The raft is not the vessel I’d hoped for. For a time I had company in the form of terns, a miniature armada of black-prowed yachts bobbing on the becalmed waters around me. But when the barnacle-encrusted flukes of a…
Nobody could recall an actual date when the island appeared off the coast of Lyme Regis, why it should have, or what circumstances conspired to allow it, but one thing universally agreed upon was its portentousness. Mallory, on summer break…
Harriet rolled her eyes at her brother’s petulant bleating. She supposed this was about her beating him at real tennis after church. A man of nineteen years should know better! ‘Saints preserve us, Freddie!’ Mother called from the kitchen as…
Pigger pulled on his clothes like a zombie. These days he didn’t care what he wore; not since Ne—, not since the accident. That day, he’d walked through the chill five o’clock darkness to the abyssal yawn of Ollerenshaw’s No.8…
Olenus waited as patient as time. Up and down the November beach was barren save for the stacks of mossy rocks. They weren’t much in the way of company – not even he could offer that, either – so he…
Yes, I remember Luxor… Not the Luxor of limestone cliffs baked almost to glass, where summer nights are filled with the occasional crack! as heat escapes from stones into darkness; nor dry river-bottom throats leading to tombs of the cursed;…
Dead on seven o’clock, the curtains to the theatre rise. The orchestra’s bows await their cue in pregnant stillness. Marek Parell awaits his own, fixed under a simple spotlight. He’s not moved an inch, yet already grateful applause rolls over…
Old Tom, hunched over in a seafront shelter of baby blue wood and stippled white concrete, stared over the salty flats. An ancient beachcomber, familiar, picks over the graph of flotsam hurled onto the dirty sand by a long-forgotten storm.…
As Provost, I found myself in that agreeable position rare of antiquarian scholars in that my summer was unplanned. I (in those days of my earthbound hubris, a Prospero of the sciences man can measure) decided on the Purbecks, perhaps…
The wind speaks in Roquebrun. A labyrinth pond there I once fished as a boy, where darting, infant mullet kissed a fallen mirror. Away, behind eyelashed dunes, mother languished and father malingered on a Martian beach. Ahead, a choppy fringe…