Sublime

‘Did you get a piano?’ ‘Yes. A Bösendorfer!’ ‘A grand?’ ‘No, love; we’ve only got a very small sitting room. But it’s a beauty!’ He was disappointed, but he would not reproach her. She was his lifeline; his saviour.

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

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

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

“What good is a love so easily blown away?”

It was after three encores, after the applause and the flowers thrown onto the platform by an excited group of schoolgirls, that Heini thought of Ruth again. She always waited for him wherever he played – unobtrusive, quiet, but so very pretty, standing close by so that he could smile at her and claim her, but never crowding in when people wanted t

ludic

Lady Plackett took the binoculars. Her sight was less keen than her daughter’s but she too agreed that the girl was Ruth. She turned to Miss Somerville. ‘This is unfortunate,’ she said. ‘And quite irregular. The girl is a Jewish refugee who seems to think that she is entitled to every sort of privilege.’