Figments of a Murder

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Figments of a murder. Request this item to view in the Library's reading rooms using your library card. To learn more about how to request items watch this short online video. You can view this on the NLA website. New search User lists Site feedback Ask a librarian Help. Advanced search Search history. Browse titles authors subjects uniform titles series callnumbers dewey numbers starting from optional. See what's been added to the collection in the current 1 2 3 4 5 6 weeks months years.

Cite this Email this Add to favourites Print this page. Catalogue Persistent Identifier https: You must be logged in to Tag Records. In the Library Request this item to view in the Library's reading rooms using your library card. NL copy pbk Main Reading Room. Order a copy Copyright or permission restrictions may apply. No one knew then about the cash Babes siphoned off, or the lies she told, or the way she tormented her partners. We wanted a hero and Babes was it: And she had a genius for organisation.

Without that, no one would have known what anyone else what up to. Babes knew everything about everybody and was generous with her time. In her private life I found out slowly, from casual questioning, scrupulous snooping, arduous and obsessive research she stole a hefty amount of feminist money. She did this by sleight of paper involving business documents and bank accounts.

In her public life she broke up households by various means, but always for love of feminist principle: One mother committed suicide, which was regrettable, but Babes arranged a feminist funeral and wrote an oration about sacrifice and progress. On another occasion she signed commital papers when an old friend developed lassitude and became introspective. Professional nurture is our right, after all: There were squabbles about this and that; there was powermongering; there was toeing the invisible line.

But Babes could somehow smooth things out, make things work, get women back into harness. It was only one-to-one that any of us ever found out how deadly her solicitude could be. Sybil helped me to see how things really were. Without Sybil, I might have faded away altogether, or just drifted somewhere out of sight. Sybil showed me the bottomless Babes. But what could I do? Is she nevertheless to be embraced? I tried having it out with the sisters. I asked them owning my experience, claiming my pain: They were worried and thoughtful. They hid their faces.

They advised restraint we must stick together. If a sister behaves badly, well. The sisterhood must show solidarity. All women are sisters. We must all belong. We cast no one out. They said I would heal, in time. I fastened on that. And not only me. Many of us have been hurt. And are you saying no faults or failings are worse than any other? All wrongs are equivalent? Vice, dear Tessa, is a patriarchal word. You must learn to be patient.

There are eventually, sadly, calmly more important things. I take the fee, I smile graciously, I put Sybil away in her box and let them take me to dinner. Some lies and deceits are necessary in any human exchange; even Sybil will lie to me sometimes, though she knows her own mind better than anyone, better than I know my own.

The frames for exchange are extremely wide, extremely fluid and flexible. Women want everything they can get: They want things exposed, anyway; they want different possibilities. In any case, women are our subject-matter, as well as audience, creditor, agent and banker. And of course the detestable Babes, with Portland Jo in tow, and the inevitable gaggle of groupies.

Babes is a black hole; from falling into Babes, no woman has ever returned alive. Only Sybil understands the extent of my dilemma: She knows how I loathe both fire and ice, how I crave the comfort of a clement climate. She knows that I go on loving Ria because she never notices the weather. Dear Sybil I begin: I am engulfed in a swarm of women, overwhelmed by their getting and fretting, and consumed by their gab-gabbing and hob-nobbing.

But what is the alternative? Women are your friends! She turns to the audience: All you women are her sisters! And so the atmosphere is established. Sybil can be a real leader when she lets 7 herself go. I need the company. The appalling Babes I tell Sybil: She watches me put away the clothes, tidy up the table, brush my hair, make tea.

She likes to know what I think. She remembers nearly every word. I put her on my knee, in the end. I tell her exactly how I feel. Babes is the worst of women I pronounce out loud, practising the pitch and tremor of purest rage: Babes is a brute, a bitch, an abomination.

Let her fall into hell.

