He yawned, looked at the water-clock and rose. The girl made no effort to follow him, though the timer had switched off the central heating hours before and the fire had burnt down almost to ash. He stood looking down at her.
“Do you have anything to say?” he said.
“I don’t know. Has it helped, telling me?”
“I shall find out this evening, perhaps. Let’s go to bed.”
“I’m too cold to move.”
He bent and without apparent effort, though she cannot have been much lighter than he was, lifted her from the sofa and straightened, holding her to his chest as if posing for a cartoon of a bridal couple entering their first home. After a moment, instead of carrying her through into the bedroom, he lowered her deftly to her feet. The water-clock whispered in the silence.
“I shall have to stop doing that sort of thing one day,” he said.
“Don’t.”
“Wheel-chair parts. Fogeys on benches.”
“Please don’t.”
“We seem to be a reasonably long-lived family. Eighty or ninety years of total self-dedication in the case of old Sir Arnold and my Cousin May.”
“You’re different.”
“Miser leans against the wall and becomes generous.”
“What’s that about?”
He let go of her and created by his stance an invisible vertical surface against which he seemed to lean while a look of senile benignity suffused his face.
“It is said to be a Restoration stage-direction,” he said. “Some playwright hacking his way out of his fifth act. I have never found it in print.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“The transformation? No more do I—but I could make an audience believe it if I chose.”
“I don’t want you to. If I’ve got a say, I mean. Are you going to send me away?”
“No. Not yet. Not for some while.”
“And I can go on calling you A.?”
“Um. You realize that we have now invested the letter with a meaning? Three weeks ago it was almost anonymous. Now each time you used it you would be making an assertion about who and what I am.”
“It’s just a way of saying I love you.”
“Love whom?”
“You.”
He shrugged, hunched, spread his palms and became for an instant his classic Shylock, rejecting mercy as unreasonable. With a twitch he shook the role off him and straightened.
“All right, in private,” he said. “Let’s go to bed. Wake me at half past eleven. I’m meeting Robin at half past two to decide how much we can screw Benny for, and then I’ll have an hour in the gym and then there’s some bloody Dutchwoman coming for an interview … Do you feel up to coming to watch this evening?”
“If you want me to.”
“I don’t suppose it’s ever crossed your mind to wonder what sort of job Prospero made of ruling Milan when he got home. It might be a help, knowing you’re there.”
“All right.”
About the Author
Peter Dickinson was born in Africa but raised and educated in England. From 1952 to 1969 he was on the editorial staff of Punch, and since then has earned his living writing fiction of various kinds for children and adults. His books have been published in several languages throughout the world.
The recipient of many awards, Dickinson has been shortlisted nine times for the prestigious Carnegie Medal for children’s literature and was the first author to win it twice. The author of twenty-one crime and mystery novels for adults, Dickinson was also the first to win the Gold Dagger Award of the Crime Writers’ Association for two books running: Skin Deep (1968) and A Pride of Heroes (1969).
A collection of Dickinson’s poetry, The Weir, was published in 2007. His latest book, In the Palace of the Khans, was published in 2012 and was nominated for the Carnegie Medal.
Dickinson has served as chairman of the Society of Authors and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2009 for services to literature.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1988 by Peter Dickinson
Cover design by Mimi Bark
978-1-5040-0490-9
This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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