284
PAUL SMITH
everything is in full control," she said. "You know or think you do,
where it is you're going, and why, and what
it
is you'll see when
you get there. Then without as much as a by-your-Ieave, everything
you had all neatly tied up is gone and you're left staring at Jesus
only knows what. Only it's never at what you know or are used to,
or want, and right away you're stranded in a misery that was none
of your making. Or you think it wasn't. But that's only because
you haven't been aware of the changes taking place inside yourself.
So when something does happen, the old you is gone, and what's
left can't handle or cope with the event.
So
you feel bunched. Bet.
But we wouldn't feel either if we had been aware of the changes
going on in the first place, and in spite of them held something of
the old self in reserve. It's only when we forget and let go the thing
from which we draw our strength that we leave ourselves defenseless."
"That's when the hard knocks come. The ones that do the real
damage. And they come always from where we least expect them.
It was like that with me," Ellen Simms said and, pausing, looked
over in silence through the darkening room to the windows and the
coarse white lace curtains that had been pushed aside - to the cabinet
between the windows and the nativity scene; and from that she
looked to her bed in the corner, with its polar white fringed quilt
against the bare whitewashed wall, and over it and running the
length of it the four unpainted shelves she had put up herself to hold
her books. "Thirty years ago," she said suddenly: and now, sharp,
suspicious, watchful, imperious, and implacable,
she was a dealer
and 100ked the way she did in the street as she began the story we
had never heard before. The story of herself and Andy Prince.
"I was twenty-three," she said. "I had a hard-scrubbed face
and chopped hair. My mother was dead. Died when I was a child.
I lived in a lane like yours. Along with thirty-six other families.
There was a pump in the middle of the lane and behind it three
lavatories for one hundred and sixty people. We had rats in the
houses and strife that grew out of the waHs of them. I lived with
my father and his bothered widowed sister. She had teeth like cloves
and black hair she could sit on. But she wore it looped over ears
pierced for rings that dropped in heavy solid gold to her shoulders.
"She suffered from chronic indigestion and a voice that com–
plained. Often. And always about me to my father. In his bare feet
that man stood seven foot high. He wore boots. Heavy hobnailers.
