The crab hunt
As he reached the first rock-encircled pool he wondered if he would find the little girl there, until he remembered that she had gone home the previous morning. They had hunted crabs together every day...
Category: Winter Swan
Extracts from The Winter Swan
Like icing
Gordon drove slowly at first through the crowded streets; down the station road to the promenade and then to the east. On their right the sea rolled in across the cloud-flecked sands, sinking further below...
No link but memory
Lance heard Gordon’s voice calling. He closed the car door. ‘I’ve got to be getting back,’ he said. ‘Good-bye.’ He ran back to Mummy and Gordon, who were getting ready to leave. As they all...
The bad old days
‘In a way I’m sorry I gave you that telephone number,’ he said. ‘She’s a bit of a bitch, you know. And you were at an impressionable age when you knew her.’ ‘Who?’ Roger asked,...
Damn it, he’d just said good-night to her husband
Roger climbed the stairs slowly. As he reached the landing he saw that a door on the left was half open, so that he could see part of a cream wall and the end of...
A decorative woman
From the depth of his deck-chair, Norman Danvers said lazily: ‘You would never guess there was a child in this house. I don’t think I’ve known one so quiet.’ Rosemary said: ‘Lance is very self-sufficient.’...
A sense of property
Roger got up suddenly, startling him and disturbing his chain of thought. He began to walk down the garden path towards the sand-pit where Lance played silently. Stephen thought he detected a kind of baffled...
‘Not a minute on the day, not a penny off the pay’
The strikers were coming out of the café, talking among themselves, orderly and purposeful. They went past Stephen and Harris, and the swarthy leader climbed on to the back of the bus. ‘All change,’ he...
Writer at work
During breakfast he thought a lot about the Irish question, rolling in his mind those balanced, sonorous phrases, framed in rhetoric, for which his writing was – even though only in a narrow circle –...
It is all there, in my hand
Mulready came over, swaying ponderously like a tight-rope-walking elephant. He threw forward a large white hand, like a tentacle, as Stephen began to rise. ‘Don’t disturb yourself, Mr Hallam,’ he protested. ‘I just hoped I...
