An Awfully Big Adventure - Beryl Bainbridge [0]
An Awfully Big Adventure
About the Author
An Awfully Big Adventure
Dedication
Copyright
Chapter 0
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 0
About the Author
Beryl Bainbridge is the author of seventeen novels, two travel books and five plays for stage and television. The Dressmaker, The Bottle Factory Outing, An Awfully Big Adventure, Every Man for Himself and Master Georgie (which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize) were all shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Every Man for Himself was awarded the Whitbread Novel of the Year Prize. She won the Guardian Fiction Prize with The Dressmaker and the Whitbread Prize with Injury Time. The Bottle Factory Outing, Sweet William and The Dressmaker have been adapted for film, as was An Awfully Big Adventure, which starred Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman. Beryl Bainbridge died in July 2010.
AN AWFULLY
BIG ADVENTURE
Beryl Bainbridge
Hachette Digital
www.littlebrown.co.uk
For Yolanta and Derwent May
Published by Hachette Digital 2010
First published in Great Britain by Duckworth in 1989
Published with minor revisions by Penguin Books in 1991
Copyright © Beryl Bainbridge, 1989, 1990
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the Special Trustees of the Hospitals for Sick Children for their permission to quote from J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan; to Faber & Faber Ltd for kind permission to reprint four lines from ‘Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar’ from Collected Poems 1909–1962 by T. S. Eliot; and to Peters Fraser and Dunlop for permission to reprint a quotation from Dangerous Corner by J. B. Priestley.
All characters in this publication other than those clearly in the public domain are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
eBook ISBN 978 0 748 12526 5
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SLIGHTLY: (Examining the fallen Wendy more minutely) This is no bird; I think it must be a lady.
NIBS: (Who would have preferred it to be a bird) And Tootles has killed her.
CURLY: Now I see. Peter was bringing her to us. (They wonder for what object).
OMNES: (Though everyone of them had wanted to take a shot at her) Oh, Tootles!
TOOTLES: (Gulping) I did it. When ladies used to come to me in dreams I said: ‘Pretty mother‘, but when she really came I shot her.
James Barrie, Peter Pan, Act Two.
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When the fire curtain had been lowered and the doors were at last closed, Meredith thought he heard a child crying. He switched on the house lights, but of course there was no one there. Some unfortunate had left a teddy-bear perched on the tip-up seat in the third row.
The girl was waiting for him in the property room. At his approach she stepped backwards, as though afraid he would strike her. He didn’t look at her; he simply told her, in that particular tone of voice which in the past he had always used for other people, that he wasn’t interested in excuses and that in any case there were none that would fit the bill.
‘I was upset,’ she protested. ‘Anybody would be. It will never happen again.’
They both heard a door opening on the floor above, and footsteps as Rose clumped along the passage.
‘If it was up to me,’ he said, lowering his voice, ‘you wouldn’t get the chance.’
‘You