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60 pages

English

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Prunella, wife of local stockbroker Christopher Hetherington, was at a crossroads in her life. Her husband and their two children had become to her like the fixtures and fittings in their home - Alison and Robert no longer depended on her as they had done when they were younger, and Christopher was embedded in routine. She was feeling unappreciated and decided she was not fulfilling her potential - gardening and shopping was not satisfying her, surely there must be more than this to life?Would an affair fill the void? While pruning the rhododendrons, Prunella wondered how she could seduce a likely candidate - possibly one of Christopher's partners in the stockbroking firm, Latham, Blakeshaw and Smithers. Perhaps she should work part-time in the office to attain her goal?Meanwhile, is Christopher also feeling that their marriage has become run of the mill? After all, you know what they say - variety is the spice of life!

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Publié par	Andrews UK
Date de parution	13 août 2019
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780722349670
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0374€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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SUNRISE AND SUNSET
Keith Barnes
ARTHUR H. STOCKWELL LTD
Torrs Park, Ilfracombe, Devon, EX34 8BA
Established 1898
www.ahstockwell.co.uk

Copyright © 2019 Keith Barnes
First edition published in Great Britain, 1980
This edition published in Great Britain, 2019
Keith Barnes asserts the right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the copyright holder.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales, is purely coincidental.
Digital version converted and distributed by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com

