Jacob,
Sandra, Evan. Dinner and talk: the Williamses are going tomorrow to
Constantinople; Jacob, it is believed, went with them; and gave too
to Sandra his poems of Donne to remember him by.
Jacob
back from Greece, very brown and lean, sits in Hyde Park with Bonamy.
They talk, as motor cars passed over the bridge of the Serpentine, as
small children run down sloping grass and fall. Bonamy guesses he's
in love; Jacob does not respond – in look or words – just stares
fixedly ahead. Bonamy enraged by Jacob's silence rises suddenly and
stalks off.
Jacob,
still in Hyde Park, draws a plan of the Parthenon in the dust; reads
a long flowing letter from Sandra; feels for his chair ticket in each
trouser-pocket when asked for it by the ticket-collector; can't find
it and parts with half-a-crown.
But
what does he think of sitting there in a green chair under a plane
tree? Rome? Architecture? The ancient past, the distant future? He,
like Bonamy, rises suddenly, tears his ticket to pieces and walks
away. To where?
His
face is recognised too late in Piccadilly by Reverend Andrew Floyd –
Jacob had crossed the road already; he's glimpsed in a street,
perhaps reflected in a shop window, by Clara Durrant on her way to
the theatre; then gone.
Where
had Jacob gone? To fight for his country. His room as it was, his
letters any how. A wicker arm-chair that nobody now used, and an old
pair of shoes. Jacob's Room.
THE
END
Picture credit: Poppy, P R Francis
See
Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf.
Written February
2022.
