The Shell Seekers

by Rosamunde Pilcher

It was exactly nine o’clock, and he settled contentedly to his daily ration of strikes, bombs, murders, and financial disaster, topped off by the information that the next day was going to start very cold, and that during the course of the afternoon rain would slowly cover the entire country.

they found Cosmo and Antonia and Maria and Tomeu sitting around the candle-lit table, carousing with a bottle of wine, and all talking at once, in a castanet clatter of Spanish.

she had forgotten his attractive smile and his even, very white American teeth.

secateurs,

Garden sheers. Vocabulary word.

ewers

Your children never stopped being children. Even when they were thirty-eight and successful career women. You could bear anything for yourself, but seeing your children hurt was unendurable.

perambulators,

Stroller or baby carriage.

polyanthus

Type of bright colored primrose

Grief was like a terrible burden, but at least you could lay it down by the side of the road and walk away from it. Antonia had come only a few paces, but already she could turn and look back and not weep. It wasn’t anything to do with forgetting. It was just accepting. Nothing was ever so bad once you had accepted it.

conservatory,

Greenhouse or sun parlor attached to house

What had gone wrong? What had become of the babies she had borne and loved and brought up and educated and generally cared for? The answer was, perhaps, that she had not expected enough of them.

Self-reliance. That was the keyword, the one thing that could pull you through any crisis fate chose to hurl at you. To be yourself. Independent. Not witless. Still able to make my own decisions and plot the course of what remains of my life. I do not need my children. Knowing their faults, recognizing their shortcomings, I love them all, but I do not need them.

“September has come, it is hers Whose vitality leaps in the autumn, Whose nature prefers Trees without leaves and a fire in the fireplace. So I give her this month and the next Though the whole of my year should be hers who has rendered already So many of its days intolerable or perplexed But so many more so happy. Who has left a scent on my life, and left my walls Dancing over and over with her shadow Whose hair is twined in all my waterfalls And all of London littered with remembered kisses.”

“Richard, do you ever think about luxury?” she asked him. “I don’t crave it, if that’s what you mean.” “Luxury, I think, is the total fulfilment of all five senses at once. Luxury is now. I feel warm; and, if I wish, I can reach out and touch your hand. I smell the sea and, as well, somebody inside the hotel is frying onions. Delicious. I am tasting cold beer, and I can hear gulls, and water lapping, and the fishing boat’s engine going chug-chug-chug in the most satisfactory sort of way.”

MacNeice’s Autumn Journal;

Romantic poems

“Sleep to the noise of running water Tomorrow will be crossed, however deep; There is no river of the dead or Lethe Tonight we sleep On the banks of the Rubicon—the die is cast There will be time to audit The accounts later, there will be sunlight later And the equation will come out at last.”

antimacassars.

Doilies to protect chair backs from wear. Macassar was a popular type pf hair oil.

gamine

Cute, boyish

croft,

Shack in Scotland, sort of like a deer lease

A ring was the accepted sign of infinity, eternity. If her own life was that carefully described pencil line, she knew all at once that the two ends were drawing close together. I have come full circle, she told herself, and wondered what had happened to all the years.

Easter is always particularly disturbing, with the Resurrection and the promise of afterlife. I can never quite bring myself to believe it. And although I would adore to see Sophie and Papa, there are dozens of other people I can very well do without ever seeing again.

mange-tout peas.”

Peas with edible pods.

You and Antonia have found each other, you love each other, and you want to spend the rest of your lives together. You must snatch at happiness, hold it tight and never let it go. To do anything else is morally wrong. Such chances never come again.

Happiness is making the most of what you have, and riches is making the most of what you’ve

got. You have so much going for you. Why can’t you see that? Why do you always want more?”

Or lay the table?

English phrase

give him a tinkle,

English slang…call on phone

“He had epilepsy. He’s an epileptic.” Olivia was filled with horror. “An epileptic? But how perfectly ghastly. Did Mumma know?”

Overwrought emotion. Even back in1980s there were plenty of medications.

She may not have believed in God, but I’m pretty certain God believed in her.”

Rev comment about Penelope.

creels,

Fisherman’s basket

And if only you hadn’t been such a stupid clunk

and kept it all to yourself, you would have saved yourself all these years of anguish.” “I didn’t want you to be worried.

Unrealistic

As long as Mumma was alive, she knew that some small part of herself had remained a child, cherished and adored. Perhaps you never completely grew up until your mother died.

scraping carrots.

English phrase

jumble sale

Rummage sale

furnace heat flowed up, scorching her cheeks, and she dropped Mumma’s secret into the heart of the glowing red coals and watched it burn. It took only seconds, and then was gone forever.

This is almost as bad as throwing the diamond in the ocean in the Titanic!