School for Love [antikvár]

1 When they reached the top of the hill from which the road snaked down in the Seven Sisters' bends, the driver nodded to the opposite hill and said: 'El-telq.' Felix knew that did not mean Jerusalem, although Jerusalem was over there. He asked: 'El-telq?' The driver smiled, shrugged, could not explain. Felix felt he ought to respond in some way. To show interest, he wound down the window and put his head out; the air, striking him with a glassy freshness, made him think of England. He had not been home since before the war when he was a small boy. That was the time his father had gone abroad alone and he and his mother had lived in Bath; the best time of all. Now, in spite of everything, the cold gave him a slight exhilaration. The exhilaration was painful, like blood returning to a cramped limb, for it seemed to him he had had no feeUngs at all since his mother's death. At once, of course, he was jolted by the realization there was nothing to feel exhilarated about. He would never see his mother again. Not only that - he had now to face the real Miss Bohun. Ever since the letter arrived inviting him to Jerusalem, an imaginary Miss Bohun, exactly like his mother, had been standing in a doorway with her arms open for Felix. She was still there when the plane touched down at Lydda and while the taxi was taking him from the mild, flat seaboard up into mountains where rocks overhung the road as though an avalanche had been arrested in mid-descent. Now he knew there was not a chance she would be like his mother. For one thing, she was years older; she was older even than his father, who had always seemed elderly and remote. Although she was not related to him - Miss Bohun had been an adopted child of his father's parents - Felix was afraid she might resemble his father. Another thing. Miss Bohun was a person whom his mother had not wanted to visit. Whenever his father