The Aunt's Story (1948)
“It was an honest house, because it had been put up at a time when the object of building was to make a house, a roof with walls, and the predominant quality in those who made it was honesty of purpose. This is something that gets overlaid by civilization, in houses by gable and portico, in man by the social hypocrisies, but sometimes it survives in the faces in old photographs, beside the palm, and it was present too in Meroë, which was what someone had called the house before the Goodmans came....
Someone had called it this, and no one in the district remembered why. It had been accepted along with the other exotic names, Gloucester, Saumarez, Boscobel, Havilah, Richmond, and Martindale, that have eaten into the gnarled and aboriginal landscape and become a part of it. It was the same with Meroë. No one ever debated why their flat daily prose burst into sudden dark verse with Meroë in their mouths. Meroë, they said, in their flat and dusty local accents. Although the word smouldered, they were speaking of something as unequivocal as the hills.MoreLess
Someone had called it this, and no one in the district remembered why. It had been accepted along with the other exotic names, Gloucester, Saumarez, Boscobel, Havilah, Richmond, and Martindale, that have eaten into the gnarled and aboriginal landscape and become a part of it. It was the same with Meroë. No one ever debated why their flat daily prose burst into sudden dark verse with Meroë in their mouths. Meroë, they said, in their flat and dusty local accents. Although the word smouldered, they were speaking of something as unequivocal as the hills.MoreLess
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