Excerpt from The Fortnight in September by R.C. Sherriff, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Excerpt
The Fortnight in September

On rainy days, when the clouds drove across on a westerly wind, the signs of fine weather came from over the Railway Embankment at the bottom of the garden. Many a time, when Mrs. Stevens specially wanted it to clear up, she would look round the corner of the side door and search along the horizon of the Railway Embankment for a streak of lighter sky.

The Embankment—stretching without break to right and left—divided the world for Mrs. Stevens. On her side was Dulwich and her home: long friendly roads, dotted here and there with the houses of people she knew. On her side, too, half a mile across the housetops, loomed the Crystal Palace, which sometimes in the autumn flashed golden squares of sunset over to them. Away beyond lay the open country and the trees—green corners of heathland where they used to go for picnics when Dick and Mary were children.

On the far side of the Embankment lay the other half of Mrs. Stevens's world: the half she scarcely knew. Herne Hill, Camberwell, and the lights of London that shone in overcast skies like sulphur candles in a dark, disused sick-room—that washed away, on fine nights, a little of the deep blue of the starlit heavens.

At the end of Corunna Road an asphalt footpath dived under the Embankment and emerged on the other side, but Mrs. Stevens seldom penetrated far into this other part of the world. She shopped in Dulwich, and had her friends there. Fine Saturday afternoons called them south, to the open fields and trees, out Bromley way.

Although she had lived at 22 Corunna Road for all her twenty married years, Mrs. Stevens had little idea of what lay directly opposite the end of their garden—beyond the Embankment.

Sometimes, when they passed in a train, she had tried to find out. But the train was always full, and she could not run quickly from one window to the other to take in both sides as they passed their house. She had never, therefore, been able to solve the mystery of what lay exactly on the other side although one thing she always noticed because it made her proud. As the train rattled along the Embankment a strip of thirty gardens would pass in panorama before her eyes: the thirty which made up the even numbers of Corunna Road. None of them showed up to greater advantage than No. 22, with its close-clipped lawn, neat borders, and its lilac tree. No. 22 alone had no half bricks or disused slop pails on the tool house roof.

But the garden looked sad and sorry this dripping September afternoon. It had begun to rain quite early in the morning: it was spotting when she came out of the butcher's, soon after eleven; and now, at five o'clock, a silent, listless rain was filling the hollows of the paths. She was distressed and miserable. The night before they left home for their holidays was always one of family celebration. When Dick and Mary had been children it was a night that rose almost to the height of Christmas Eve: a night voted sometimes as the best of all the holiday, although it was spent at home and the sea was still sixty miles away.

But the sea would always be calling them that evening; and when Mr. Stevens took his after-supper stroll in the garden he could almost taste the saltiness in the air. It was a habit of Mr. Stevens to linger in the garden longer than usual on that night before they went away: the Office was behind him: he had slammed the lid of his desk for fifteen splendid days, and he liked to feel the holiday had begun that evening. On the little lawn outside—in the dusk—he would open his chest and breathe the air. Then he would go to his bedroom and lay out the clothes he would wear at the sea, his gray flannel trousers, tweed sports jacket, stout brown boots, and soft tweed cap. But he would seldom wear the cap. For a whole fortnight his thin brown hair would blow in the sunlight and the breeze.

Excerpted from The Fortnight in September by R.C. Sherriff. Copyright © 2021 by R.C. Sherriff. Excerpted by permission of Scribner. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.