Let her vanish utterly, between one instant and the next. Let her achieve oblivion. I move my voice higher, then lower, then higher again. But low is best. Let snakes embrace her; let vultures pick her bones bare; Let her be cursed; let her feel the everlasting fire; Let the night come, when none can work; Let the storms rage, when no ship is safe; Let whirlpools spin her out of sight; Let the beast of the great sea bed devour her. But let me have the sounds of her sorrow; Let me have the swell of her drowning; Let me have the heat of her burning; Let me have the fright of her falling; Let me have the feel of her helpless hands; Let me have the sight of her blinded eyes.

Her eyebrows come down slowly. Sybil understands better than anyone. She knows I mean what I say. She knows as well what happens in the undertow when faith is lost, or when faith is moving and changing. She sees me suspended between one faith and the next. Can murder sometimes be justified? I would only be guilty after the fact, according to all rational measures. When is a passion a grand passion?

Which fight to the death is glamorous and glorious? A life imbued and embellished with sisters of every kind: Like Durga, we must take the sword in our hands. I read about a collection of essays by Annette Baier. I roll in the cold surf, weightless and abandoned, hearing the suck and rasp of water against sand. I think of survival; of how I must risk everything and become despised. I think of the consequences.

When the accused is convicted, what determines the sentence? Is it meant to measure the odium attached to the act? Or to measure the vengeance which erupts from the accusers? How does Our Lady of Perpetual Balance reconcile these incompatibles? Does she consult consensus? Or invoke absolute certainties?

And every woman has salted the earth with all she must lay aside as waste, has challenged the rule of men with aching arms and wizened womb and thin grey hair. Who am I to contend? Tomorrow Ria should be back. It will calm my fever. One day can be much like another, give or take the hassle factor arising from any particular incident, though even that depends on whether the women are more or less interesting than the issue.

Take the other day, for example. Ria and I are just sitting, relatively 11 quietly, but stoked up ready for the revolution after reading the papers and drinking the second pot of coffee. Gloriana Hardy is serving her sacred muse somewhere in the bowels of the earth. AllyPally waves newsprint at us, pants with pleasure and exertion. Into the shredder along with all the other rubbish people write PhDs about.

AllyPally believes in success. Her mother was just eighteen when she gave birth; just nineteen when they all started wearing boiler-suits in restaurants. Her mother had actually met Kate Millett before she was famous. AllyPally teaches English to motor technicians in a further education college, so she has her reasons for being angry with literature.

Ria reads out one of the reviews. A burst of talent may legitimately be mistaken for a 12 stroke of genius, but it takes more than one book to achieve immortality. They never wrote a book in their lives. Maybe for a whole week. Even you must know that. And she kicks who she likes, whoever they are, whenever she feels like it.

Our little friend Babes has called a meeting at the Tram Factory to discuss the whole thing. Look producing a leaflet from her pocket it says here: Our struggle is being brought into disrepute. Read it all through. What a sanctimonious, twofaced little turd! Gloriana Hardy will have to be flattered or soothed. Ria will have to be on call. I should disappear for a day or two. Gloriana Hardy talks naturally in sound bites, smiles a lot, and has good teeth.

She says pithier things about God, marriage, high-heeled shoes, fitted kitchens, and so on, than most people could if you gave them a fortnight. Is there any coffee left? A sort of diary-cum-biographia literaria. I can see it already. I left her to it. Babes is a non-event. Every so often she tries this sort of thing, to get attention. She says everyone knows where she stands and she wants to get on with some notes for the Rape Crisis Centre forum. I call her Monster in my dreams. I know about libel laws, slander laws, incitement to hatred laws.

I know about laws against the person and laws against property. I know about inadmissables in mitigation. But in another country, inside my head, I can call her what I like. Other people, both friends and detractors, call her Mother-of-the-Movement. She affects ignorance of this soubriquet, but I know she knows. Mother-Monster is a head first lesbian: In those days it was called becoming a lesbianfeminist. There are hundreds of reasons for becoming a lesbian. Meaning, I assume, that as Adrienne Rich had proved heterosexuality to be compulsory, Babes would be the last woman on earth to be duped and manipulated by that.

