Last Tenko [antikvár]

1 Home For some reason, which eluded her, Marion did not turn off the tree-shaded pavement of Alexandra Road into the driveway of the house. She stopped and stood there in the humid heat, and surveyed her home. As always, she admired its almost prim colonial neatness: a benevolent colonel's lady of a house, dignified without being forbidding, impeccably turned out in white, down to where the slope of the verandah roof marked the hipline's outward curve; feminine also in its trim but colourful flower borders, the razored lawns and constantly raked gravel pathways and drive as immaculately groomed as Marion herself; and she was a colonel's lady, too. From first sight she had thought it a delightful house, by far the best she and Clifford Jefferson had been allocated in fifteen years. When she had married him as a subaltern at Aldershot it had been in the knowledge that 'home', throughout his career in the Service, would be no fixed point in a world of movement and change. Only shallow roots would be possible, when each two or three years in a place would end in yet another move to another, half a world away perhaps, with a different climate, a different race and tongue, different smells, a different pace and style of life, different acquaintances of one's own sort, in the usual proportions of friendly, agreeable, aloof, and obnoxious. England, India, Hong Kong, England again, Hong Kong again: the sequence had progressed predictably as the British Army moved its pieces about the chessboard of the Empire, sometimes purposefully, as often merely a move for