In Memoriam Hilary Mantel
De Britse schrijfster Hilary Mantel is gisteren op 70-jarige leeftijd overleden. Hilary Mary Mantel werd op 6 juli 1952 als Hilary Mary Thompson in Glossop, Derbyshire, geboren. Zie ook alle tags voor Hilary Mantel op dit blog.
Uit: Wolf Hall
“Finished?” Kat says. She turns back to him. “Tom, you’d better stay with us now. Morgan Williams, what do you say? He’ll be good to do the heavy work, when he’s healed up. He can do the figures for you, he can add and . . . what’s the other thing? All right, don’t laugh at me, how much time do you think I had for learning figures, with a father like that? If I can write my name, it’s because Tom here taught me.”
“He won’t,” he says, “like it.” He can only manage like this: short, simple, declarative sentences.
“Like? He should be ashamed,” Morgan says.
Kat says, “Shame was left out when God made my dad.”
He says, “Because. Just a mile away. He can easily.”
“Come after you? Just let him.” Morgan demonstrates his fist again: his little nervy Welsh punch.
After Kat had finished swabbing him and Morgan Williams had ceased boasting and reconstructing the assault, he lay up for an hour or two, to recover from it. During this time, Walter came to the door, with some of his acquaintance, and there was a certain amount of shouting and kicking of doors, though it came to him in a muffled way and he thought he might have dreamed it. The question in his mind is, what am I going to do, I can’t stay in Putney. Partly this is because his memory is coming back, for the day before yesterday and the earlier fight, and he thinks there might have been a knife in it somewhere; and whoever it was stuck in, it wasn’t him, so was it by him? All this is unclear in his mind. What is clear is his thought about Walter: I’ve had enough of this. If he gets after me again I’m going to kill him, and if I kill him they’ll hang me, and if they’re going to hang me I want a better reason.
Below, the rise and fall of their voices. He can’t pick out every word. Morgan says he’s burned his boats. Kat is repenting of her first offer, a post as pot- boy, general factotum and chucker-out; because, Morgan’s saying, “Walter will always be coming round here, won’t he? And ‘Where’s Tom, send him home, who paid the bloody priest to teach him to read and write, I did, and you’re reaping the bloody benefit now, you leek- eating cunt.’ “
