I know what it was, of course. I’d lived with loneliness a long time. That was something which was always there … one learns to keep it at bay, there are times when one even enjoys it – but there are also times when a desperate self-sufficiency doesn’t quite suffice, and then the search for the anodyne begins … the radio, the dog, the shampoo, the

‘Léon liked you too. He said you were gallant. That was the word. He said: “She’s a gallant little devil and it’d be a pity if we had to bring her down.”’

Infinitely more real were the last nine years in England – seven of them spent at the orphanage in Camden Town, and the last two in a qualified independence – a travesty of freedom – as general help and dogsbody at a small prep. school for boys in Kent. Those endless green-linoleumed corridors, the sausage on Mondays and Thursdays, the piles of

I sat quietly and watched them, feeling a warm, almost affectionate glow towards this large and distinguished Parisian who, among all his other preoccupations, could bother to make a lonely small boy feel he was wanted.

Banquets abroad by torchlight! music! sports! Nine coaches waiting – hurry – hurry – hurry – Ay, to the devil … Tourneur: The Revenger’s Tragedy.

there used to be plenty of money, anyway.’ ‘There still is,’ I said, ‘or so it seems.’ ‘Yes. Things are waking up again, I gather. Two good vintages, and you get the roof repaired.

banquets abroad by torchlight! music! sports! nine coaches waiting – hurry – hurry – hurry … some tempter’s list of pleasures, it had been, designed to lure a lonely young female to a luxurious doom; yes, that was it, Vendice enticing the pure and idiotic Castiza to the Duke’s bed … (Ay, to the devil) …

Léon de Valmy was speaking. That he was angry was obvious, and it looked as if he had every right to be, but the cold lash of his voice as he flayed the child for his small-boy carelessness was frightening; he was using – not a wheel, but an atomic blast, to break a butterfly. Philippe, as white as ashes now, stammered something that might have

Some of the baggage was out on the tarmac. I could see my own shabby case wedged between a brand new Revrobe and something huge and extravagant in cream-coloured hide. Mine had been a good case once, good solid leather stamped deeply with Daddy’s initials, now half hidden under the new label smeared by London’s rain. Miss L. Martin, Paris.