’Darling, now listen. You know about me being beautiful?’ ’You’re all right.’ ’No, Rudolph, please say I’m beautiful; it’s part of the thing.’ ’I suppose you’re going to tell me you’re a beautiful female spy?’ ’In a way, I was.’ ’Yes, I’m quite sure you were. And that you have a Chief, but you don’t […]

She could not endure this day’s being over. Fixedly lookin ahead, past the driver’s ears, she cast no backward glances; she could not bear to. Nor did she need to; the beautiful agonising mirage of the University was inescapable from. This was a forever she had no part in. The eternity was more real to […]

I have been much afflicted again lately by visitors – not stray callers to be got rid of after a due administration of tea and things you are sorry afterwards that you said, but people staying in the house and not to be got rid of at all.  All June was lost to me in […]

For the first time since her arrival in the Middle East she felt all of a piece; Gentile and Jewess, Vaughan and Aaronson; she had caught some of Freddy’s madness, having recognized by his manner in the car, as they careered across Jerusalem, that he had regained some lost or forgotten element in his nature […]

Feeling rather guilty I walked among the trees of Regent’s Park and ended up at the Zoo. I often went there to draw the animals, only this time I hardly saw them. They were just vague smells and noises, and I was surprised to find myself in the parrot house surrounded by lonely birds all […]

I do not know how many afternoons I lay on my bed listening to a litany of tennis noises from where my two brothers played on the court a little to the right below my window. Sometimes, to tell me it was time to get up, my elder brother Richard would send a tennis ball […]

She could not have said exactly when she had become aware of how often their neighbour Blanche Silcox’s name occurred in Evelyn’s conversation as that of a woman immensely knowledgeable on rural topics, whose opinions on the ethics of tied cottages, drainage and poultry-keeping for profit called forth respectful agreement. To all such topics Imogen […]