BY PATRICK WHITE

Fiction

Happy Valley
The Living And The Dead
The Aunt’s Story
The Tree Of Man
Voss
Riders In The Chariot
The Burnt Ones
The Solid Mandala
The Vivisector
The Eye Of The Storm
The Cockatoos
A Fringe Of Leaves
The Twyborn Affair
Three Uneasy Pieces
Memoirs Of Many In One

(Editor)

Autobiography

Flaws In The Glass

Je te mets sous la garde du plaisir et de la douleur; l’un et l’autre veilleront à tes pensées, à tes actions; engendreront tes passions, exciteront tes aversions, tes amitiés, tes tendresses, tes fureurs; allumeront tes désirs, tes craintes, tes espérances; te dévoileront des vérités, te plongeront dans des erreurs; et après t’avoir fait enfanter mille systèmes absurdes et différents de morale et de législation, te découvriront un jour les principes simples, au développement desquels sont attachés l’ordre et le bonheur du monde moral.

HELVÉTIUS

Part One

1

Outside the station, people settled down again to being emotionally commonplace. There was very little to distinguish the individual feature in the flow of faces. Certainly it was night, but even where a wave of neon washed across the human element, it uncovered no particular secret, just the uniform white, square or oblong, tinged for a moment with the feverish tones of red or violet. In the same way his ears took sound, but selected no predominant note out of the confused stream, taxis unsticking their tyres from the wet surface of the street, the rumbling of the buses. All this was so much prevalent, and yet irrelevant sound. Like the drifting faces, a dim, surrounding presence, almost dependent on his train of thought for its existence there in the darkness. It was better like this, he felt, escaped only a couple of minutes from the too intimate glimpses, the emotional sharps of the railway platform. It was better to swim in the confused sea that was anybody’s London. The personal was eclipsed by Eden’s face that last moment on the strip of receding train.

Elyot Standish bumped his way through the crowd outside Victoria. The light that touched him, the street lights that have no respect for the personal existence, shaved his face down to the bones, left it with the expression of the street faces. The sockets of his eyes were dark. Two empty saucers in the bone. He remembered the face of the German woman, moments earlier on the platform, resting on her husband’s shoulder in a last unseeing embrace. Or rather, you were drawn beyond the eyes of the little German Jewess into a region where the present dissolved, its forms and purpose, became a shapeless, directionless well of fear.

I expect Julia will have gone, Eden said hurriedly.

He heard the quick gathering of her voice, the determined planting of her feet on the platform as she drew him with her into the world of trivial incident, and the things you talked about before the train moved out.

But I told her to leave some bread and cheese, she said. You’ll find it in the kitchen. Some bread and cheese.