Comyns Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead

1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-1-911547-85-3
Verlag: Daunt Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 208 Seiten

'Quite simply, Comyns writes like no one else.' - Maggie O'Farrell, author of Hamnet That evening the baker's wife ran down the village street in a tattered pink nightgown. She screamed as she ran. Strange things are afoot in the English village where the Willoweed family live. First, the river floods in June. The family wakes to find ducks sailing around the drawing room and dead peacocks bobbing in the garden. But the flood is only the beginning of their troubles. All of a sudden the miller goes mad and drowns himself. Then the butcher slits his throat. A peculiar illness is spreading through the town and picking off its victims one by one. From the Willoweed cottage, sisters Emma and Hattie watch the tragedy unfold. They have grown up in the village, cared for by their meek father and bullied by their grandmother with her enormous ear trumpet. The wild and mysterious countryside is the only world they have ever known. But as the virus spreads and hysteria grips everyone around them, they realise their lives are about to change forever. Originally published in 1954, Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead is a twisted pandemic parable and a tragicomic gem.

Barbara Comyns was born in England in 1909. She and her siblings were brought up by governesses, and allowed to run wild. She wrote eleven books including Sisters by a River, Our Spoons Came from Woolworths, The Vet's Daughter and A Touch of Mistletoe. To support her family, she worked a variety of jobs over the course of her life, including dealing in antiques and vintage cars, renovating apartments, and breeding poodles. She was an accomplished painter, and exhibited with The London Group. She died in 1992.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Comyns, Barbara

Leseproben

CHAPTER II

EBIN WILLOWEED walked down the village street with his tripping walk. He unsuccessfully tried to get into conversation with several passers-by, but they were hurrying home to their twelve o’clock dinner. The labourers were carrying forks over their shoulders. Each prong had a large potato stuck on it. In theory this was for safety, but actually they achieved about eight potatoes a day by this ruse. Ebin went a little way over the bridge, which was built of stones from the Alcester Monastery by the Normans. The stones had been worn away in several places by generations of butchers sharpening their knives on them.

He stood looking down at the river, which had returned to its banks but was flowing very fast and full. In some way the river flowing with such purpose and determination depressed Willoweed. He felt humiliated and a failure in everything he undertook; the thought of all those half-completed, mouse-nibbled manuscripts in his room saddened him even more. He bit his lower lip and gave the bridge a kick, then turned away towards Dr Hatt’s house. Dr Hatt was an old family friend, and regarded by the villagers as a miracle man since he had brought Hattie into the world after her mother’s death. She had been named after him.

Willoweed walked up the steep flight of steps that led to the doctor’s house and rang the highly polished brass bell with the word ‘Visitors’ engraved on it. An elderly servant with a twisted back came to the door and asked him into the cool, flagstoned hall while she hobbled off to find Dr Hatt. Francis Hatt was a rather melancholy-looking man until he smiled; then his whole face lit up in a delightful way and people talking to him often found themselves saying all manner of wild things to try to bring this smile back to his grave face. This morning he was distressed by his wife’s sudden illness and felt he could hardly bear Ebin Willoweed’s company. Nevertheless he asked his servant to bring some sherry, and decided to give half an hour to his old, but rather trying friend.

It was over ten years ago that Ebin had returned to his mother’s house bringing with him his beautiful young wife and Emma, then a child of seven. The Daily Courier, which employed him as a gossip writer, had dismissed him because his carelessness had resulted in a libel action which had cost them a considerable amount of money. Jenny Willoweed was expecting a baby at that time, and Dr Hatt attended her at her very difficult confinement. After Dennis’s birth he warned her that it might kill her to have another child. Eighteen months later she died giving birth to Hattie. She died some minutes before the child was born, but Francis Hatt had saved the child’s life. In the years that followed Ebin Willoweed had turned to the doctor for friendship and used his house as a place of refuge from his mother. Francis Hatt had been shocked by the deterioration that had occurred in him; but, although he often found him tiresome, he had devoted a lot of his time to him at first in the hope of providing some stimulus and later from pity.

Ebin Willoweed had hoped to be asked to stay for lunch; but no invitation materialised. He felt discouraged by the doctor’s distracted manner and suddenly took his departure, still feeling depressed in spite of the sherry.

When he reached home he had a solitary lunch. The family had already eaten theirs. He caught sight of his mother ascending the stairs, still carrying the wicker carpet beater and half-heartedly bashing a fly with it. She looked over the banisters and shouted, ‘You’re late, and your hair wants cutting,’ then continued her climb to her bedroom for her afternoon sleep.

