The Mudflats of the Dead

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Palgrave was in search of inspiration; that is how he put it to himself, although not to those of his circle who had asked him how he intended to spend his holidays. What he meant was that he needed a plot for his second novel. He had been overjoyed when his first book had been accepted, the more so when he signed a contract which called for another two novels. The signing, however, was six months old and, strive as he might, not a single idea which could form the basis of a second novel had come into his head.

‘And if not a second, how on earth can I manage a third?’ he had asked himself miserably on the eve of the school’s seven-week summer vacation, as he stared at the rows of empty desks in a form-room he had grown to hate. He had been reminded of himself at the age of nine, seated in a similar room, but in a pupil’s desk, not at the teacher’s table. The end of term examinations had been over, sports day had come and gone, the little boys were restless and fidgety, the form-master was bored and had run out of subjects for the weekly essay. Falling back on a well-tried but never very successful formula, he had told his class to choose their own subjects for composition. Having stifled the groans and the reproachful cries of ‘Oh, sir! which this shifting of his responsibilities had evoked, Palgrave’s form-master had spent the next twenty minutes on the boys’ reports and in trying to find alternatives to Works well on the whole or Could do better or the even less helpful, from the child’s or the parents’ point of view, Finds this subject difficult. Failing in this object, he had laid the blotter over the reports and resorted to his usual practice of strolling up and down between the rows of desks to see how his embryo and mostly unwilling authors were getting on.

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