The Interpreter [antikvár]

I THERE WAS A PRETTY PICTURE OF LIFE AND SOME pleasing sounds in the Surrey village of Spurfold on a July day in the year 1941. The date is worth mentioning because pretty pictures of life were in sharp contrast to the headlines of the morning papers just delivered round the village by a boy on a bicycle, unperturbed by the daily tale of death and human agony in his bundle of newsprint. That morning German armies were smashing their way nearer to Moscow. The stench of dead bodies—until three weeks before the living youth of Germany and Russia—wafted over the ruins to Smolensk, but did not reach as far as Surrey, which was still fragrant with flowers. Fifty more Frenchmen who had been seized as hostages had been executed for the murder of a German officer by unknown men. Famine and pestilence raged in Poland, where thousands of civilian prisoners were dying behind the barbed wire of concentration camps. The R.A.F. had bombed Hamburg again In the village of Spurfold the morning sun was streaming through the leaded windows of an old cottage with tall chimneys making a diamond-shaped pattern of light on the opposite v/all. On the breakfast table, which had just been laid by a stout woman who moved heavily about the room, was a bowl of roses not yet fully blown, and exquisite in form and colour. It was a low-ceilinged room with a black beam across it, and a fireplace of red brick and blackened hearth stones, where centuries ago the rustics here had warmed their bones and baked their bread by wood fires. The room was daintily furnished with signs of the modern spirit, showing that no rustics lived here now. On one of the walls, for instance, was a portrait, very modern in style and technique, of a young woman with merry eyes which laughed out of the canvas. On