Sublime

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.

Yet no one there, not one of the people who loved her, not Quin, not Ruth herself, enjoying the poem’s sadness, were touched by a single glimmer of premonition. No hairs lifted on the nape of any necks; no ghosts walked over the quiet waters of the lake. That this protected, much-loved child should ever have to leave her native land, was unimaginab

‘Bow something’ indeed! Not for the first time, Lady Plackett felt the loneliness of those who marry beneath them.

More people who did not belong, she thought wearily, more defilement and chatter. Last year one of the girls had worn a two-piece bathing costume and Miss Somerville’s early morning viewing through her binoculars had revealed the completely exposed midriff of a girl from Surbiton.

Or if he was invited to a party, to people who might be useful to him, Ruth slipped quietly away without a word of reproach.

Until the long day was done at last and Hilda returned with a hole in her skirt where she had caught it in Mrs Manfred’s carpet sweeper, and Uncle Mishak changed into his pyjamas in his cupboard of a room and said, ‘Good night, Marianne,’ as he had said every night for eighteen years and not stopped saying when she died.

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.

Having done several Seasons without, so to speak, a matrimonial nibble, Lady Plackett had accepted the son of an undistinguished chartered accountant and set herself to advancing his career. It had not been easy. Desmond, when she met him, did not even know that Cholmondely was pronounced Chumley, but she had persevered and now, after twenty-five y

It would be her home for the next seven years, until the Great Storm brought Charlie to her door. The cottage had been derelict in those days, and she’d had no money to restore it, not that she’d wanted to. She had only wanted the windmill. She’d moved right in. She only had a couple of bags, and nowhere else to go and she’d simply slotted herself