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Dust off the loose grass. Getting to the feet still creates disorientation, this wears off here in the garden, where it's usual to stroll slowly unless one is a boy racing to catch a ball. A rose responds to closeness with faint scent. Lilies: slugs, snails, suck the thick, sculptured stems, some years in the pest cycle. In reconciliation – maybe – with the playmate, there is taken up an adult offer of a cent for each snail gathered. To squash them was messy and they were dropped to die in a pail of water. Hot? A snail is not a bird. There's a ceiling at which compassion begins, lowly creatures are below it. That's the i
The ring from the house is Berenice's second call of the day. Excitement in her voice, her vocabulary a genre she's speaking from, she's just received confirmation of the big deal, a contract that includes all television, radio, Internet rights as well as newsprint, with clients who've closed their account with a sky-high-profile rival agency and come to her stable. He is aware this exaltation is also relief because her commission on such a deal will be substantial enough to help pay laboratories and doctors.
– And you? – A different voice, the cadence of the unspoken between them. He can tell her there's an email from Emma.
– Oh Emma's great! Read it to me? – no, when I come this afternoon. -
At what is designated his lunchtime, Primrose has left a salad and fresh bread set out, coffee on the electric hot tray, there's a call from his mother, but the preoccupation in that voice is different. She has lost a case, judgment given against her client. She does not bother him with the telling of it. He would only feel he must commiserate. Why should he. The judgment on him, from whom, who knows where, has no recourse; there will be an application for right to appeal, on behalf of the client.
It is Agency style that clients at once address even senior perso
She hears herself convincing sceptical clients with enthusiastic voice, fan-spread hands winking magenta fingernails, bracelets sliding back on rather beautiful forearms, of the intelligence of her plan of action. From the most dourly resistant of them she drew admiration to be read in the relaxation of face muscles although they continued to let their sidekicks do the questioning. In-house, between consultations with clients, there was the usual bantering and exchange of private views on their idiosyncrasies – Agency gossip with colleagues, several of whom were black, now, in the Agency's policy of self-interest showing conformation to Affirmative Action (some clients came from new black-owned companies), young women indistinguishable in their styles of dress and vocational jargon, except for the colour of their skin and elaborate arrangements of their hair. Only a select few of her colleagues knew the details of what had happened to that rather dishy man of hers who was always off in the bush saving the planet. Disaster is private, in its way, as love is. Other people will be pruriently curious (love-matters) or trivialise with their syrup of sympathy (matters of disaster).
Her professional persona, carrying on for her. That had to be. She drank champagne someone brought in to celebrate the triumphant contract, quipped and laughed in shared pride. She went out often to di
Most unfortunate it was decided that the grandparents with whom little Nickie got along so happily, perhaps should have no contact with him, though the doctors had been vague about whether secondhand proximity to emanation was any danger; Lyndsay went to Chambers and Adrian mixed with fellow board members. Yet certainly a wise precaution, no matter how remote the shaft of invisible light might be, for the grandmother not to be in the proximity of the child since she was the one who touched what had been against the lit-up body, clothes, sheets, the utensils that came from contact with lips and tongue. Lyndsay and Adrian tactfully left the couple alone in the garden if they happened to be home when Be