The Qirl in a Swing, Richard Adams's fourth major novel, is set, like Watership Down, in the Berkshire countryside. Yet the story could hardly be more different in content from his previous world-wide bestsellers. This is the haunting and haunted tale, set in the early 1970s, of a passionate love-affair, overwhelmingly beautiful but at the same time threatened by intimations of a frightening supernatural dimension. Alan Desland, living in the country town of Newbury, has inherited his father's business in antique and modern ceramics. An unlikely candidate for the events that are to overtake him, Alan appears a stable, prosperous and scholarly, if slightly unworldly, young man. Only one hint of the danger that lies ahead has been revealed: from adolescence he has been the unwilling, and sometimes unwitting, victim of occasional psychic experiences, whether in dreams or in his daily life. On a business visit to Copenhagen he meets Kathe Geutner, a German girl of extraordinary beauty. Their love is mutual and instantaneous. But apart from the glowing and passionate intensity of their pleasure in one another, what does Alan really know of Kathe, of her life and origins? After their marriage in Florida and return to England it is Kathe who acquires for almost nothing at a local sale the porcelain figure known as 'The Girl in a Swing' - a ceramic rarity of the greatest value. Their happiness should be complete - but it is not: as their life together is invaded by a growing fear of what has remained unspoken between them, the scene gradually darkens. Omens of impending grief follow upon one another, the Eumenides gather for vengeance, the darkest shadows close in with the awful inevitability of a Greek tragedy. It is a drama which mounts in tension to a terrible and horrifying climax. (continued on back flap) ISBN 07139 1345 2 $12.95 Adams, Richard George The girl in a swing RICHARD ADAMS THE GIRL IN A SWING ALLEN LANE ALLEN LANE Penguin Books Ltd 536 King's Road London SW10 OUH First published 1980 Copyright ? Richard Adams, 1980 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN 0 7139 1345 2 Set in Intertype Lectura V Richard Clay (The Chaucer Press), Ltd. * " Bungay, Suffolk To Rosamond, with love PREFACE THIS story is such a mixture that even upon reflection I cannot be sure of unravelling the experienced from the imagined. There seemed no point in giving Bradfield a pseudonym, since it is widely known to be unique in having a Greek theatre where plays are performed in the original Greek. There also seemed little point in disguising the fact that David Raeburn produced the Agamemnon of 1958. However, he was not assisted by either Alan Desland or Kirsten, since they, like Mr and Mrs Cook, Alan's housemaster and the other Bradfieldians mentioned, are entirely fictitious. Similarly, the localities in and near Copenhagen are real though the 'Golden Pheasant' restaurant is not. Jarl and Jytte Borgen are real and so is Per Simonsen, but Mr Hansen and his office staff are fictitious. Both Tony Redwood and Mr Steinberg are fictitious, but Lee Dubose happens to be real. And so on. Newbury, like many towns in England, has changed much during recent times, but I have written of it con amore, as I remember it, and hope I may be excused any minor anachronisms such as, for example, mention of a building which may in fact no longer be there. In my day there had been for many years an old-established china business in Northbrook Street, but I wish to emphasize that its proprietor - a lifelong friend - and staff bear no resemblance whatever to Alan Desland, Mrs Taswell and Deirdre, and certainly did not in any way suggest the story to my mind. So many people have helped me in one way or another that they might almost be said to constitute a syndicate. I thank them all most warmly, viz. my daughter Rosamond, Robert Andrewes, Alan Barrett, Jarl and Jytte Borgen, Bob Chambers, Barbara Griggs, John Guest, Reginald Haggar, Helgi Jonsson, Bob Lamming, Don Lineback, John Mallet, Janet Morgan, Per Simonsen and Claire Wrench. Special thanks are due to my wife Elizabeth, for her invaluable help on ceramics; and to my secretary, Janice Kneale, whose patience and accuracy in typing and other labours were of the greatest value. NOTE No phonetics, of course, convey the exact German inflexion, but a reader who pronounces 'Kathe' to rhyme with the English word 'later' will be near enough. Translations of the lines from German poems, etc., mentioned by Alan and Kathe (together with a very brief note on the opening of the Agamemnon) are given at the end of the book. How do you like to go up in a swing, Up in the air so blue? Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing Ever a child can dol Up in the air and over the wall, Till I can see so wide, Rivers and trees and cattle and all Over the countryside Till I look down on the garden green, Down on the roof so brown Up in the air I go flying again, Up in the air and down! ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON I ALL day it has been windy - strange weather for late July the wind swirling through the hedges like an invisible floodtide among seaweed; tugging, compelling them in its own direction, dragging them one way until the patches of elder and privet sagged outward from the tougher stretches of blackthorn on either side. It ripped the purple clematis from its trellis and whirled away twigs and green leaves from the oaks at the bottom of the shrubbery. An hour ago it left the garden, but now, as evening falls, I can see it still tussling along the ridge of the downs four miles to southward. The beeches of Cottington's Clump stand out plainly, swaying in turmoil against the pale sky, though here not a breath remains to move a blade of grass: and scarcely a sound; the blackbirds silent as the grasshoppers, the crickets, within their thick, yellow-leaved holly-bush, not yet roused to their nightly chirping. Colours change in twilight. The blooms of the giant dahlias - Black Monarch and Anna Benedict - no longer glow dark-red, but loom ashen-dusky, like great, lightless lanterns tied to their stakes. The downs have come close - junipers, beeches and yews so distinct that you might imagine you could toss a stone onto the slope of Cottington's Hill. Yet this aspect, which seems an illusion, is natural, a magnification brought about by the rain-laden air. Rain will follow the wind, probably before midnight; a steady, quenching rain on the hollyhocks and lilies, the oaks and the acres of wheat and barley stretching beyond the lane. Kathe was sensitive as a dragon-fly to wind, sun and weather. On a wet evening, having opened the French windows to let in the sound and smell of the rain, she would play the piano in a gentle, melancholy largo of response to the pouring from grey clouds to the lawn and the glistening branches: so that as I came home, up the length of the garden lying easy under the summer downpour, I would recognize at one and the same time the clamour of a thrush and - it might be - a Chopin prelude. As I stepped in she would break off, smiling, raise her hands from the keys and open her arms in a magnificent gesture of warmth and welcome - the attitude of Hera or Demeter; as though both to thank me for the gift of all that lay around her and to invite - to summon - me to receive it again in her embrace. Upon such an evening our bodies, lying clasped together, would drift scarcely even glide - to harbour, almost without propulsion or guidance, down a gentle stream of pleasure, into and at length out of the smooth current, grounding at last with the faintest, mutual shuddering along their length; and then would return the sound of the rain, the smell of the wet garden outside, and on the nearby wall the moving shadows of the leaves and the quick, here-and-gone gleam of a silver sunset. How should I not weep? Last night I dreamt that I woke to hear some strange, barely audible sound from downstairs - a kind of thin tintinnabulation, like those coloured-glass bird-scarers which in my childhood were still sold for hanging up to glitter and tinkle in the garden breeze. I thought I went downstairs to the drawing-room. The doors of the china cabinets were standing open, but all the figures were in their places - the Bow Liberty and Matrimony, the Four Seasons of Neale earthenware, the Reinicke girl on her cow; yes, and she herself - the Girl in a Swing. It was from these that the sound came, for they were weeping. Their tears were falling in tiny crystals, flakes minute as grains of sand; and had covered, as with snow, the dark-green cloth of the shelves on which they stood. In these fragments their glaze and decoration had dropped away. Already some were almost unrecognizable. The collection was ruined. I fell on my knees, crying, like a child, 'Come back! O please come back!' and woke to find myself weeping in reality. I knew, of course, that nothing could be amiss with the collection, yet still I got up and went downstairs; perhaps to 10 prove to myself that there remained something for which I cared enough to walk twenty yards in the middle of the night. I took out the Copenhagen plate, with its underglaze blue wave mark, and for a time sat looking at the gilt dentil edge and Rosa Mundi spray, designed when Mozart was still in his twenties and thirty years before Napoleon sent half a mil...
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