My heart and my flesh

by Elizabeth Madox Roberts

“Kiss your father good-night,” he said.

“I don’t want to.” He had not made such a demand for years.

“I want to kiss a pretty girl before I go to bed and by God you’re a pretty one. Kiss me good-night.”

“I don’t want to,” she was saying. He had already kissed her many times and was trying to force her to return the expression. She pulled herself from his arms and went quickly to her room, hearing his step recede down the hallway. She locked her door and turned to the cluttered room, which she set in order. She prepared for bed quickly, for the room was cold. She felt liberated, inwardly cool, free to love and hate. Between her grandfather and herself there was some relation, she resolved. There was some beauty in his putrefaction, some flower in his decay. She was freed to hate Horace Bell. His touch on her arms and on her breast had been obscene. Somewhere there was a soul within her, within her grandfather likewise, she thought. She had identified it with a swift moment of concentrated loathing, cut it free with hate. Now there would be to describe it, to outline it, to study it, to see it. The music must come out of it. She lay in her bed, hard with determination and cool with the end of emotion.

In the day that followed she gave herself to her work without interruption. The teacher had set a difficult task and the time for the lesson was near at hand. She took a respite in the difficulties that lay before her fingers.

She saw that Anthony was better now, his voice stronger in speech, his will stronger. “Siver, send that barber fellow up here. I must be trimmed,” he had called out. He sat beside the fire with a book which he thought that he read. She would not think in detail of the facts disclosed to her by the letters, holding her mind steadily apart from that knowledge. No one but the music teacher reached her inner immunity. Their duos for violin and piano, for two violins, became two remote minds conversing as abstraction was laid over against abstraction, theme against theme, and once, for experiment, key against key.

She stood beside Anthony’s chair to talk of the music, to tell him the names of the masters whose works she played. She would play a Concerto, he asserted, his heart set to it. “They’ll hear you in the capitals,” he said. He was able to care for his body now; he had reached for his manhood, but she could not go back to her former place. “The Brahms Concerto, you’ll play it. That’s what I want. I heard it in Paris. It was the second time I went there.” Standing thus beside him her identifying mind went swiftly to the matter on which she would not dwell, sped over it, naming it with a wordless withdrawal. “It may take four years, six maybe, study and practice, but that’s my wish. You’ll play the Concerto. You’ll go to the metropolis to study.” She kissed his cheek, her naming mind on the matter that gave her pain and fear. Then, faltering, she told him of what she had learned from the papers. He burst into a torrent of anger, oaths choking back his words.

“Never let me hear you mention it. Not whilst I live. The worst piece of impudence that ever I saw in life. Enough virtue in a Bell, in a Montford, to carry along a little excess weight. Never let me hear a sign of this again. Get about your business.”