Song at Twilight by Teresa Waugh Page A

most peculiar were I to confide in them my worries concerning Timothy. After all, what exactly were those worries? What precisely was the problem?
    So I spent the first week-end of term closeted in my house with Pansy. She sat on my knee and I entrusted my anxieties to her whilst she, as is the custom with Pekineses, alternately snored and allowed me to feed her with chocolate drops.
    As I stroked Pansy's head and fed her yet another chocolate drop, the thought occurred to me that I was being completely idiotic. Here I was, a middle-aged professional woman living alone with a Pekinese in whom I had lately, although never before, taken to confiding.
    And of what stuff were these confidences? Anyone reading my mind might have supposed that I was in love with Timothy. I blushed as I dared so much as to formulate the thought to myself. In my embarrassment I stood up and paced nervously around the room.
    The very idea was, of course, utterly absurd. It is quite inconceivable that a woman in her mid-fifties, as I was then, should fall in love with a mere child. The fact that I had even allowed the denial of such a supposition to flit through my mind was deeply upsetting and acutely uncomfortable.
    There are times in one's life when one is more than usually glad that no one, not even one's dog, can read one's thoughts. This was just such a moment.
    Of course I have, in my lifetime, fallen in love other than with the fictional characters I have mentioned. When I was only about thirteen or fourteen I developed a tremendous passion for a handsome older cousin who must have regarded me as a mere child and who was later killed in the war. Then at university I fell very much in love with one of our lecturers, and there have naturally been other moments when my heart has missed a beat, but, as I have already explained, love, or at least the expression of it, is something which, on the whole, has passed me by.
    I know perfectly well that I was not 'in love' with Timothy. How could I have been?
    And yet from this time onwards I was beleaguered by people who supposed that I was. Or, if they did not suppose it, they thought it amusing to pretend that they did and to make distasteful jokes at my expense on the subject.
    By the end of my solitary week-end with only Pansy for company, and in fact before I had been greeted by the full horror of public opinion, I had decided that I must pull myself together, as it were, stop being so negative, and invite Timothy to tea. When he came, as he surely would, I could casually ask him about Leo, and even mention the fact that I had seen Leo from the language laboratory window on that first evening of term.
    On Monday morning I happened to come across Timothy in the corridor. I stopped to talk to him and, as I did so, was infuriated to hear a vulgar wolf whistle coming from a passing lout. 'Lout' is the only word I can think of suitably to describe such a boy. The lout's companion, another uncouth creature, sniggered and the two of them walked on.
    I, of course, pretended to have noticed nothing.
    Timothy, whom I had somehow expected to be embarrassed when confronted by me, smiled a disarming smile and promised to come and see me that very afternoon.
    When he arrived I was not altogether surprised to find him more than usually despondent. He sat limply on the sofa.
    The holidays, he said, hadn't been bad. Leo had been jolly kind to him, but, and he looked down at his long legs stretched out in front of him and shuffled his feet awkwardly, he hated being back at school.
    I could never really get to the bottom of why Timothy was so unhappy at school. He should, in my opinion, have overcome his initial shyness and begun to make friends.
    He claimed that he could never fit in. Somehow – and he seemed to have an amazingly mature understanding of the situation – he had got off to a bad start. People had begun by being vile to him, perhaps because he had arrived late his first term, or perhaps just because