subject-matter of the previous paragraphs may be thought of as being the contents of a handwritten or typewritten text composed by some or another fictional personage in some or another upper room of a house of two or, perhaps, three storeys. Most fiction has never been published, and even a published piece of fiction may be only a small part of a far-reaching unpublished text and an even farther-reaching collection of notes and jottings. The three paragraphs above, and several that will shortly appear below, may be thought of as reporting some of what might once have formed part of some or another published work of fiction if only they had been written at the time. Or, the same paragraphs may be thought of as a report of fictional events likely to have involved certain personages in a certain published work of fiction but in fictional places never mentioned in the published text and during fictional hours or days never reported by the narrator.
The first of the dark-haired females had taken his eye during his eighth year. She, being one of his classmates, would have been of the same age. She had a strange-sounding surname that he had never before heard, and he knew only the sound of it until thirty years later when he met a man of the same name and understood that it was French. If the boy had read the name before he had first heard it, he could never have known how to pronounce it. (Of course, as soon as he had first heard her surname, he visualised a written version of it, as he did with all words heard for the first time, but he never saw anywhere but in his mind his unwieldy private word and he felt sure that he had got it wrongly.) Words, both written and sounded, mattered greatly to him, even in his childhood, and his not knowing, for as long as he was interested in the dark-haired girl, how her surname was spelled was very much a part of her attractiveness. She arrived at his school at the beginning of the year and was gone before the end of it. He has class photographs for some of his years at primary school but not for her year, and yet he recalls her clearly. He has no memory of any words spoken between them but he can easily call to mind her scrutinising him, usually from the middle distance. Her face would hardly attract him nowadays, but he was stirred whenever she turned it towards him and stared as though trying to get his measure. Surely she knew that she was his girlfriend, in the language of that time and place; even if they had never spoken, she had surely learned as much from his own staring. Perhaps he had sent a message through one of her girlfriends, but such messages were always answered, even if with insults, and he would hardly have forgotten any hint that he had once received of her feelings towards him. And now he recalls that he once followed her homewards in order to learn where she lived. He recalls not so much his walking, one hot afternoon (in February or March?), out of the gravel schoolyard by way of the gate that he had never before used and his following the dark-haired girl at a distance along a road that led in the opposite direction from his own neighbourhood, but his overhearing his mother telling the woman from two houses away what he had done and the two women then laughing together. This puzzles him more than any other of his memories: that he could have confided to his mother not only his having followed the dark-haired girl but even his being interested in her.
His mother herself was dark-haired, as were four of her six sisters. Three of those four had faintly olive skin. Once, as a young man, he had studied his mother’s family tree, hoping to learn the source of the dark colouring, but the surnames alone told him nothing; all were English, all of his mother’s eight great-grandparents having been born in either Devon or Cumberland. He supposed there might have been dark-haired descendants of the Celts still living in Devon in recent centuries or that a gipsy from the Lake District might have married into one of his ancestral families of small landholders and tradesmen. In this, as in many other matters, he preferred speculation to research.
His mother herself was dark-haired, as he seemed to have learned for the first time one cold morning during his fifth year and later to have forgotten until a certain cloudless afternoon with a cool wind blowing while he was sometimes writing at his desk and sometimes watching through his window the waving of a clump of treetops in the middle distance. (The reader will surely bring to mind some or another image formed earlier while he or she read references to distant wings, upper storeys, sunlight falling on window-panes, and the like.) On the cold morning mentioned, he and she were together at the kitchen stove, she cooking porridge or toasting bread and he trying to warm himself. His two siblings were surely nearby, but he remembers only himself and his mother. All through his life, he was able to call up numerous memories from his fifth and his fourth years and some even from his third year, but his memory of the morning at the stove is the earliest memory in which a visual image of his mother appears. He has earlier memories of words spoken by her or of things done by her and memories of her as an unseen presence, but the image of the dark-haired woman at the stove is his earliest visual memory of his mother.
The woman at the stove wore a dressing-gown tied with a cord at the waist. Throughout his life, he has taken scant notice of clothes or fabrics or furnishings, but he believes he can recall the exact colours of the dressing-gown – he would call them indigo and silver-grey – and the exact feel of its silky texture. The dressing-gown belonged not to his mother but to his father. He was a minor public servant who neither drank nor smoked, and he and his family might have lived in frugal comfort except that he bet heavily on racehorses. He had never operated a bank account but carried a roll of banknotes always with him. After a series of winning bets, he would treat his wife and children to crayfish, blocks of chocolate, and what were called in those days family bricks of ice-cream and would peel off several banknotes from his roll and would tell his wife to buy with them something for herself and the children. His winning bets, however, were fewer than his losing bets, and during some of his lean periods, so to call them, he would place credit bets with bookmakers. After an especially lean period, three years after the cold morning mentioned above, he escaped from his gambling debts by quietly resigning from his public-service position, giving the minimum required notice to his landlord, and fleeing with his wife and children from the northern provincial city where he had lived for several years to his native district far away to the south-west.
The dressing-gown was one of several costly-seeming items that his father had bought from the proceeds of winning bets in the years before he had married. (He had been a bachelor until his mid-thirties.) Other such items were a bespoke three-piece suit that would have cost the equivalent of ten times his weekly earnings before his marriage; several pairs of gold cuff-links; a gold watch that his widow would finally sell, thirty years after his death, for a sum equal to her yearly income from the pension for the aged; and, of course, the dressing-gown, which was described earlier as having a silky feel and may well have been partly or wholly of silk.
His mother would have been wearing the dressing-gown because she had no dressing-gown of her own. She had been married in her eighteenth year, after she had been working for several years on the small farm belonging to her mother and her stepfather, who could seldom afford to pay her any wage. He, however, the chief character of these paragraphs of fiction, had not surmised until later years who had been the true owner of the gown. On the cold morning beside the stove, he considered the blue and silver gown his mother’s property. She wore the gown often; his father never.
In his memories and in the connections between them, colour is always important. Nearly twenty years after the cold morning mentioned, he would try to write a poem to explain to himself why he had for long disliked the colour blue. While he was trying to write the poem, he supposed that the cause of his dislike was his never having been able during his first twenty years to fall in love with Mary, the mother of Jesus, even though he had felt continually obliged to do so. (Blue was traditionally associated with Mary, who was almost always depicted as wearing a blue robe or mantle.) He had never finished the poem, but before he had abandoned it he had recalled for perhaps the first time in twenty years, and in minute detail, the colours and the texture of the indigo and silver-grey dressing-gown and even the subtle interweaving of alternate strands of the two colours in each of the many approximate rectangles separating similarly shaped areas occupied by one or the other colour alone. He had recalled these details for the first time in many years in somewhat the same way that he would recall, many years later again and likewise for the first time in many years, and while he was at his desk in an upper room and preparing to write about certain dark-haired female persons, that his own mother had been dark-haired.
