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What am I doing here, eating my heart out for a small, bald man who’s shackled to a cabbage?
Still watching the young woman, he saw her nod to the little girls, and then she dived neatly into the lake and one by one the children followed her: some jumping in, some diving, and the cross English girl going down the wooden steps. In the water she turned to see that all of them were safe and then she struck out into the lake, swimming strongly, but several times looking back to see that all was well – and behind her came her brood, fanned out in a V exactly like the ducklings that nested in the reeds.
if you have a talent you had to use it to go further into life and not escape from it.
Then he stood looking down at her – not smiling . . . considering . . . and she caught her breath, for she felt that she had been, in that moment, completely understood.
Quiet girls to whom the artists had not bothered to give names, for it was clear that without them the essentials of life would cease.
a small barn owl was blown off course and sat like a bewildered powder puff under a fir tree,
twenty-three dentists are descending in July!’
They minded about blowing up women and children in those days,’
ineffable
Marek was looking with pleasure at the herons fishing in the shallows,
Ellen
tonight’s performance of Rosenkavalier will be conducted by Marcus Altenburg.’
And then, because they were both Englishwomen and their hearts were somewhat broken, they turned back into the room and put on the kettle and made themselves a cup of tea.
It was as lovely as she had expected, the famous Forest of Bohemia. Pools of light between ancient trees, new-minted streams tumbling over glistening stones . . . Squirrels ran along the branches of great limes; woodpeckers hammered at the trunks of oaks that had stood ‘from everlasting to everlasting’.
At least he did until a rainy morning in late July when he flew suddenly out of the first-floor window of Mon Repos, bounced off a privet bush, and landed on a flower bed planted with crimson salvias and purple aubretia.
MAREK IS ALIVE AND DEFENESTRATING AGAIN!!!
‘You will say nothing about me to Ellen. You will not mention my name. I put you on your honour,’ said Marek, reverting unexpectedly to his year at an English public school. ‘You will only hurt her,’ he said presently. Leon’s hero worship subsided momentarily. ‘I could hardly hurt her more than you have done,’ he said.
somewhere in the orchard, a blackbird singing.
An hour later they sat on a bench in St James’s Park, looking not at each other but at the ducks, waddling complacently up and down in front of them.
She was silent for long enough to make him very frightened. Then she lifted her head and said that sad thing that girls say when all is lost. She said: ‘I haven’t got a toothbrush.’
