That came of reading too much Byron.
How was it that patterns of sound had power to haunt and excite you? Like the "potnia, potnia nux" that she found in the discarded Longfellow, stuck before his "Voices of the Night."
Potnia, potnia nux, hypnodoteira ton polyponon broton, erebothen ithi, mole, mole katapteros ton Agamemnonion epi domon.
She wished she knew Greek; the patterns the sounds made were so hard and still.
And there were bits of patterns, snapt off, throbbing wounds of sound that couldn't heal. Lines out of Mark's Homer.
Mark's Greek books had been taken from her five years ago, when Rodney went to Chelmsted. And they had come back with Rodney this Easter. They stood on the shelf in Mark's bedroom, above his writing-table.
One day she found her mother there, dusting and arranging the books.
Besides the little shabby Oxford Homers there were an Aeschylus, a
Sophocles, two volumes of Aristophanes, clean and new, three volumes of
Euripides and a Greek Testament. On the table a well-preserved Greek
Anthology, bound in green, with the owner's name, J.C. Ponsonby, stamped
on it in gilt letters. She remembered Jimmy giving it to Mark.
She took the Iliad from its place and turned over the torn, discoloured pages.
Her mother looked up, annoyed and uneasy, like a child disturbed in the possession of its toys.
"Mark's books are to be kept where Mark put them," she said.