Free My Candlelight Novel by Joanne Horniman

and the idea of the unconscious …the birth of modernist art…and the madwoman in the attic…
    I took it all down, and afterwards went to the university library, and put in an application for a library card. Going up the stairs, I remembered the day Becky Sharp had scooped Hetty up into her arms and strolled away; the poetry of her stride. In truth, I longed to see her again, and hoped to run into her at any minute.
    But I didn’t. In the meantime, there was the luxury of being a legitimate library user. I drank in the peace, and looked through the shelves to see what I’d borrow when my card was processed. Then I sat in a carrel and read through the study guide.
    I had no other lectures that day, and just before lunch I went to collect Hetty, who scowled at me the whole time I fed her. On the way home in the bus she fell asleep against my shoulder, and I had to wake her up again to put her into her pram.
    The next day brought a letter from Kate. I had the day off, and though the weather was still wintry, I lay out on the verandah in the hammock to read it – such a lovely long letter, full of gossip and description.
    Every day Kate fed the ducks on the lake next to the university; the park was either full of solitary people like herself, or couples kissing. I have never been kissed! she wrote. Or not in that way.
    But she’d met a boy, Myles, in one of her English tutorials. She described him in detail ( very pretty, with a face like a lost angel she wrote). And it seemed that this Myles liked all the right writers , Sylvia Plath, and Virginia Woolf, and Jack Kerouac. And he listened to Ella Fitzgerald and Bessie Smith, who were black women singers that Kate had never even heard of before, but he was going to invite her to his place to listen to them some time (O, Kate!).
    If I hadn’t lost that letter I could write it down word for word. I swung in the hammock as I read, holding the letter in one hand so it fluttered like a little flag in the breeze. And as I finished each page I dropped it carelessly onto the floor where Hetty seized it with squeals of delight, scrunching it up in her fists and sucking on it.
    As I finished the last page (there was much, much more about this Myles, and about a job she’d just got cleaning in a motel), I dropped it onto the floor and lay back with my eyes closed, thinking about Kate. Hetty became intent on pressing one of the pages of the letter into my ear, and as I opened my eyes to fend her off I found myself face to face with Maggie Tulliver again.
    â€˜I seem always to catch you at an awkward moment,’ she said. Her voice still had an edge of sly amusement to it that made me self-conscious, but at the same time I wanted to be in on the joke with her. I knew that after her one night at the time of the flood she was meant to be coming back again, so she must only have recently arrived.
    Hetty dropped the piece of paper she’d been trying to cram into my ear and scooted away on her bottom. She went over to the barricade I’d put at the top of the stairs and pulled herself to her feet, gesturing towards the tops of the trees and the river as though to draw our attention to their magnificence. I thought that if she ever acquired the art of speech Hetty would make a grandiloquent orator. She had the knack of the grand, the amplified, the eloquent gesture.
    â€˜She needs to learn how to crawl,’ said Maggie Tulliver, in a detached voice. ‘That bottom-scooting’s an easy way to get about, but it won’t do her any good in the long run.’
    â€˜What do you mean?’ I felt cautious and hostile. Was she telling me that Hetty was lazy ?
    â€˜Crawling is critical to a baby’s development. It wires the brain to cross-pattern.’
    I must have still been looking deeply suspicious.
    â€˜It establishes a crossover flow of energy,’ she explained. ‘All sorts of movement, even walking, will be easier for her if