Coloured Quilts & Grey Velvet

 THREE STORIES BY RICHARD MIDDLETON

THE STORY OF A BOOK 

“The author had nothing to say, and he has said it.”

About a novel being written and published, an intentional fallacy of a fiction, where the author eschews his skill for colons by replacing them with semi-colons at the last minute… thus undermining his ideals. He even undermines his inspiration and creates tantamount to the nothing that the publisher unintentionally prints in inordinate numbers, and the reviews are mainly scathing but he becomes famous by default of this story’s gestalt while sharing the same  part of the overall body with the different stories below.

“….a voice at his elbow said, “I shouldn’t buy that if I were you, sir. It’s no good!” He looked up and saw a wild young man, with bright eyes and an untidy black beard. “But it’s mine; I wrote it,” cried the author.”

“It seemed to him that in spite of his effort to bear in mind that the whole should be greater than any part, his chapters broke up into sentences and his sentences into forlorn and ungregarious words.”

“The streets were more than a mere assemblage of houses, London herself was more than a tangled skein of streets, and overhead heaven was more than a meeting-place of individual stars. What was this secret that made words into a book, houses into cities, and restless and measurable stars into an unchanging and immeasurable universe?”

***

AND WHO SHALL SAY — ?

The small boy tells his younger sister that their father had murdered their mother…

“She could see her father’s elbow projecting on one side, but nothing more. For an instant she hoped that he wasn’t there — hoped that he had gone — but then, terrified, she knew that this was a piece of extreme wickedness.  So she lay on the rough carpet, sobbing hopelessly, and seeing real and vicious devils of her brother’s imagining in all the corners of the room. Presently, in her misery, she remembered a packet of acid-drops that lay in her pocket, and drew them forth in a sticky mass, which parted from its paper with regret. So she choked and sucked her sweets at the same time, and found them salt and tasteless.”

So she tried to wake her father , to prevent Hell being whereto her parents vanished, after her brother had gone for a policeman……….

***

THE SOUL OF A POLICEMAN 

The connections in the stars… and a policeman called Bennett ponders: . 

“As he went systematically from house to house the consideration of these things marred the normal progress of his dreams. Conscious as he was of the stars and the great widths of heaven that made the world so small, he nevertheless felt that his love for his family and the wider love that determined his honour were somehow intimately connected with this greatness of the universe rather than with the world of little streets and little motives, and so were not lightly to be put aside. Yet, how can one measure one love against another when all are true?”

He yearns to care for his own children and for his wife with the coloured quilts, but torn between that emotion and being ruthlessly efficient in his job as a policeman so as to help him put food on their table and give them whatever else they need, but he is too philosophical to be a proper policeman; some may say he is too soft-hearted, too understanding of the criminals’ plight. Until he is told that he had not arrested enough people, and everyone is complaining in general about the police for  not doing their job, and so he needs to be made an example of…

“And at his very elbow the superintendent was speaking in that suave voice that reminded Bennett of grey velvet.”