Catherine herself

CATHERINE thought: Day is white, Night is black, but sometimes it is half-white and half-black.... There were five knobs on the brass rail of the bed: one of them would come off...

CATHERINE won an open scholarship to the Upton Rising High School for Girls. She did not win it because of any particular brilliance or erudition in her examination papers; she...

“Two hours the last map took me,” said Catherine, indignantly, “and we’ve got another in less than a fortnight.... Rivers and mountains as well.... And it isn’t as if North Amer...

ON a certain bitterly cold night in November, Catherine stood on the doorstep of No. 24, Kitchener Road, with her overcoat and hat in her hands. Despite the chilliness of the at...

“You can use the desk,” he said curiously, “if you’re wanting to.” His politeness, his unusual solicitude for her comfort, was horrible! Normally, if she had been at his desk, h...

GIFFORD ROAD, Upton Rising, seemed to be composed of various architectural remnants which had been left over from other streets. No. 14 was a dour, gloomy-looking edifice built...

LONG hours she practised on the Chappell grand in the room over Burlington’s Music Emporium. The Concert Study in A flat began to take shape and cohesion. April swept out of its...

ON the first of May the weather was very sultry. Downsland Road, running past the front of the Council School, was both blazingly hot and distressingly conscious that it was Fri...

IT seemed to Catherine the most curious thing in the world that she should be sitting with George Trant inside a taxi. There was no light inside, and only the distant glimmer of...

“CLAREMONT,” the Ridgeway, was a corner detached house well set back from the road. A high evergreen hedge impeded the view from the footpath, and a curving carriage drive overh...

SHE waited fully ten minutes in the drawing-room at “Claremont.” “Mr. Verreker will be here directly,” the maid had said, and Catherine had time to look about her. It was a love...

They had been engaged three months. Three months it was since a certain winedark evening when, in the shadows of the heavy trees on the Ridgeway, he had suddenly said:

But Catherine was disappointed. For it was perfectly evident not only that Razounov had failed to recognize her, but that her name when told him had recalled nothing in his mind.

She began to long for companionship. Since her estrangement from George, the Trants’ household had of course been barred to her. This meant the loss of Helen’s benign, sweetenin...

ARRIVED at Gifford Road one summer’s evening after a dusty journey on top of a crowded motor-bus, Catherine took pen and paper immediately (without taking off her hat) and wrote:

In the small room behind the concert hall the applause was still echoing in her ears. She looked proudly in the mirror and she saw herself flushed and triumphant. She knew insti...

REACTION visited her. Walking along the sun-white pavements the next morning the self-revelation of the night before seemed incredibly absurd. It had rained during the night, an...

WALKING amongst the trampled snow of the Ridgeway, it was difficult for her to decide the significance of what had happened. It was not easy to determine how far her passionate...

THE next morning she awoke with a bad headache. Her hands and wrists were very hot, and when she tried to get out of bed her feet were curiously vagrant and unstable. So she got...

UNFORTUNATELY her illness, whilst not serious in itself, left her with neuritis in her right arm. Until she should be rid of this, any restarting of concert work was out of the...

IT was in the first week of April that Catherine began to look about for suitable lodgings. By this time the cottage at High Wood was half-naked of floor coverings: patches on t...

ON the afternoon of the fifteenth of April, Catherine sat with her hat and coat as yet unremoved in the front sitting-room of No. 5, Cubitt Lane. She had taken a drastic step, a...

A WEDNESDAY morning in June. Catherine had been in the song department for just over a month. Her work was easy and not too monotonous. It consisted in selling ballad songs, and...

ON the Monday morning exactly a week before the August Bank Holiday, Catherine unpacked the morning’s music with a quiet satisfaction that knew no bounds. She was by this time a...

ON the Colchester and Ipswich train it was still possible for her to think. I am not necessarily going to Barhanger. I have a ticket to Holleshont, and there are many places one...