She was kneeling and she was worshipping – and Miss Somerville, made nervous by what was obviously going to be more emotion, said sharply: ‘What’s the matter? They’re just autumn crocus. I put some in a few years ago and they’ve spread.’ ‘Yes, I know. I know they’re autumn crocus.’ She looked up, pushing her hair off her forehead, and it was as Mis

Verena, who had read so much, had also read that no man can resist the sight of a beautiful woman descending a noble staircase. She had watched Quin’s arrival out of her bedroom window and now, gowned simply but becomingly in bottle-green Celanese, she placed one hand on the carved banister, gathered up her skirt, and while her mother waited unself

‘I should have escaped over the border; I should not have let you swear things that are lies.’

Someone, thought the deputy, whose origins were working class, had almost certainly been at school with someone else. Professor Somerville’s father with the Ambassador’s cousin, perhaps . . . There would have been those exchanges by which upper-class Englishmen, like dogs round a lamppost, sniff out each other’s schooling – faggings at Eton, beatin

At the bottom of the staircase, as they prepared to leave by the side door, a small group of people waited to wish her luck. The cleaning lady, the porter, the old taxidermist on the floor below. They had all known she was there and kept their counsel. She must remember that when she felt despair about her countrymen.

It was a strange walk they took through the enormous, shadowy rooms, watched by creatures preserved for ever in their moment of time. Antelopes no bigger than cats raised one leg, ready to flee across the sandy veld. The monkeys of the New World hung, huddled and melancholy, from branches – and by a window a dodo, idiotic-looking and extinct, sat o

‘Sinners are human,’ she said. But nothing could deflect Ruth from the noble path she had chosen and she quoted yet another European sage, the great Sigmund Freud, who had said that a thing cannot become lovable until it is loved.

In mocking at the people you saw here, you commit more than ill manners; you commit an injustice over which you will burn with shame – and very soon. For it is these braying boys who the moment war comes will flock to fight. It is they who will confront the evil that is Hitler even though they do it for a jape and a lark.

Miss Somerville nodded. ‘A Jew, I suppose?’ ‘Well, he said he was, but he had fair hair. I can’t help wondering whether some of them go round pretending to be Jewish just to get the benefits. The Quakers are giving away fortunes in relief, I understand.