Роберт Эйкман: The Late Breakfasters (Faber Finds)

‘Are you pleased?’

‘It is beautiful.’

‘It is doomed of course.’

‘Of course.’

‘You are smiling.’

‘I am happy.’

The men and women round the fire had kept quite silent during this colloquy. Now a tall woman came to her and said ‘Would you like to change? There’s no need if you’d rather not. But if you’d like to, I could help.’

‘Thank you,’ replied Griselda. ‘I’d like to.’

Envoi

Before many days Griselda found that happiness unfitted her for the modern world; and, though the master of the Castle, as she knew, often travelled, as on occasion did most of the others, decided to give her half of the shop to Lena, who, despite the warmest of invitations, persisted in her attitude that Wales was a waste of oracles and oratorios.

Griselda was happy, though cognizant that sooner or later the spell would be broken by public opinion and Order in Council; but whenever there was mention of Hero and Leander, about whom one of the others was writing a poetic drama, and indeed whenever her thoughts were idle, she knew that if only Louise were there, then indeed would she be whole.

About the Author

Robert Fordyce Aickman was born in 1914 in London. He was married to Edith Ray Gregorson from 1941 to 1957. In 1946 the couple, along with Tom and Angela Rolt, set up the Inland Waterways Association to preserve the canals of Britain. It was in 1951 that Aickman, in collaboration with Elizabeth Jane Howard, published his first ghost stories in a volume entitled We Are for the Dark . Aickman went on to publish seven more volumes of ‘strange stories’ as well as two novels and two volumes of autobiography. He also edited the first eight volumes of The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories . He died in February 1981.