Tunstall - The Republic of the Husband

1. I
   The Children of First Marriages
2. II
   The Republic of the Husband
3. III
   Land- and Seascapes

Her house is tall and thin like a dolls house. Pictures are filling in the walls, but where the paint shows through in a chink it is the authentic dull pink of oxblood and lime. We take tea in the garden which is like a well with its high walls, and deep shade and the underwater grey-green of the thyme lawn; and sitting still like a still ancient cloistered thing at the bottom of a well she remembers (she must remember) a long trip to the only part of Canada where it never snows, weeks and weeks of sky and sea and sickness like snow-sickness. Ever after a drawing-in, this square of London sky, and the cypress leaning over.

In the neighbouring field, heifers wept for their calves. A bluebell-wood harboured logs in the guise of crocodiles, foul mud that sucked in childrens boots, and once free of the wood, where to go but the arid chalk heath winding unrelentingly on and up? Pity the Romans their blue knees, their fluttering tunics, the flat, grey light. A childs cradle in torn white brocade decorated the corner of the music room. At Easter, the land was blessed. The vicars name was Canon Dagger.

All through lunch the sunlight screeched off Pedros canines igniting the cutlery, the pine-cladding, the tomato-red kitchen cabinets. * While my godfather swore blind the Staffordshire pottery spaniel seventeenth-century, royalist, red-haired belonged to him, I want that fucking dog, my mother regal, carolean gave no ground, Darling, you are dreadful. My father slunk about, not up to the game, rightly punished. * By a curious and intricate choreography my father made his way to my bedroom, mapped out a constellation in phosphorescent stars, retreated, reversing all the steps, leaning close in to the dado, avoiding the creaky stair, was far away when the lights went down, the applause began.

It was not wrong of her to think that all men would clamour at her door. But this was easeful beauty of the dark almond eye, the perfect bone and brow. If only she had learned envy and fight, struggle and plot, like those who were not noble, but better equipped.