How could anyone dare to accuse her of mere submission to convention, or mindless collusion with indoctrination? Did they think she had no pride? Did they think she had no will of her own? That she was incapable of free choice? I have no such pedigree. I never took account of my head. I was always a body first lesbian, a falling in love type. If they proved to me right now that becoming a heterosexual was necessary to the progress of feminism, I doubt that I could do it. Back among the pathogens, where we came from, probably, though the sisters never say so.

She praised us for having toughed it out all the way along. They soothe and flatter it out of the men. She told us we were the backbone of the movement: We loved the acceptance, recognition, solidarity. After our confrontation, Babes ignored me. Not pointedly or angrily: What mattered was setting up projects, appearing in public, keeping the movement on the boil, maintaining her profile. There were issues at stake. She continues to star at meetings and conferences, stretching out her small arms to embrace the multitude. That would risk rejection.

The groupies, gathered in a phalanx to serve, agree, admire, ratify, reinforce and reiterate, offer rapturous loyalty. What eloquence; what courage: Mother-of-the-Movement gives of herself so wholly, so heartily, that she makes herself ill. She suffers from chronic fatigue and migraine, allergies and eyestrain, pollutant poisoning and nerve sheath corrosion. She suffers from heat in the summer and cold in the winter, from all sorts of fumes: She had a brief encounter with stomach ulcers but nipped them in the bud with strict dieting.

She responds positively to intimations of hay fever, diarrhoea, and insomnia, as well as to a range of modern viruses. On the other hand, she is always willing to point out that she still has all her teeth, has never had even the mildest venereal disease, shows no trace of alopecia, and despite her age, has not yet entered the menopause. Frail is only one way of looking at it: The groupies honour and succour, whisper and offer.

This is what lies above and beyond money, status, grubbing and scrubbing, marriage and meniality—even beyond power. This is the reward of the cause. This is the personal made political. This is how to belong, because Mother never 19 scolds or only with infinite care and gentleness ; Mother always comforts or at least gives the benefit of clear analysis ; Mother elucidates how everyone outside the group is probably mad or bad, and is certainly misguided.

We must love one another. When she abandoned me, the groupies were embarrassed, and the outer sisters talked to me earnestly about egoism. Babes began a whispering campaign. She reminds me that feminists proclaim no god though they secretly hunger and strive with longing. She reminds me that in the sisterhood we have each other. The only enemy is the patriarchy; and to deal with it there are strategies, arguments, practices, visions. I was taken aback, and extremely irritated. We always rehearse conscientiously and have agreed not to take chances with improvisation.

I was forced to respond. I felt the audience hold its breath. The professional part of my mind gave grudging admiration to Sybil. She has a genius for creating excitement, for generating tension—audiences love that, as long as you can resolve it as well as you create it. Sometimes you raise your voice, and shout and rage and accuse other women; and then, almost at once, you praise and revere them and crown them with rectitude.

Sybil lowered her eyebrows and grinned.

She was a big success. I let her stay up specially late that night, as an acknowledgment. She warns me against excess. She says Babes is no devil, but only a mere mortal, a distraction, a minor irritant, an unimportant fool, an unpleasant obstruction in the scheme of things. So Babes, being a toad, knows nothing of mountain tops or ocean spray in summer—is that so significant?

So Babes, being a monster, is immune to the ecstasies of fire and ice. Are you faithful yourself to the elements? So Babes might be an enemy: Babes has perfected her survival techniques. Everything about her is disciplined, honed, calculated. Take the way she walks, for instance. She never strides— but she never minces, either. This theme brings out the strategist in her. This way therefore she can avoid any accusations of closetry and can join any march or demonstration without problems.

In discussions, she teases out all the implications. Not making an exhibition she elaborates is efficient on two counts: But it allows us, also, to win friends and influence people from the inside.

