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and neutral – perhaps that was what made the castle and its rock seem so black.
    She stepped down from the train with her suitcase ('Only one suitcase,' Romer had insisted) and wandered up the platform. All he had told her was that she would be met. She looked about her at the families and couples greeting each other and embracing, politely declined the services of a porter and walked out into the main concourse of Waverley Station.
    'Miss Dalton?'
    She turned, thinking how quickly one becomes accustomed to a new name – she had been Miss Eve Dalton for only two days now – and saw that the man facing her was stout in a too tight grey suit and a too tight collar.
    'I'm Staff Sergeant Law,' the man said. 'Please follow me.' He did not offer to carry her suitcase.

2. Ludger Kleist
    '"YES, MRS AMBERSON THOUGHT, it was my doing nothing that made the difference."'
    Hugues looked more than usually puzzled, almost panicked in fact. He was always puzzled by English grammar, anyway – frowning, muttering, talking to himself in French – but today I had painted him into a corner
    'My doing nothing – what?' he said, helplessly.
    'My doing nothing – nothing. It's a gerund.' I tried to look alert and interested but decided, there and then, to cut the lesson short by ten minutes. I felt the pressure of desperate concentration in my head – I had been almost furious in my application, all to keep my mind occupied – but my attention was beginning to fray badly. 'We'll tackle the gerund and gerundive tomorrow,' I said, closing the book (Life with the Ambersons, vol.III) then added, apologetically, aware of the agitation I'd aroused in him, 'C'est très compliqué.'
    'Ah, bon.'
    Like Hugues, I too was sick of the Amberson family and their laborious journey through the labyrinth of English grammar. And yet I was still bound to them like an indentured servant – tied to the Ambersons and their horrible lifestyle – and the new pupil was due to arrive: only another two hours in their company to go.
    Hugues pulled on his sports jacket – it was olive green with a charcoal check and I thought the material was cashmere. It was meant to look, I supposed, like the sort of jacket that an Englishman – in some mythological English world – would unreflectingly don to go and see to his hounds, or meet his estate manager, or take tea with his maiden aunt, but I had to confess I had yet to encounter a fellow countryman sporting clothing quite so fine and so well cut.
    Hugues Corbillard stood in my small, narrow study, pensively stroking his blond moustache, a troubled expression still on his face – thinking about the gerund and gerundive, I supposed. He was a rising young executive in P'TIT PRIX, a low-cost French supermarket chain, and had been obliged by senior management to improve his English so that P'TIT PRIX could access new markets. I liked him – actually, I liked most of my pupils – Hugues was a rare lazy one: often he spoke French to me throughout the lesson and I English to him, but today had been something of an assault course. Usually we talked about anything except English grammar, anything to avoid the Amberson family and their doings – their trips, their modest crises (plumbing failures, chicken-pox, broken limbs), visits from relatives, Christmas holidays, children's exams, etcetera – and more and more our conversation returned to the unusual heat of this English summer, how Hugues was slowly stifling in his broiling bed and breakfast, about his incomprehension at being obliged to sit down to eat a three-course, starchy evening meal at 6.00 p.m., with the sun slamming down on the scorched, dehydrated garden. When my conscience pricked me and I felt I should remonstrate and urge him to speak in English, Hugues would say that it was all conversation, n'est ce pas? with a shy guilty smile, conscious he was breaking the strict terms of the contract, it must be helping his comprehension, surely? I did not disagree: I