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Suite (swet), n. Retinue, set of persons in attendance; set of things belonging together, esp. - of rooms, or furniture; (mus.) instrumental composition, orig. succession of movements in dance style. (F, as SUIT).
Concise Oxford Dictionary, 1969 edition.

I

... not water but grey ice covering the lake, a few dry sticks of fern still rising from the middle, cut off, beneath a thick grey sky in cold air, and bird calls, stilled firs, remembered, the curtains drawn, the lights out ...

II

A smell of resin drifts in the air. All afternoon the drone of a mechanical saw carries into the garden from somewhere far beyond the high walls. With each completed stroke, its note drops an octave.

     Within the walls, on an open patch of lawn, a group of white-clad figures seems to glide over the smooth wet grass. One of them, the one with the yellow bandage over her eyes, stretches out her hands in front of her, palms downwards, in the hope of touching one of her companions. After each failure to encounter an object - the cloth of a dress, the harshness of a branch, the thickness of a leaf, the coolness of flesh - she draws back, hovers motionless for a moment or two, then moves as before in another direction, her arms outstretched again. Her companions circle round her, avoiding her touch, trying to be as silent as they can. This game, this dance, seems to have no shape, or ending. A smell of resin drifts in the air. Soon, probably, one of the others in the circle will step into the centre to take the place of the girl with the yellow bandage over her eyes.

     To one side of this group, another girl stands in the shade of a tall tree. Her eyes are wide open and staring. She is dreaming. Then she turns her head slowly to one side and looks towards a door in the wall on her left. The drone of the saw drops another octave. Beyond that door there is another garden. In there, distantly, figures in white can be seen turning, gliding over smooth wet grass, almost in slow motion, in a circle....

III

After the journey we gave the baby back to my mother. I am still not entirely sure who was accompanying me. All I can say is that ‘we1 travelled a long distance in the large black car, down straight unlit tree-lined roads, to get to our destination. I am almost sure the driver was a woman. She was certainly wearing a dark uniform with a peaked cap. Since I sat at the very back of the car in what used to be called a ‘dickey seat’, exposed to the open air, I could not see the driver clearly. I squatted within a square metal hole cut from the metal of the boot, the glass of the rear window immediately in front of me. Nameless trees flashed past us and small villages : Chyse, Zlutice, Lubenec. What, I thought, if we have an accident, especially with the baby untended on the back seat of the car ? I could not communicate with the driver, even though I wanted to. Time stretched out, unrecorded, unremembered; hours became minutes as the smooth expensive machine hissed over the even macadam in the darkness.

     We had come from a place whose name I did not know. Back there, days ago, four people in a room had endlessly discussed whether this journey we were making now should or should not be made. When we arrived at my mother’s house, the chauffeuse carried the baby tenderly from the car to the garden at the back of the house where my mother sat in a deckchair in the middle of the unmown grass. It was neither night nor day, but a curious half-way stage between the two, partaking of the essential characteristics of both. My mother took the baby and cradled it in her lap. She was evidently pleased that we had brought it. Its jointed, metallic head, a cross between that of a fish and a tapir, protruded over her wrists, the grey four-legged flannel body spread limply over her lap. There were creases now in the heavy flannel.. It did not move. Round the edges of the garden, birds whose voices I had never heard before, called gently to each other in the black trees.

IV

We try to reconstruct what happened. But it is hard : words come and go, the images are few and blurred, vanishing almost as soon as they are recognized. The darkness subsumes everything. First, there is a woman’s fur coat, lying crumpled by the side of a stone balustrade; nearby, a (lead pigeon, one bedraggled wing outstretched. No sound accompanies this vision. Darkness; then the pilot’s cabin. It’s really a high hutch, with a thin chair in front of the large metal wheel. The little room is made brown wood, like panelling. But it is not there for long, the darkness comes down again . Then there is the picture of the floor, green, wooden sloping and divided into odd-shaped segments all of which are moving separately. At its lower end a thin film of water covers it and, for a fraction of a second, there is a suggestion in this wetness of something very unpleasant. And then we are back again in the blackness all around us. We try to recapture these quick flashes of light, but there is not much there, to think about, is there? We cannot remember. Perhaps there will never be a woman to fill the coat or live pigeons flying, but instead, only these sterile, unpeopled images. And only we are here, or think we are, in this darkness, endeavouring to fit these fragments together (... but to make what?), trying to remember if we remember. And the darkness overtakes the scenes we think we see, our attempts at connection, it overtakes us too ....

V

Things move in the silence, in the darkness, in the room, at night, when I wake up and listen to them. Nothing, as it turns out, is ever totally invisible; silence does not exist, nor maybe does death. The shirt hanging from the back of the cupboard moves like a man half asleep, the clock is talking to itself and someone is groaning under the floorboards or in the wall. Distance vanishes and the waving branches of the trees enter the room and I am alone with a small piece of blue paper nervously twisting in the gutter as the ducks shift in their one-eyed sleep by the edge of the pond behind the green railings. Yellow eyes bore out at me from underneath a car, then blink and disappear. Something hoots in the trees in my head and I turn to face the spine of a book whose title I cannot read. I hear someone breathe but it is only my own voice, back with me again.

VI

... something is here after all, a thin beam of light, mote-full, at last between the curtains, and on the lake the ice melting, clicking out loud, and among the firs, underfoot, the continual rustle of water, the fern fronds moving ...