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Babes says that butch and femme 23 women are acting out unreconstructed feminist rebellion, since the true origin of these behaviours is the rejection of compulsory heterosexuality. It follows she goes on that the butch woman is more admirable than the femme, because the butch is obviously lesbian, while the femme can pass for a heterosexual. Consequently, the femme is much less brave than the butch and much less likely to get bashed, raped, abused or insulted. She once confessed that she concurred. How could it be otherwise, given her delicate frame and dainty features?

How could someone as fragile as she was try to be a butch? She would be ridiculous as a butch. But if you look like a femme, what can you do about it, other than refuse to cash in? She always beams generously at the groupies during a discussion. It used to make some of us uncomfortable, being simultaneously praised for being brave and pitied for being big. She often confides that there are practical advantages: Babes has made all her tics into tricks.

She can glitter through her teeth, for one thing. She can glitter through her tiny fingers, as well. She gets a lot of satisfaction from undoing minute knots in cotton or string, or from picking out impurities in rice without making a mess, or from pressing the buttons on miniature calculators when the rest of us need to use a pencil. There are differences, I know, between conceit and vanity; and between vanity and honesty.

Babes takes the humility line. How can there be liberation without self-knowledge? The path to destruction can be slow and subtle. The political is personal all right: She tells me to cheer up, look on the bright side, pass beyond it. But when she says all this she seems to be laughing at me. Long ago, when I had more important secrets, I told them to the stars, but the stars said nothing.

Instead they made music out of my passions. The music was thin and wonderful, but it was only music. Though fires burn at the hearts of stars, I feel only the freezing white of their light, now that I no longer believe in mysteries. I have the memory in both modes: Babes is not a nice woman, by any standards. Designed to serve those in power, and keep them there?

And convention aside, is there anyone at all who deserves to die? People just die, whether they deserve to or not. Whether I remember the rage, or the sentences, what stays the same is the word kill. It frightens me just to write it. It frightens me even more 26 to take it to myself. I joke about it sometimes, to test the water or to get in touch with my feelings, as they call it. But the sisters look blank. Meaning what justification; or what motive? Or they wonder what it would feel like having an interest in the psychopathology.

Probably what they actually wonder is what it would mean, since other kinds of killing seem rational enough: The astonishing secret they must share in their totally enclosed universe of two: I know women are differently socialised and not on the whole capable. But there are limits, even for women. I considered myself superior. It was men, after all, who played war and prostitution and sado-masochism and rape. And I had a fervent unbelief in what they called human nature.

But Babes instructed me in a deeper wisdom. Babes and I are no exception. We were friends, coworkers, fellow activists. But whatever lies she tells now, we were never lovers; that was never in the air. We had our own lovers, as friends do. These days, she has Portland Jo who dumped faithful Annie to set out on the primrose path ; and I have Ria. Ria is even-tempered, likes to stay calm, tells me to be happy, cautions me against the pomp and circumstance of public issues and private mania. For Ria, the highest virtue is optimism. Thatcher, for example, had hundreds killed in the Falklands, though none of the sisters approved.

But for us, the political is personal. I know all the arguments: But I did learn something new from the age of Thatcher: I learned the logic of privatisation. Killing, like anything else, can be privatised. In any case, I have a cause; I feel a threat. I must use initiative, take care of my own problems, must not rely on the nanny state. Babes has not committed what the patriarchy would call a capital crime; and we feminists have shrunk from codifying any alternative.

That 28 Babes has poisoned our meat and drink, and that consequently we have slowly, very slowly, become ill, and that there is no easy remedy, seems clear only to me. The sisters are distracted, enthralled, secure that Babes directs their action and inaction. She says my arguments make her dispirited, unhappily reflective. I can have that effect, I suppose; but who can laugh their way to the brink?

