Two Short Stories

Two very short and vague reviews because I wanted to take part in Daphne du Maurier Reading Week, hosted by HeavenAli and it ends tomorrow. Not After Midnight and The Way of the Cross are both set during holidays taken at Easter time and are included in the Don’t Look Now collection of short stories and both were unsurprisingly excellent.

In Not After Midnight, Mr Timothy Grey takes a painting holiday in Crete. He’s pompous and stuffy and very funny while cringingly embarrassing – he’s a teacher at a boys prep school but puts ‘professor’ on his passport. Chalet 62 takes his fancy at the resort and he stomps about until he gets it – but why are they so against letting that particular chalet and who was the last person to stay there? While at the bar ordering a lemonade he notices an American couple, the loud obnoxious man is very drunk and beside him his deaf wife sits silently. They are staying at No.38 just across the bay and go out all day everyday An hotel, a small group of people, and a body, what is going on?

‘Then silence. No more rattling of the shutters. No more breathing.’

There’s a tension that runs just under the surface and a point where the story becomes genuinely thrilling. He’s still the same self important twit but now I was caught up in his adventure and rooting for him!

A Film For May: Don’t Look Now

John and Laura are in Venice a city they’ve visited before to try and escape the pain of their young daughters death. One lunchtime they become aware of a couple of elderly women watching them intently. They find out that one of the women has second sight and can see their daughter. As Laura becomes increasingly friendly with the sisters, John becomes increasingly worried.

When a telephone call comes through from their son’s school in England saying that he is ill, Laura takes the first flight to be with him leaving John to follow with the car the next day. But going along the Grand Canal he notices a vaporetto going back to Venice and on board are the elderly sisters and Laura.

He returns to Venice, but Laura is nowhere to be found and John finds himself getting caught up in a train of strange and violent events.

Frenchman’s Creek

In the court of Charles II, Lady Dona St Columb bored and fed up with her superficial world, is involved in every scandal. Beautiful, careless, insolent and deliberately indifferent she aims to shock. But secretly she’s disgusted with herself and so sets out with her children and their nurse for Navron, the isolated Cornish Estate that belongs to her husband.

Free from her drunken sop of a husband and his grisly friends, she runs barefoot through the grass with flowers in her disheveled ringlets and basks in the peace.

But not for long. She sees a sail on the horizon and hears from Lord Godolphin, a local landowner that there are pirates about, led by an elusive Frenchman.