Ruth Prawer Jhabvala by Heat & Dust

Author:Heat & Dust [Heat & Dust]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Literary
ISBN: 9781582430157
Amazon: 1582430152
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 1999-06-02T07:00:00+00:00

There was an architect, and a decorator, and a tailor if you please, from Vienna (for the curtains), also a champion swimmer - female - to inaugurate the underground swimming pool ... When I managed at last to pour my tale of woe into his luckless ear, he called me an old fuddy-duddy. He loved these expressions - he'd been at Eton. 'You're an old fuddy-duddy, Major,' he said. And then he grew very serious and drew himself up to his full height which was almost five feet and he said 'The trouble with you, my dear fellow, I'm sorry to tell you is you have no vision. No vision at all.' Unfonunately it turned out that I did have some - at any rate more than he - because there was a famine. You remember '12."

"Most dreadful, "said Mr. Crawford.

"One thing to be said in Dhung's favour," said Major Minnies, "he was a fool. It's worse when they're not. Like our Friend. When they are so well endowed by nature with looks, brains, personality, everything: and then to see them go to pot ... What is it, dear lady ? You're leaving us?"

"To your brandy and cigars," The three men were on their feet, watching her walk across the moonlit lawn. She went into the house but not into the drawing-room. where the servants were bringing her coffee; She went up on the terrace and leaned thoughtfully on the parapet. She could see the three men still at table down below. Probably now that she had gone they were talking more freely-about the Nawab and his mysterious misdeeds. She felt strange, strange. She looked beyond the little tableau in her garden of three Englishmen in dinner jackets blowing smoke from their cigars while the servants hovered around them with decanters: she had a moonlight view of the Saunders'

house, then the spire of the little church and the graves in the cemetery, and beyond that the flat landscape she knew so well, those miles of dun earth that led to Khatm.

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