Affinity by Sarah Waters Page A

but her nerves are shattered, she has found out a new place in a house at Maida Vale.
    Mother said she never heard such nonsense in her life.
    ‘Ghosts!’ she said to us. ‘To think of ghosts, in this house! To think of your poor father’s memory being sullied, like that, by a creature like Boyd.’
    Priscilla said she did think it rather queer that, if Pa’s ghost should walk anywhere, it should be in the tweeny’s attic. She said, ‘You sit very late, Margaret. Have you heard nothing?’
    I said that I had heard Boyd snoring; and that where I had thought her only sleeping she might, after all, have been snoring in fear . . .
    Mother said then, she was glad I found it comical. There was nothing comical about the task she had now, getting another girl and training her up!
    Then she sent for Boyd again, to bully her a little more.
    The rain having kept us all so close at home, the argument has dragged miserably on. This afternoon I could not bear it any longer and, despite the weather, I drove to Bloomsbury—I went to the reading-room at the British Museum. I called up Mayhew’s book on the prisons of London, and the writings on Newgate of Elizabeth Fry, and one or two volumes recommended to me by Mr Shillitoe. A man who stepped to help me carry them said, Why was it that the gentlest readers invariably ordered such brutes of books? He held the volumes up to read their spines, and smiled at them.
    It made me ache a little with the loss of Pa, to be there. The reading-room is very unchanged. I saw readers I last saw two years ago, still clutching the same limp folio of papers, still squinting over the same dull books, still fighting the same small, bitter battles with the same disobliging staff. The gentleman who sucks his beard; the gentleman who chuckles; the lady copying Chinese characters, who scowls when her neighbours murmur . . . They were all there still, in their old places beneath the dome—like flies, I thought, in a paperweight of amber.
    I wonder, did anyone remember me? Only one librarian gave any sign of it. ‘This is Mr George Prior’s daughter,’ he said to a younger attendant as I stood at his window. ‘Miss Prior and her father were readers here for several years—why, I seem to see the old gentleman now, asking after his books. Miss Prior was assistant to her father while he worked on his study of the Renaissance.’ The attendant said he had seen the work.
    The others, who do not know me, call me ‘madam’ now, I noticed, instead of ‘miss’. I have turned, in two years, from a girl into a spinster.
    There were many spinsters there to-day, I think—more, certainly, than I remember. Perhaps, however, it is the same with spinsters as with ghosts; and one has to be of their ranks in order to see them at all.
    I didn’t stay many hours there, but was restless—and, besides that, the rain made the light very poor. But I did not want to come home, to Mother and to Boyd. I took a cab to Garden Court, on the chance that the weather would have kept Helen there, alone. It had: she had had no visitors since yesterday, but was sitting making toast before the fire, feeding the crusts of it to Georgy. She said to him when I went in, ‘Here is your Aunt Margaret, look!’ and she held him to me, and he braced his legs against my stomach and kicked. I said, ‘Well, what great fat handsome ankles you have,’ and then, ‘What a great red crimson cheek.’ But Helen said his cheek was only crimson because of a new tooth, that hurt him. After a little time in my lap he began to cry, and then she passed him to his nurse, who took him away.
    I told her about Boyd and the ghosts; and then we talked of Pris and Arthur. Did she know they mean to honeymoon in Italy?—I think she had known it for longer than I, but would not admit to it. She said only, that anyone might go to Italy if they liked. She said, ‘Would you have everyone stop at the Alps, because you were meant to go to Italy once, and were kept