"When I was adolest, my mother taught me a charm, gave me a talisman, handed me the key of the world. For I lived in terror, I, so young, so shy of so many people -- i.e. those who spoke with soft voices and souhe h in which; ema usherettes who, in those days wore wide satin pyjamas which mocked my unawakened sex with unashamed lasciviousness; suave men who put cold hands on my defenceless, barely formed breasts oops of lonely November buses. So many, many people.
"My mother said: Child, if such folks awe you, then picture them on the lavatory, straining, stipated. They will at once seem small, pathetic, manageable. And she whispered to me a great, universal truth: the bowels are great levellers.
"She was a rough woman, my mother. She picked her teeth ceaselessly with a fork and she would take off her felt slippers, in the evenings, and probe out the caked, flaked skin and dirt from betweeoes with a sensual, inquisitive finger. But she ossessed of great wisdom -- the brutal, yet withal vital, wisdom of a peasant."
The womans voice, high and clear as the sound of a glass rapped with a spoon to summon a waiter, ceased iation for a moment. Only two endlessly long miraculously slender legs emerged from the pool of coagulated shadow in the er where she sat.
Petals dropped from a red rose in a silver bowl on to the low, round, blood-coloured mahogany table with a soft, faint, exhausted sound, as of a pigeons fart. The woman recrossed her legs; rasping planes of silk flashed out as they caught the light, like the blades of scissors, slig all that came between them. She resumed her narrative.
"I had been a shy child. A lonely child, lost in the middle of a large family -- twenty-three children, of whom eighteen reached maturity! -- cooped up in a meagre dwelling, the loft above my fathers stable. Ah!" she cried, "how often I lay awake at night forted by the gentle whickering of great, grey Dapple, with the ruffs over his hooves, like a pierrot!"
Again she paused for a moments recolle; then resumed her narrative.
"By tragic paradox, so crowded was our home, so tinual the to-ing and fro-ing, that my isolation was total. I was alone, so alone; so tentative, uo grasp the fayself as ay, a personality.
"I was introverted to the point of extin, and in that great, surging melee of humanity -- my family -- only behaviour extroverted to the point of sheer exhibitiotention to oneself.
"I remember how one of my brothers -- or perhaps it was a sister: one fets, one fets -- plunged his little bare feet in the suppertime soup one night, t to my parents attention how great his need was for new boots. Or shoes. Or sandals. Or socks. . ."
The voice died away and then welled out again in passionate regret: "The signifit detail -- one fets it! One fets it!" But soon she resumed her narrative.
"Poor little fellow, he -- or was it she -- was scalded almost to the khe suppertime soup, the cabbage leaves bobbing in it -- I remember, though, the suppertime soup. And the faces round the table, so many, many faces. And such meagre soup that many a time, my small stomach sonorous as a pair of maracas, I would creep down in the silence of the night to scoop up a little of Dapples steaming mash on my fingers, for myself.
"Ihough one would scarcely credit it, for many years my mother, in error, called me by the name of an elder sister who had died in infancy. My father, oher hand, a grey, precise ma