The Separation

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The rain was falling steadily on Buxton that Thursday afternoon in March, the town veiled by drifting low clouds, grey and discouraging. Stuart Gratton was sitting at a small table in the brightly lit bookshop window with his back to the street, but from time to time he turned to look outside at the slow-moving cars and trucks, the pedestrians splashing along with their faces averted, umbrellas low over their shoulders.

On the table before him was a glass of wine which he had almost finished drinking and next to it a half-empty half-bottle of hock. Beside the wine glass was a narrow-necked flute, with a single red rose standing upright in the water. On the table to his right was a pile of unsold copies of his most recent hardcover book, The Exhausted Rage, an oral history of the experiences of some of the men who took part in Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. To his left, on the edge of the table, were two smaller piles of unsold copies of his books, both paperback editions reissued to coincide with the new hardcover. One of the titles was The Last Day of War, the book published in 1981 which had established his reputation and which had been in print more or less ever since. The other was called The Silver Dragons, another oral history, this one recounted by some of the soldiers and airmen who took part in the Sino-American War in the mid-1940s.

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