Electricity [antikvár]

Chapter One When Godwin gave me the beautiful manuscript books to write in, I told him that I feared I should never dare to use them. 'Write about yourself, begin with something you remember and continue from there,' he said, and strode out of the room in his riding boots, leaving the books on my bed. I wrote nothing then. It was not the right time. But if not now, when? It is my own story after all. Sunday afternoon, waiting for the stranger. I was eighteen. I sat on the left of the fireplace. My father sat on the right, his back to the brown door. My father's name was Alfred Mortimer, and I suppose he would then have been about forty-seven. It was an autumn of terrible gales and high tides engulfing the coasts. That was over. The world was waiting. The day was fading, discolouring the muslin curtains that covered the window, dimming the already dim reddish-brown velvet drapes and the leaf-patterned wallpaper. The plant on the mahogany table was a black silhouette and the brass urn in which it stood was losing the last of its gleam. I could no longer see to work. I let my petit point subside on to