At the farther end of our garden, behind the boxwood maze, there was a bower with
honeysuckle and other creeping plants overlooking the tennis court.
That evening I sat with Douglas on the swing-seat within the trellised shadows of
the arbour. Douglas had been singles champion at our village club.
Boy, my kid brother, knew perfectly well how I first met Douglas, from that
auspicious day I returned home from a match with a tennis ball I’d mistaken for my own.
Douglas had written his name on it in indelible ink: DE SHERRARD (the ‘E’ stood for Eric, I was to learn eventually, of course, but at first I’d been willing to believe the ‘de’ was the nobiliary particle, because Douglas was such a perfect gentleman). I have the ball still.
The fringes of our fingers were touching. I felt an electrical charge passing between us.
A crescent moon rocked gently in the cradle of a pine crest.auspicious day I returned home from a match with a tennis ball I’d mistaken for my own.
Douglas had written his name on it in indelible ink: DE SHERRARD (the ‘E’ stood for Eric, I was to learn eventually, of course, but at first I’d been willing to believe the ‘de’ was the nobiliary particle, because Douglas was such a perfect gentleman). I have the ball still.
The fringes of our fingers were touching. I felt an electrical charge passing between us.
Above us, in the twilight, hung yellow roses so brilliant that for a moment I’d almost mistaken them for lanterns. Beyond the rhododendrons, the chalk lines of the tennis court glowed in the dusk, and I glimpsed a pair of bats dipping low over the net.
I nestled on Douglas’s shoulder as he talked of warring Dayak tribesmen.
‘When drums speak out, laws hold their tongues,’ he said gravely, puffing on his pipe.
‘In a remote place of flies and midges men don’t need permission to smoke,’ he added thoughtfully in parenthesis, striking another match.
Suddenly I felt Douglas’s shoulders stiffen and he slowly reached down and I saw his hand close on a large windfall apple, which with a lightning move he hurled into the darkness.
There was a yelp of pain from the shrubbery and Boy emerged.
‘Listen, chummy,’ Douglas drawled, ‘there’s a difference between staring and being stark blind.’
Douglas was a crack shot with a sporting rifle; he could shoot the eye out of a mosquito, or so he claimed. And he also said he slept with his eyes open like a hare.
‘What do you want here?’ Boy asked in a shrill quavering voice.
‘Your sister,’ Douglas boomed.
‘No one wants to marry a quaint old thing in a poke bonnet,’ Boy sneered. ‘Besides,’ he continued, ‘Mummy says she would not let a daughter of hers marry a Roman Candle.’
It was true. Mother and Boy had got up a whispering campaign against me when they had learned Douglas was a Roman Catholic.
Boy ran off up the path, shouting, ‘She’s got it bad, Mummy! She’s got it bad!’
‘Sawn off little runt,’ I heard Douglas mutter.
‘What did you expect?’ my brother grinned evilly, when the next evening my new beau arrived looking glum. ‘Rosaries all the way?’
Dispossession, pages 292 and 293, Sister Morphine (2008)
•
Catherine Eisner believes
passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary
craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and
psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and
ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines
Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from
psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive
recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry,
rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and
the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence,
see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
