The Director, coming to collect an interviewee. Cate had been surprised, and impressed, by this at the time: it had seemed to her a good omen. A sign of something democractic in the system, to be chauffeured by the boss. But Dottoressa Meadows had barely even shaken her hand at the station, and s...
Elena had stood and watched its last rays shining silver down the length of the river below and wondered about Giulietta Sarto. The blue-grey dusk was settling over the city and lights were beginning to go on along the embankments. A woman came and stood beside her. In the gathering dark the huge...
‘I’d better check first. That Calzaghe’s not back, I mean. He won’t allow it, you see.’ Although Sandro thought she seemed as much afraid of Niccolò as she was of her boss. They’d waited fifteen minutes, he and Niccolò Rosselli, inside the rusted gates to the silent hotel, time to reflect that it...
Hiroko’s calm, symmetrical features, on which Iris could never discern even the ghost of emotion, and Sophia’s prettiness blurred with crying and the onset of a monumental sulk. ‘You’re going where?’ she’d said. ‘You’re going to see him?’ Outside, the sound of the rain seemed to have been turned ...
‘I swear,’ she heard. ‘The constitution of an ox. The Watts woman keeps an eye out for him, God knows why. Last year they had to fish him out of the mud before the prizes. I don’t know what he puts in that home brew but it hasn’t killed him yet.’ They were talking about the barge match, the race ...
It was ten minutes since Dasha had called her, and she couldn’t find her keys. She heard Luisa’s voice in her head, Turn on the lights, might be an idea. She wanted to cry, but the time for crying was past. At the Women’s Centre the charge doctor had sounded merely bored when eventually, an hour ...
From the beginning Nathan had been … not evasive exactly, more, impatient; more, dismissive. ‘My dad’s … well,’ he had said abruptly, one evening, Fran five months pregnant and suddenly looking it, and they’d been talking about getting stuff, laughing on the sofa about whether he could put a cot ...