Flowers of Darkness by Tatiana Rosnay (free ebook reader for iphone TXT) 📗

the stars. As she reclined on the writer’s bed, well-being stroked Clarissa with the softness of a spring breeze, contrasting with the melancholy that had overwhelmed her in Romain Gary’s apartment on rue du Bac. She breathed more easily. Part of her sadness had crumbled away. The large boulder she dragged around everywhere had shrunk. Clarissa let peace permeate her. There was no wretchedness here, no woe. Even if Virginia Woolf had, like Romain Gary, chosen to put an end to her life, she had, in her wake, left hopefulness and tranquility as her legacy.

That day, on Virginia’s bed, Clarissa realized she needed to express the fascination with places that had guided her to her profession. Ever since the faraway incident on rue du Bac, and her strange encounter with Romain Gary, she had once again been confronted with the potency of the inner memory of houses, the tiny particles of vibrations she garnered there, and which heightened her sensitivity. She knew she would write about this; she knew she would write to dispel the darkness within her. She left Monk’s House with a new light in her eyes. Her father had seen it. It had made him happy.

“So you started to write Topography of Intimacy just after that episode?”

Mia White’s voice startled her. Clarissa had almost forgotten her presence. Once more, she found it impossible to differentiate her innermost thoughts from what she had said out loud.

“That’s right. More or less.”

“In your novel,” Mia White went on, “there is a marvelous conversation with Virginia Woolf’s ghost, or spirit. Did you really feel her presence?”

“No,” said Clarissa. “I invented all that bit. But I did feel something else.…”

She should have stopped there. She should have elaborated about the ghost she had invented, done what she usually did with readers and journalists: embellish, enhance. She had forgotten how to do that. It had been a while. And her loneliness made her want to open up. She said that when she got back to London, she had gone to buy Mrs. Dalloway in a bookstore. On the way to Paris in the train, she had settled down to read it. Reading Virginia Woolf was daunting, she soon discovered. There was hardly any dialogue, and the sentences were very long. In the beginning, she had been put off. She had never read anything like this. She couldn’t make heads or tails of it. She felt stupid, illiterate. Perhaps she wasn’t sophisticated or literary enough. She stuck at it, doggedly.

Little by little, the winding sentences began to make sense, in the most beautiful manner, as if she had been reading an uninterrupted poem, the words opening windows in front of her eyes, letting the air, the sounds, and the scents in. Virginia Woolf didn’t write to seduce her readers, to hook them in from the start with glib techniques, no, not at all. Virginia Woolf cast a spell on her readers, leisurely, gently, so that they did not know at first how they had been lured, so that they followed, enchanted and docile. But she made them think; she made them wonder. She surprised them at times; she destabilized them. And that was what Clarissa admired the most: the beauty and the depth of her prose, and how Virginia Woolf let her readers into her characters’ minds, how Mrs. Dalloway’s entire life was revealed in one single day, by dint of a ceaseless coming and going between past and present. The entire feat of the book was there. And while she talked to Mia White, Clarissa was also thinking about her own day, François’s texts, Jim Perrier and what he was about to divulge, her own writing, waiting for her in the two notebooks that never left her side, her lack of sleep, her peculiar dreams.

“You’re not sleeping well, is that it?” asked Mia White in her girlish voice.

Clarissa went quiet, alarmed. What was going on? She must truly be tired. Yet, she was persuaded she had said nothing to Mia White about her sleepless nights. Nothing at all. She lowered her head, stared at the cake crumbs on the tablecloth. She had to get out of here.

“Are you feeling okay?”

Mia White placed an attentive palm on her hand.

“I’m fine,” said Clarissa, moving her own hand back.

“You seem tired. Shall I take you home?”

“That won’t be necessary, thanks.”

Clarissa signaled to the waitress, her mind still fogged up. She simply could not recall what she had said, or not, to Mia White. Stupid idiot, said the little voice. That’ll teach you. That’s what happens when you let your guard down.

Two humid arms suddenly wrapped themselves around her neck.

“Mums! I figured it was you! What are you doing in our area?”

Andy was there, standing behind her, her hair drenched by the rain. She had seen her grandmother through the shop window on her way home from school. Clarissa introduced Mia White to her as one of her young readers; Andy greeted her and sat down at their table. She wouldn’t mind a bite of cake, as well, that one on display, the chocolate one; it looked so good. Clarissa ordered a slice for her. She watched the two young girls, who were only a couple of years apart. Mia White seemed more composed, more detached. Andy wasn’t paying attention to her posture; she appeared to be taking it easy. Clarissa expected them to establish some sort of connection, but they seemed to stay on different wavelengths. She wondered why. Mia White’s stiffness was politely aloof, while Andy devoured her cake with chewing noises, exaggerating bad manners she didn’t have. Clarissa noticed her granddaughter’s eyes never left Mia White’s face, sizing her up, almost defying her, as if she did not wish the young woman to encroach upon her territory.

“I’m going to leave you with your granddaughter,” said Mia White finally. “Thank you for the conversation. It was most interesting.”

Her tone seemed less sincere than during their first meeting, and her gestures looked contrived. She took her