I decide to humour her. She says quite calmly, as if she were reading out a letter, or dictating a recipe: It comes from the north, where forests of silver birch confine each freezing lake. They say that where I walk, and when I smile, dead trees bud with spring, whatever the season; 29 they say that even the fences sprout leaves and flowers. They say such things. I say that death is its own desire; spring is only a promise of how things might have been.

The world grew old, and all the soils of the earth were nothing more than bones and blood and other burnt offerings. Where I walk is not forever spring; it is only a dream of how things might have been. She likes things just so. Some months back, despite her speeches about solidarity and monogamy, Babes became obsessed with Portland Jo.

This was the Real Thing. It was also one of many predictable results of being brainwashed by American feminist imperialism. Babes was mesmerised throughout by American feminist glamour: Judy Chicago, Adrienne Rich, et al. Younger glamour icons like Naomi Wolf had less appeal, since the big bucks came to them much faster than could have been the case in the sweet seventies, and since the television networks 30 accepted them as mainstream.

But at least their success proved the endurance of the message. Babes knew from experience that if you wanted to fill a major venue in Britain you could only do it with an American star. Home grown was humdrum, though Gloriana Hardy was determined to change all that. Portland Jo was no writer; but she threw her weight around and made a lot of noise and had useful connections back on the west coast where she came from. They had long talks about it.

Portland Jo thought Annie was gorgeous when she cleaned the bath, scrubbed the cooker, hoovered the stairs, wiped out the fridge. Annie made things nice. Annie is pure gold, Portland Jo told everyone. Portland Jo, in bed with Babes as often as time allowed, sighed with pleasure at the thought of what Annie would cook when she went home later.

Sal had escaped from New Zealand and wanted the lot. Sal was cautious and had building society deposits; she could handle workmen and bills and curriculum reports. Sal was sane, steady, sensible, and prepared herself properly for her Home Office interview.

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We went through all this with Su. These days women need the equivalent of a business plan to qualify, but 32 back then it was easy to get support, and no one checked up on anything except whether women were sharing toothbrushes with some man or men. Su was neat and trim except for her overlarge breasts and her even larger cashflow needs, which were never less than chaotic and always utterly spontaneous.

No one minded much about the till, since the movement was Portland Jo explained both democratic in itself and subversive with respect to the mainstream. Women were entitled, after all, to have enough. Sal told Annie not to worry about Babes. And Babes is famous for autonomy: They agreed, after a few exhausting weeks, that Portland Jo would move into a bedsit and Sal would move in and take over the mortgage. Just for a period, to see if it helped. It was different from the seventies. Back then, Portland Jo had believed in collectives and had a string of women to prove it.

It was earnestly argued: Portland Jo was an optimist and had a ball. In the beginning was or had been Babes; Babes was her was-been she joked in public , having been had. Had was how Portland Jo liked to even up her bedtimes. Love is democracy, she argued, when it all boils down. To have and be had and be having and be had again. Gertrude Stein she argued further had understood it better than anyone else alive. And had gone to enormous language to make that absolutely plain. Babes was or had been a Gertrude Stein fan, and said she could raise her legs at the drop of a single present participle; and Portland Jo had plenty of them.

Babes said Portland Jo to whomever was listening was made to go through life pubis first, and who was she to go against nature? Sal was conservative at heart, and had never thought Portland Jo was a calming influence. To me she confided her hatred of Babes, but what could anyone do? Women were free, after all, and no one could dictate. And no one else should try to protect: Who could do anything about Babes? Sal raged at me. Babes is in control.

Babes has it made. After Annie got over the initial shock, she got used to sharing the kitchen with Sal, and living the celibate life. I started visiting most weekends. And I could be a proper sister and believe in justice again. Once, after supper, I ventured my plan, just in the abstract. Annie and Sal were horrified. We all had fantasies, they counselled. It was good not to bottle things up. But in the real world.

