Format: Single
…I made a mighty serious business of my repairs and a glittering shop of my repair kit, spanners, pump, and the like, which I spread out orderly upon a rug. It was a trap to catch all childhood, for on such a day, I argued, the children would be not far off…I listened, but the wood was so full of the noises of summer … that I could not at first distinguish these from the tread of small cautious feet stealing across the dead leaves… |
This is from “They” in Traffics and Discoveries. In his wanderings by car across the county, the narrator has happened on a stately old house, lived in by a beautiful blind woman, with a garden full of the noises of children playing. A month or so later, he has gone that way again; he needs to repair his car, and is hoping to tempt the children to seek him out, by laying out his tools as if he were playing shop. What he does not yet know is that ‘They’ are the ghosts of dead children, and that among them is his own lost daughter. |
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