As soon as she was enclosed in her peppermint-smelling room a drowsy peacefulness descended on the house. The maids went up the back stairs to the bedroom they shared, and took off the striped print frocks they wore in the morning. Eunice lay on their bed dressed only in a large white chemise, while Norah washed in a cracked china bowl. She held up her hair with one hand, and with the other worked away with a soapy flannel. The large mole on her chest showed above her camisole. When she had finished her toilet she rinsed the bowl and wiped it carefully with a cloth; but Eunice, when it was her turn to wash, left the basin filled with dark, scummy water. As they dressed in their black afternoon frocks they quarrelled over this. Then Norah lent her sister her silver brooch with ‘Amelia’, their dead mother’s name, engraved on it, and they were happy again and sat in the window with their arms around each other, looking down on the village street.

In the garden Old Ives was tying up the flowers that had been damaged by the flood. While he worked he talked to his ducks, who were waddling about hopefully, as it was almost time for the red bucket to be filled with sharps and potato peelings. Emma dawdled up to him and said:

‘Don’t you think, Ives, we should send a wreath to Grumpy Nan’s funeral? It’s tomorrow, and people seem to be making a great fuss about it.’

‘Of course they are making a fuss, her being drowned and all. It’s a long time since we had a drowning by flood; that’s an important event in this village. And don’t you worry about the wreath neither. I was just telling my ducks as you came along about the pretty wreath I’m going to make this evening. White peonies it will be made of, miss, and little green grapes. There won’t be another to touch it, will there, my dears?’ and he turned to the ducks who agreed with him in chorus.

‘Thank you, Ives,’ she said, ‘no one makes wreaths like you,’ and she left him still talking to his white birds.

‘If ever I die,’ she thought, ‘I’d like a wreath of water lilies, only they’d go brown so soon.’

She came to a swing that hung from a pine tree near the river. Once when she had been swinging on it she had disturbed a bumblebee from above, and it came buzzing out from the pines and was as large as a lemon; but when she told people about this they wouldn’t believe her and said it must have been a buzzing bird. She sat in the swing now in the hope of seeing this strange insect again. She swung for a few minutes; but no lemon-sized bee appeared. So she sat quite still dreamily gazing at the shining river between the pine trees.

She had pinned her hair in a large knot at the nape of her neck, and she felt very conscious of her altered appearance.

‘But no one will notice,’ she thought.

She looked down at her little feet in the clumsy shoes made by the village cobbler, and she felt like crying. Even Eunice wore pointed black shoes with high heels on her day out. Twice a year the cobbler, who was also the village bookmaker, came to the house by the river and measured the feet of anyone who needed new shoes; and a week or two later he came again with some clumsy pieces of leather heavily nailed together. It was the same when Emma or Hattie needed new clothes. Lolly Bennet would be summoned from the little house that you had to go down steps to reach the front door. She was the village old maid, and almost a dwarf. It was with great difficulty that she managed the great bales of cloth provided by Grandmother Willoweed, who stood over the poor little thing as she crawled about the floor with her mouth full of pins trying to cut dresses with the aid of paper patterns.

‘You will waste the material if you cut it like that, you little freak. Good God! Don’t you know how to make a gusset? If you let your hands shake like that you will cut the material to ribbons,’ and so it went on. The results of Lolly Bennet’s labours were lumpy and bunchy, and dipped at the back and cut across the shoulders. Grandmother Willoweed had not added to her own wardrobe for twenty-five years and she still wore a form of bustle.

As Emma sat swinging gently she felt overcome with a longing for beautiful clothes and an admirer or several admirers; overcome with a longing to travel, perhaps even in a private yacht. She imagined a white one gliding through impossibly blue water, and saw herself on deck wearing an evening gown with a train. And then there was the tango. How beautiful it would be to tango to exotic music, and perhaps go to something called a tango tea! Her thoughts were disturbed by the sound of shrill chirping and she remembered she had not fed the small chickens that had been bought to replace the ones that had been drowned …

She wandered towards the kitchen, and there was Norah sitting in the Windsor armchair, staring into space with unseeing eyes. On her lap was her best black straw hat, which she was absent-mindedly stabbing with a hatpin.

Norah had spent the afternoon in the damp cottage where Fig the gardener lived with his mother. The village people rightly called Mrs Fig a dirty little body. Her cottage was so filthy it was almost uninhabitable; but recently Norah had devoted her free afternoons to bringing some kind of order to the place. This afternoon, as she scrubbed floors and beat mats, Mrs Fig had sat huddled over the fire and talked in her soft dreamy voice. Occasionally a stray tear slipped from her protruding, misty blue eyes. Her only garment was a greasy old...