The Letter

The letter gripped in his hand, M. rushes, bent as low as he can get, out of his parents' home, across the road turning his head sideways to look up at the windows, and through the open door of the house opposite. He leaves the letter before her bedroom door and scuttles back across the road. He has declared his love. Now he sits in his room, hugs his knees rocking gently, and waits. She has always teased him a little, sometimes drawn attention to his awkwardness, made him do her little favours - she had him climb a tree for her once, to collect apples while she held the ladder; she had looked up and made quite saucy comments that time. He will admit that she had never asked him to kiss her; though it has been three years. But try to dismay him with your tatty half-understood experience of girls, your half-concealed chuckle, and he will leap up from his chair, grab you by the tie, bring your face close to his face and explain, perhaps wearily for he has rehearsed this move so many times, that one can never be sure. That girls are shy - some of them anyway. Girls think it immodest to offer and they wait to be asked - most of them. And now he has declared his love in a letter. Perhaps just in time - yesterday, from a top window overlooking the garden, he saw her leap upon the back of a boy, bend her head round and kiss him on the side of the neck.

Presently he hears, from across the road, the shrill, silly, laughter of a girl. Now, he can hear several voices. It is possible to trace the path taken by the girlish voice, which runs from left to right, interrupted in places by first the shrieking of other female voices, then the hearty belly-laugh of a man's voice, then children shouting and clapping their hands. Next, he hears rustlings in the shrubbery right outside his own room. He hears murmurings. The room faces the outside along two of its sides, though the windows are shut and curtained. Around his window sit several people now. The girl's mother and father bend their heads together and laugh. The girl's sister has come along, and there, look, even the sister's friend has been invited (and not even a best-friend either). An old lady is there too; some elderly neighbour who (incredible to M.) has made the difficult journey across the road despite her advanced arthritis. Several children sit in a row on the grass before the adults (probably a mix of chance visitors to the girl's house) and they try to point through the join in M.'s curtains. The grown-ups have brought fold-up garden chairs in summery colours to sit upon, and from bags which they hold upon their laps they leisurely remove sandwiches. And all the while, the girl continually runs around the backs of the chairs, taps the shoulders of the sitters, lowers her mouth to their ears and points towards M.'s room, and inside this cell M. now sits hugging his knees and rocking somewhat more than before and at an ever increasing swing.