‘AND
THEN, OF COURSE, SHE’S A CHASER.’
The colonel sat forward in his chair over the
clubroom fire, while outside a high wind whirled round the hotel and the December sunshine
shone down without
warmth on the Sussex Riviera.
‘Anything in trousers,’ the colonel said. ‘During the summer it was perfectly
disgusting. She was staying in the house then.’
‘Has she ever chased you?’ Gerard St John asked him.
‘No bloody fear! I think she’s rather frightened of me, you know.’
The colonel, who was the secretary of the
club, spoke in a voice which made credulous people believe he had been to Oxford. When addressing any of the bridge-members, his accent became
especially exaggerated. He modulated his manner and opinions upon the traditional retired
colonel of fiction and the stage.
NOTE:
I have spent a fair amount of time on the Sussex Riviera in mid-winter and would like to return there again, in
mid-winter to show my family how truly odd and difficult the slanted-freezing-rain Channel-front weather is,
and in mid-summer so that I can finally visit the place "in season."
I love
it there, both inside and outside its cities and towns, for walking, thinking and
imagining.
This (like me) is an excerpt of an excerpt
-- an unpublished piece of
"longer fiction" by Julian Maclaren-Ross, whose Of Love And Hunger is one of the finest
Brighton novels.
So many directions -- potential running
directions -- but I'm stopped dead and blocked tonight. It's the change of seasons, I guess. Perhaps it’s time to stop down, to try to pull it all into focus.
