The Morning Gift

“You must love what you cannot like.” He said it quite often.’ ‘I don’t know what that means,’ said Pilly sadly – and a thin bespectacled youth called Simon said he didn’t either. ‘It sounds better in German,’ Ruth admitted, ‘but what it means is that though you can’t like everybody, you can love them deep down – in fact the more you don’t like the

‘It’s going to be a lovely bonfire; the best ever,’ said Pilly, and Ruth nodded, wrinkling her nose with delight at the smell of wood smoke and tar and seaweed, and that other smell . . . the tangy, mysterious smell that might be ozone but might just be the sea itself.

Mrs Weiss disagreed. ‘So she finds out who she is?’ she said, spearing a piece of guggle with her fork. ‘What has she from that? Myself, it is bad enough that I am it, but to find out, no!’

At the table by the hat stand the banker and his wife from Hamburg sat in silence, each reading a magazine. In Germany they had been a successful and well-established ménage à trois, but Lisa’s lover, a racially pure car salesman, had stayed behind and though he tried to take his place, the banker knew that he was failing. The walls of their small

‘They’re rounding up all the Social Democrats,’ said a plump, middle-aged woman with a feather in her hat. There was no censure in her voice; no emotion in the round, pale eyes.

She pulled up a mare’s-tail and threw it onto the pile of weeds. ‘It’s a bit of a muddle, I’m afraid – the poor rabbi in Belsize Park gets quite cross: all these people being persecuted who don’t even know when Yom Kippur is or how to say kaddish. He doesn’t think we deserve to be persecuted.’ She turned to Aunt Frances: ‘Would you like me to stop

Heini did not like the idea of England: The Land Without Music, the country of fogs and men in bowler hats who had done unmentionable things to each other at boarding school, but it looked as though he had better get himself there quickly.

Oh, why couldn’t Quin marry, she thought, making her way across the courtyard. Not one of those girls he brought up sometimes: actresses or Parisiennes who came down to breakfast shivering in fur coats and asked about central heating, but a girl of his own kind, a girl with breeding.

‘It is a pity there is no Morgan,’ she said. ‘He could help one to choose the morning gift. It would have to be something very nice so that one would not mind not having responsibilities. A St Bernard dog, perhaps.’