor’s mind that his son's taste did not perhaps draw him towards that conventional marriage which he, Victor, longed for.
    Schoolmistresses, especially elderly unmarried ones, are notoriously narrow-minded people, easily shockable and incapable of understanding the modem world, and yet, I am permanently dismayed by the blindness and lack of understanding displayed by Patricia, not to mention the ludicrous narrow-mindedness of Victor. I cannot imagine what would happen if anyone ever dared so much as to hint to my brother that Leo's sexual leanings were not absolutely conventional and yet I would have thought that it was quite obvious that Leo is not what used to be called the 'marrying kind'. Neither do I think that Patricia has woken up to reality as far as her son is concerned.
    I thanked her for asking me to lunch and put down the telephone with a feeling of relief that Leo would in fact be there because it would make a change and enliven the atmosphere. Besides, despite everything, I am fond of my nephew and have not seen him for a while. Laurel, his sister, I have my doubts about.
    Hardly had I put down the telephone when Pansy started yapping to be let out, so I put her in the garden thinking as I did so that I would give myself some bread and cheese and an apple perhaps before taking her for a little walk. She is too old now to go far. Then I might return for a lie down. I usually like to lie down for a while in the