Spending time with Annie and Sal took some of the pressure off Sybil. Not that she ever complained. But she hardly ever laughed any more, except in performances. She sang to herself, or else just sat. I started asking what would make her happy, but she insisted she was happy. Sybil started singing and crying and eventually said she was constructing a speech and would I listen to it and make comments. What did they give me in return? The comfort of their arms?

The knowledge of tides and seasons? Or just their terrible secrets, bare as the bones they picked clean? Why did I calm them? How then could the truth be uncovered? But she swept on: But expect from me no affirmation or elucidation. The function of a god is to sit and listen and make only universal laws. The sisters pity only their own pain, never the pain of men or gods. I know better than you think the surge of longing while hope and faith remain. Bring your dreams and break them open in front of me.

Bring your memories and let me check them for veracity. Bring your prattle and your anecdotes. Bring your treasure-chest of failed intentions and sorry boasts. I am after all this time impermeable. I am as you discern unmoveable. I am, in my own time, transparent with emptiness. There is no river of regret in all the world that has kept its waters free from my immersions. With raised eyebrows you admonish me. With a shake of your head you call me to account. With a flick of your wrist you dismiss me.

But who have you been? Above and beyond the circles of women, do you share ground with the men? Do you tell me to live and let live? Turn the other cheek? In the circle of women, love was no problem, though its coming or going was never examined. Love was a mystery, and also a principle. A word only in the mouths of men? It was a change. Even I can imagine how everlasting silence can boil the blood and keep the vengeance singing. It takes two to make peace.

A goddess clicked her fingers and the rains came down; and another pouted and the bare twigs burst into flame. A queen waved her sceptre and the wine flowed all night long. Now we have women in suits 37 and ties who manage pension funds; and when they say shine, the babies come. A woman taken in rage was sitting by a well.

I asked her to emigrate and sin no more. She looked at my manicured hands and my high cheekbones and she spat on the ground. What would I know she demanded about ethics, or the twist in the tale about freedom? We can definitely weave it into the number about women in banking.

Even Mozart made rude jokes; even Bach had choirs to train; even Blake, who sang purer than a bird, was visited by angels with beards and wings who frightened him half to hell. And women, who harboured the greatest souls on earth, did their baking, mending, washing, cleaning, bearing, rearing, between the hours they stole for love of pen or paint. I only ask that you listen. It turns into cash that way, if nothing else. There is Ria, after all: Ria who works at smiling and who regards happiness as the true religion.

Ria makes passion effortless. I see her always as I saw her first: She sought me also though I never dance. Light fell from her eyes and I was bedazzled. Liberty sighed the Liberty Bell from the corrupted sea bed. From the slush-mush, the dirt-murk, where no fish swim. Yield O sea cried the Liberty Bell in memory of an antiquated age.

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But the sea swings where it wills. To that end I believed we were born and saved and made what we made. How else avoid the petty and intimate? How else discard the danger of death? Because of Ria, everything made sense. Light fell from her eyes and I became consuming. Friends came and died and rose again in their second flesh, again and again. They burnt one another; they bled one another. Stay away, they cautioned; have some sense. When I think of Ria, I remember nearly everything, but mostly the sea, soft and deadly, yielding nothing. I remember my education: Now we know better and follow words.

Ria and I succumb to our own inventions. We tell each other intimacies, to become disfigured, and then 39 transfigured. She loosens her blueblack hair, she loosens her clothes, she loosens her tongue. I see her in gardens, her long hem flowing between hyacinths, poppies, unruly borders of bushes and herbs. I see her over my mouth.

I remember for ever the heat of the rain at the equator. She asks what I remember but I am bedazzled. Incipient to my condition is her condition. No one knows who starts these things.

There are they say more important things. I agree there are; but who decides? I never actually saw the Liberty Bell, but they pointed out where she lies and I heard I imagined I heard the muffling and sighing under the swish of the sea.

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I was young when I did my travelling and prone to atmospheres. Light falls from her eyes because I expect it. I have accrued, from my reading and travelling, some priestly ways and know something about libations. I know how to tune my voice. But in this dance, who is the leader? Bad women I must confess it are hardly rare, and if I must be among them, at least it can be part-time.

