Jo Walton: Among Others

“Are you going away?”

“I’m going to spend one night in the Old Hall with Daniel, and then go down to Aberdare for a few days, to see Auntie Teg and my grandfather.”

“And kill your mother?” he asked. “No, I know, but I could. That wouldn’t be against any ancient prohibitions.”

“In the ancient prohibitions I’ve seen, I wouldn’t even be able to share a meal with someone who had killed my mother, whatever I thought of her,” I said, though I was mainly going from Mary Renault, and not any actual ancient prohibitions. Funny how nobody teaches ancient prohibitions any more. “Anyway, there’s no need.”

“I could come down with you.”

“Don’t be silly, where would you stay?” I asked. “Anyway, you have to work. I’ll see you when I come home.”

“I’ll miss you,” he said, and kissed me very gently for a long time.

Well, at least it isn’t boring.

There was a frost this morning. When I woke up and looked out of the window everything was crisply outlined in white. It had melted by the time we went to church.

The sermon was all about giving thanks, and how we shouldn’t just skim through our blessings but choose two special things to give thanks for. So, mentally, when it was prayertime, I gave thanks for Wim and the interlibrary loan system.

I wrote to Auntie Teg saying I’d be there next Sunday. I hadn’t bought a card for Grampar yesterday, or last week either, because Wim distracted me both times. I’ll take one with me.

My new worry about Wim is that it’s the possibility of magic that he wants, not really me.

The Persian Boy is so wonderful. It might be her best book. Stimulated not by it directly but by the general thought of her books, I have also raced through the Phaedrus and started The Laws and got a bit bogged down.

Miss Carroll seems to approve of me reading things that aren’t SF. She started a conversation about ancient Greece, and mentioned the possibility of me doing an O Level in Greek while I’m doing my A Levels. I don’t know if I’m going to be doing A Levels here or what, but if I am and I do, that would be a really good plan. I don’t think they’d let me do what Wim’s doing and keep mixing arts and sciences. Besides, I’d like to do English, history, and Latin, which is a very usual and conventional mix. I’d like to keep on with either physics or chemistry too, but as Miss Carroll pointed out, not having the maths would make that difficult. I might just scrape a pass in maths, if I’m lucky, but that’s the best I can hope for.

At the doctor’s, I asked if I was seeing him in confidence, and he said of course. Then I asked if he’d give me a prescription for the Pill. He asked if I was sexually active, and I said not yet, but I was thinking of becoming so. He looked at my date of birth and tutted a little, but he gave me the prescription. He said I’d have to take it for a whole month before it would work, that I had to start taking it on the day after a period, and that if I missed one pill after that I’d be okay, but no more than that, and I should take them at the same time every day. I picked the prescription up in Boots on the way back. I also bought a packet of condoms (be prepared) and a bar of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, which was more to disguise the other things than because I wanted it, though I ate it anyway.

I’m keeping the pills and the condoms in my bag, because there isn’t anywhere else safe.

Deirdre nearly got caught copying my Virgil today. There are two verbs, “progredior” and “proficiscor” and they’re both weirdly in the passive all the time, and they both start “pro” and one means “advance” and the other “set out” and I always confuse them, and I did in my prep, which Deirdre had copied. Miss Martin, who’s very sharp, gave us both a stern look when Deirdre read that bit aloud, and she said that mistakes with passive verbs seem to be catching, and then she had Deirdre come up to the front and do the next bit, the bit we hadn’t been set to prepare. She didn’t make too bad a muck of it, so I thought we’d got away with it. Then she made me construe the next part, again unseen. After class, while the bell was ringing and everyone was charging off down the corridor for physics, she stopped me and said “Did you and Deirdre co-operate a little on that piece of Virgil, Morwenna?”

“She was a bit stuck,” I said, which was the truth, and sounded much better than saying she copied all of mine.

“She’ll never learn if she doesn’t learn to learn on her own,” Miss Martin said, which sounds like an aphorism, and maybe is one in Latin, where it would be about three words, no six, maybe seven.

Letter from Daniel saying he’ll collect me on Friday and it’s fine to go to Aberdare on Sunday, also saying I might get a surprise before that. I wonder what he means? Maybe he’s sent books separately?

Book club tonight, talking about Pavane .

Hussein led the meeting, and we didn’t just talk about Pavane , but also Brunner’s brilliant Times Without Number and Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (which I haven’t read) and Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee and the whole idea of having para-history. We also mentioned Up the Line and Guardians of Time and Christopher Priest’s A Dream of Wessex (must order!) which Wim says is brill. There was a question of whether they were really SF, which they obviously are, and whether there was a difference between the kind of “paratime” thing, like Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen and a book like Pavane which is all in one universe where things went differently.

We kept coming back to Pavane and the way Pavane covers such a span of time, which, Greg says, is what makes it SF, the perspective. Then Brian mentioned the Lord Darcy books (I adore Randall Garrett!) and asked whether they were SF, which was a cheat, as they’re obviously fantasy, except that they’re not at all like fantasy, and they are exactly like SF. Harriet said she felt they belonged rather with things like Dunsany’s club stories and tall tales, they were whimsical. I disagreed (probably talking too much and too vehemently) because I think the way in which they’re like SF is the opposite of whimsy, they’re taking magic and treating it as another bit of science, especially in Too Many Magicians .

Janine doesn’t seem to be speaking to me, or Pete either. They’ll get over it, Wim says. I hope so.

Hugh looked a bit confused. Greg thinks—he said in the car—that Hugh thought he and I would automatically become an item, because we were the same age. I never heard anything so stupid in my life, and said so, because while I like Hugh I never thought of him in that way for two seconds. Greg just laughed and said these things sort themselves out, and had I read McCaffrey? I don’t know what that has to do with anything, but we talked about Impressing dragons all the rest of the way back.

Wim’s meeting me in Gobowen again tomorrow. He seems to think this isn’t very often to see each other, but I think it’s loads. I need time in between to think—and to write it all down! I don’t suppose he does that.

It has just belatedly occurred to me that tomorrow is Valentine’s Day. I don’t suppose he’ll take any notice of it—or will he? I don’t have the foggiest. Miss Carroll thinks he might, and that I should have something ready to produce if he does. The problem with that is that I don’t have anything. She suggested a book—well, she would!—and that would be a terrific idea if there was time to go to a bookshop. I could make him a card. Well, except that nobody would want a card I’d made. I could write him a poem, or more to the point, write out neatly one of the poems I have already written about him. But what if he didn’t like it? I’ve never talked to him about poetry, I have no idea whether he likes it or not. If he didn’t hate Heinlein I could give him The Number of the Beast , but he does, so I can’t. I don’t have anything else new, and he probably has everything I have here.