Second paragraph of third chapter:
On arriving I had switched out the lights, lit the sconces over the bed-sofa—that little dark Eros and Psyche between them— and taken two more candles to the chimneypiece across the room. There came a time in the exchange of certainty that was our conversation when this even penumbra grew unsettled, began to shake and curiously brighten. A flame on the mantelpiece, burning low, had arrived at the corner of a sheet of paper, which evidently had fallen forward against the wax. It was the drawing of a temple I had designed, and now a ripple of fire was flowing unevenly downwards across it—in the first surprise it was as if the room had quietly ignited of its own accord. The drawing had become symbolic of the hour, and for a moment I hesitated between saving the symbol, and letting it consume away like our misery.
I came across this book in rather an odd way. One of the distant cousins who I have got to know through my genealogical research told me that there is a family connection to actor and poet Jill Furse, whose marriage to glass engraver and writer Lawrence Whistler is the subject of this book. There is indeed a connection but it is pretty convoluted; her grandfather‘s second wife‘s first husband‘s first cousin married my great-aunt.
It’s a beautiful portrait of a relationship, cut short by her death five years into their marriage, at the age of 29, shortly after the birth of their second child. Her health was generally weak – Whistler thinks in retrospect that she had lupus, which was much more dangerous in the 1940s than it is today – but even so her death was sudden and unexpected. In their time together they had shared the delights of parenthood, but also the tragedy of a house fire in which they lost most of their possessions. At the end he was separated from her by the war, and several of their close friends (including Lawrence’s brother Rex) died in the conflict. All bereavements are tragic, and this is an eloquent description of a couple who expected many years together, but had only a few.
This was the shortest book that I had acquired in 2022 and not yet read (apart from Doctor Who comics). Next on that pile is Science Fiction: Voyage to the Edge of Imagination, edited by Glyn Morgan. You can get The Initials in the Heart here.
