Foretold (Unknown Assailant)

Ivy Barton, a Chelsea barmaid, was on Sundays able to stay in bed an hour later than on weekdays.  This she relished very much.

        She did not, however, use the extra hour for extra sleep.  Her mother brought her a cup of tea and a newspaper -- the News of the World -- and she read.

        One Sunday morning, early in the year 1933, she came across an item dealing with a matter of robbery and violence.

        A working girl, it seemed, had been tied to a tractor in the country (somewhere in Norfolk not very far from King's Lynn) and had been robbed of about twenty pounds.  She had, after some time and with difficulty, released herself from the tractor; but by this time her 'unknown assailant', as the News of the World described him, had escaped. The police were searching for him.

        Ivy Barton was not particularly interested in this piece of news, which was not given much space by the famous newspaper, and at which she only glanced rapidly.  She merely vaguely wondered how and why a working-class girl had as much as twenty pounds upon her at the time.

        But she would have been a good deal more than interested had she known two facts -- the fact that she had met and conversed with the 'unknown assailant' only last night, and the fact that she was going to meet him again within the next twelve hours.

       

From Patrick Hamilton:  Unknown Assailant (1955)
Photography: Strange Phase Studios

Foretold : Mood (Beginning of Henry Green's unfinished second novel, c. 1926)

She walks down Oxford Street.

When she heard that high, loud educated voice she saw the Blue Train where it was so much in evidence, then the boat where was no sound of it throughout the crossing, and the English Pullman where it again triumphed, crying:  My dear I went to sleep before the boat started and didn't wake up till my maid told me we were in.  My dear, that same voice said, what people want is to lie naked in the sun and that drives everyone further south to where it's all unknown.   There was that same kind of voice, here in Oxford Street, this time proclaiming: The most lovely sponge.  She looked and there was that same kind of woman coming out of a shop. -- A most lovely sponge which -- and then several buses cut short its price and the story of how that sponge was bought.  She wondered where that woman bought her sponges. One shouldn't go just anywhere for one's sponge.  For what is a sponge, -- and this she felt but did not think.  Why it is picked from the sea, it is cleaned and dried, perhaps a lot of things are done to it perhaps nothing very much.  Perhaps a little salt is left in it.  Here she sailed.  For, when she heard that woman talk, so she remembered the clatter of knives and forks, the absolute roar of chasses and good living and she remembered how, in the Pullman, she had longed to be in a restaurant again where it was famous and lots of people you knew.  She said no I will never go abroad again unless I go with a thousand people, it's really too squalid there being just three or four of you.  The sea and everything, it just won't do, she said, if there isn't a whole crowd one knows.  It's like going when you're by yourself and turning on the gramophone.  Or like a sponge in the water in an empty bath.