Dorothy Edwards: A Country House

“Night does not round things off. Night is a distorter.”

This story is a major short story discovery for me, especially after reading, by chance, a similar discovery: THE ISLAND by L.P. Hartley HERE a day or so ago, about a supposed electrician and emotional matters between two men and a woman, involving Hugo Wolf music! There the Hartley story’s own metaphorical equivalent to the flagstaff of meaning also flew, as it were, “senselessly”, at the end… (Aickman echoes, too.)
Here it is a man as narrator dwelling on his wife…
“It takes many years to close up all the doors to your soul. And then a woman comes along, and at the first sight of her you push them all open, and you become a child again.”
And he wants to care for her, and put electricity into the country house, where no drought, as here today in my own real-time, would prevent a stream in the grounds fulfilling the power for an electric substation…
“‘There is enough water,’ he said, ‘and I suppose it is fuller than this sometimes?’
‘Yes, when it rains,’ said my wife.”
The electrician is a musical man and matches the musical tastes of the wife, and the narrator feels the electrician is spiritually outside the plain utility work that he oversees, the work with the substation…”forming a sort of triangle with the hypotenuse underground.” – “Nothing but a yellow brick hut with steps to go down, and an opening like the mouth of a letter-box in the wall nearest the stream.”
Doubling such work with a holiday when staying at the country house; it is not on an island but is a place with deceptive lake in the distance that the electrician thinks is the sea…
“What can anyone do with a strange man in the drawing-room but play the piano to him? She played a Chopin nocturne.” That night distorter.
“…he later sung Brahms” and discussed Strauss’s Alpine Symphony. And one particular Hugo Wolf song emblemises the conflicting emotions involved… and he stood to attention like a flagstaff with elbow as flag?

“She played for him, and he stood up at attention, except that, with his right arm bent stiffly at the elbow… […] People do not change their lives suddenly. That is, they don’t except in literature. And now I feel at peace about it.”

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Full context of this review: https://cernzoo.wordpress.com/the-penguin-books-of-the-british-short-story/