Few in number, though, are women like me, who can plan a kill without blood. The passions of bad women are strictly personal. Ria, however, could never be evil, given her vitality. The sisters find her frivolous, but they mean she neglects them, and is unreliable about 40 priorities. Who starts rumours anyway, apart from Babes? Babes I remember built her power on a base of feminist ethics. Babes was first in line to affirm autonomy and fidelity and freedom of information.

Over and over, in public, Babes has declared how important it is to analyse what women do. Babes has always been an expert witness when it comes to assessing who failed and who succeeded. Ria takes no notice of what Babes says. Ria believes in ordinary life. In the piecemeal of the daily round, therefore, we do what everyone else does: No one any longer does opera or ballet or theatre or the South Bank.

No one we know, that is. The sisters are worker bees, part of the great scheme that makes the rich even richer and the powerful ever more mighty. The sisters live in swelter-shelters: Or else they live in squalorparlours, the old bedsitter in a lodging house now revamped, renamed, in the technical settings of rehousing programmes that are the nuts and bolts of privatisation. Well, not quite all the sisters. Gloriana Hardy has a big house, and Ria, being her oldest 41 friend, has a whole floor to herself.

These are dogdays, dog-years—post-socialist, post-feminist, postidealist, post-modernist. Soon, to deflect her eyes, I rant a bit: Love, after all, is a satisfactory past-time. She likes it when we count nationalisms, says all you can do is laugh, says all other ways lead to madness. I elaborate the game as we go along. There are good and bad nationalisms: We innovate sometimes to include religions and racisms. What about the Caribbean version—the black churches, black theology, black evangelicalism, the black charismatics?

Judy sent it to me for my clippings file. Ria went to Lahore once, and can get sentimental about Sufis. And after that we tango, as they used to say, love being a mystery and imperious at the point of urgency. Ria needs to stretch and dance; and I need not to be boring.

I manage, nearly always, to keep my plans for Babes to myself. She casts spells and invokes apparitions.

Figments of a Murder

She manoeuvres plots and counterplots. She grew up in the days when people held dinner parties with the right cutlery and more than one wine. She says talking is what moves mountains, even more than money; and that money, anyway, is only the fastest form of talk. What schemes, what strategies, what elaborations! Once she tried organising group purchases of stately homes. Just as safe, just as autonomous.

And once she tried to start up a periodical. Ten thousand women at ten pounds each would do it; or one thousand women at a hundred pounds each. A hundred committed, motivated, moderately comfortable women at a thousand pounds each. Two extremely rich women. She jokes about it, not being susceptible to depression. Ria will never desert Gloriana Hardy, no matter what she does or says. At least Gloriana Hardy is good for a laugh, which is more than can be said about Monster.

She says it makes life complicated. Sometimes I wish I could be impervious, but I never am. I feel her adjudicate. I feel myself overwhelmed. She stands with me. She sees what I see. And what shall I do if Sybil turns against me? If she stops up her mouth and pulls down her eyebrows? Why say all this to me? Who do you think I am? She laughs a lot and makes silly jokes. Work always mollifies, if nothing else will. They asked me to preside and we invented ceremonies.

But then they grew restless. They were afraid of the moon and relinquished travel by night. They were afraid of trees and pulled them out by their roots. They were afraid of me and brought me gifts. They sang me eulogies. What did they do? They sank to their knees and offered me anything I wanted. Was this a great success? Or a terrible failure? We can make it an interactive piece. Night and day I hear the words of the Liberty Bell. Beauty is power, it sings, over and over, repeating requiring, as in all things seasonal and ritual my glad acquiescence.

And sometimes it sings Power is beauty, beauty power, as if those who could hear would prick up their ears. The fearful thing is to love without comfort of religion. How then calm the rage of millions who cry without ceasing for acculturation? Burn the imperialists, they command.

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