CHAPTER ONE
Prunella thought how apt to be in the garden with a name like hers. Except instead of cutting roses she was loosening the ground underneath the rhododendron bushes with a hoe, intent on extracting weeds, but there were none there. She had in fact decided to do the garden after lunch when assailed by a fit of melancholy, and found unwanted, troublesome and heavy ideas forming. Ideas which she found irreconcilable with the ornate domestic and social routine of her life. She was thirty, unravaged by passion of any kind, and it would be at least another twenty years before the opposite sex would no longer imagine her as a suitable bed mate. So she herself was not a rose which had had its spring and summer, and was waiting for the first October frost. It was in fact the case that no great event was about to shatter her way of life.
Even in small things she received the admiration of everybody who went to the Rotary Club. People felt compelled to congratulate her on the house and garden. Not that she had designed either, but like everyone else she had had a choice, and had chosen perfectly. The rhododendron bushes of mauve and white grew in two ovals cut in the quarter acre lawn, and against a brick wall sweet peas and Michaelmas daisies were only two flowers in a profusion of Victorian hapless horticulture. She had merely insisted when acquiring the house that everything remained as it was. She paid a gardener whose two visits a week ensured that nothing was altered. Built between the two world wars the house had four bedrooms and was perfectly conventional, L-shaped, but not in one respect. The slates were jagged and appeared to be of dissimilar thickness, and many toned, and it was this natural rustic quality which indicated taste.
Inside the house the furniture was neither antique nor modern. Many thought that as they were well-off – her husband had inherited and made money – the items of furniture were made to her specification. They had, however, been acquired already made for little or nothing, and they were the work of craftsmen who had lingered on into the nineteen twenties, and before they disappeared had brought lightness and sparing elegance to heavy Victorian furniture. The framed pictures she had bought for a few shillings each appealed because, although mass-produced, had endeavoured to retain the personal touch of old masters. They represented a world in transition. For example, a stately forecourt which captured the spirit of the times after the uncertainty following the Great War. Also obelisks and love bowers not in an English country park but somewhere else, the location being as far as could be ascertained in Arcadia or somewhere in ancient Greece. Prunella had no desire to go and see the Parthenon. It was simply the charm of the objects which appealed to her. She did not associate them with the last period of craftsmanship, certainly not with Ancient Greece or Aldous Huxley. She liked them as she liked her wedding and engagement rings. One does not repeatedly buy engagement rings, and the garden and the house had the same transitory significance. If a picture broke, or a piece of furniture had woodworm, she would replace them, in the same way as when the fire began to burn low she would either put on some more coal or a log, or turn on the central heating.
The trouble was that her husband and her two children had become to her like the fixtures and fittings. As with these she felt as if she had done what she could and her attention was a matter of convention. Both children, a boy and girl, had been born before she was twenty, and she considered they were now on lines along which, under their own power, they would inexorably move until they married. Really, when she had left them at their first play group she had to all intents and purposes abandoned them: group projects at school, discotheques now, and in time the Young Conservatives or the Young Socialists. As for university, this lay in a nether world because responsibility for them had long disappeared. Her husband as an adult had long ceased to demand any attention. These circumstances, if not typical, were not uncommon. What was uncommon about Prunella, was doing what she did with unintentional style; with elan but with sufficiently unique attitude to have outstanding results, and she would not be choosing fixtures and fittings but getting involved with other people.
So in this vacuum she poked about beneath the rhododendron bushes forgetting all about the non-existent weeds. Reality can be discerned in Turner’s paintings; the boats’ and ships’ forms are not matters for conjecture: at the same time who knows what the inchoate colours which do not paint an actual object indicate. So the objects in Prunella’s life were gradually disintegrating and disappearing. She did not go into a trauma, as the reality of life since she had married, her husband, children, house and garden, were swept away like cobwebs. The result was much more prosaic. New shapes, at first indistinct, but after two hours of hoeing assumed definite and precise forms.
That she did not go into a trance, ululate, or become conspicuous in any other way while she hoed does not detract from the emotion of the situation. Her previous mode of life had disappeared, and what may happen subsequently may just assume a superficial difference with the past. She thought about her sexual life, married at seventeen, she thought of groping orgasm and particularly she thought about her present feeling which had moved to one of feeling nothing. Certain meals had to be cooked, and her husband expected her to get into bed naked twice a week. Shortly after getting married he had arrived home after a rugby match boisterous, drunk and singing a song about ‘Sally the only girl at the rally’. The chic action to match Sally was to promptly discard her nightdress, and she had been doing so ever since, and now twice weekly.
“I must do something,” she said to herself.
By now the ice-cream van which coincided with the children’s arrival from school, had been playing its one-line tune.
It was gone half past four and Alison and Robert had passed their mother shouting casually, “Has the gardener left?” It was only after they had entered the house to find no tea ready, and were tugging at their mother’s dress that she was shaken out of her reverie. They all went into the house. It was important to the children that the routine when they came home went like clockwork, because by six o’clock when their father Christopher arrived, tea had been eaten and all homework done. No one in the household considered homework seriously for it was assumed that by paying school fees a kind of exemption from the rat race was gained. Success was assured. With a little hustle and bustle tea had been consumed and homework finished just before six, when the financial report on the radio was switched on. Christopher was a stockbroker in the provinces and always expected his wife to give him the closing figures of the Financial Times Index.
“Hello darling. What was the close?” was the usual greeting, repeated today as Christopher came in.
She told him, and he normally never made any comment. She had concluded that the only reason he asked was to assure himself that he was taking life seriously. It might be thought he wasn’t a very good stockbroker; money had never bothered them. He had plenty and she had plenty. The only indication of what he thought about finance she had heard from a reply he had given when advice was sought at a party: “Fixed assets, Henry, and a good spread over the rest.” She always remembered this, because in matters in which she was not basically interested she liked generalities, conclusions. She was atoise about such matters, but never remembered clichés. She was tolerant of clichés, for three quarters of the people with whom they mixed spoke nothing else. Believing that familiarity does not breed contempt she had a natural tolerance for the artless, humdrum, unspectacular, and those who assiduously read The Times , Telegraph and Manchester Guardian during the day in order to be able to say something in the evening. Christopher encouraged this disinterest she had by arranging his life as orderly as possible. Tonight, for example, they were going to a dinner party for eight, and he required no tea as he had a snack at the office.
That she was a beautiful woman some might think made it unnecessary for her to read the quality papers. Beautiful women, though, make beautiful portraits, but their beauty is no substitute for conversation. Conversation, no matter how banal, is required. Indeed, Prunella’s flaxen hair, lightest of brown eyes and skin of white marble drew attention, and some remarks were necessary. Her conversation turned out to be far from banal, and it was completely natural, indiscriminately seeking the peculiar, extraordinary and exquisite in a subject. She was like a magpie collecting trinkets hardly knowing what they were. Prac