Piano was – well, all musical instruments were taught in this very rigid, formal, classical method when I was young.
I had to wonder how Ginny could hold her head up under the weight of cosmetics smeared all over her face. Underneath it all, she may have been quite pretty. Or she may have been Dirk Bogarde. I will never know.
In war, whichever side may call itself the victor, there are no winners, but all are losers.” Neville Chamberlain.
To follow somebody, without them knowing that you’re doing it, is not the doddle they make it seem in films. I’ve had some experience of professional following, and a lot more experience of professional going back to the office and saying ‘we lost him’. Unless your quarry is deaf, tunnel-sighted and lame, you need at least a dozen people and fifteen thousand quids-worth of short-wave radio to make a decent go of it.
Solomon raised an eyebrow. Or rather, he left it where it was and dropped his body slightly.
Later, a very fat woman came in with a trolley and put a plate of something brown and foul-smelling on a table beside me. I couldn’t imagine what I’d ever done to her, but whatever it was, it must have been bad. She obviously realised that she’d over-reacted, because half an hour later she came and took the plate away again.
It’s not the way we do it on planet Earth, certainly.
His name was Rayner. First name unknown. By me, at any rate, and therefore, presumably, by you too.
I saw a man this morning Who did not wish to die” Patrick Shaw-Stewart.
Look,’ I said, ‘I’ll be honest with you. You’re a big chap, and I’m sure you can do more press-ups than I can. And I admire you for it. This world needs people to be able to do press-ups. It’s important.
Well, that obviously wasn’t good enough. Not by a long shot. Saying period at the end of something doesn’t make it incontrovertible.
I realise it must be strange for you, being here in England. I realise that we must strike you as a nation of hicks, who only got hot and cold running water the day before you flew in, but even so, I have to tell you that I’ve heard a lot of this before.
The first item was fighting under the name ‘Crostini of Mealed Tarroce, with Benatore Potatoes’ and weighed in at an impressive twelve pounds sixty-five. The Ralph Lauren blonde came over and asked me if I needed any help with the menu, and I asked her to explain what potatoes were. She didn’t laugh.
Face-cream, hand-cream, nose-cream, eye-cream. I wondered for a moment how serious it would be if you ever got home drunk and accidentally put face-cream on your hands or hand-cream on your face.
She kissed me. She kissed me. What I mean is, I was standing there, lips puckered, brain puckered, and she just stepped up and threw her tongue into my mouth. For a moment, I thought maybe she’d tripped on a floorboard and stuck out her tongue as a reflex – but that didn’t seem very likely somehow, and anyway, once she’d got her balance back, wouldn’t she have put her tongue away again? No, she was definitely kissing me.
She just played with it slowly, and then pointed a pair of grey eyes at me. I say a pair. I mean her pair. She didn’t get a pair of someone else’s out from a drawer and point them at me. She pointed her own pair of huge, pale, grey, pale, huge eyes at me. The sort of eyes that can make a grown man talk gibberish to himself. Get a grip, for Christ’s sake.
I had an absolutely revolting lunch with O’Neal. Although the food was pretty good.
The French came to Morocco to build roads, railways, hospitals, schools, fashion sense – all the things that the average Frenchman knows to be indispensable to a modern civilization – and when five o’clock came, and the French looked upon their works and saw that they were good, they reckoned they had bloody well earned the right to live like Maharajahs. Which, for a time, they did.
I stood and waited on the open second-floor landing, and tried to imagine what appalling series of bureaucratic errors had led to this estate being so well looked after. In most parts of London, they collect the dustbins from the middle-class streets and empty them into the council estates, before setting fire to a couple of Ford Cortinas on the pavement.
If you want a place guarded properly, hire Germans.
I stayed where I was and watched. The man and the corridor. He didn’t make any other noise, and the corridor didn’t do anything that corridors don’t normally do.