From education to catastrophe

‘I do feel the strongest urge to talk,’ confides the narrator when a chance meeting with the beautiful Olivia after more than 30 years brings back disturbing memories of what she tells us is ‘a terrible story’. The encounter takes place in Bordeaux where Kate, American, is sightseeing while her English husband attends a conference, and for reasons which we shall eventually learn it threatens to shatter her orderly life. What she wants is an impartial ‘stranger on a train’ to tell her story to, and we are it — sitting, in Kate’s imagination, in a warm carriage crossing the Russian steppes, waiting for the approach of the samovar and little sticky cakes. The device is not intrusive but ensures that the story, although it involves lurid scandal, a tragic death and much philosophical speculation, is told in a light, intimate tone of voice: well-behaved, well-educated, self-deprecating and eager like its owner.

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Kristina Murkett

There’s an obvious reason pre-school children are falling behind

It all begins in the 1950s at the exclusive Sweet Briar College in Virginia with the arrival of the cosmopolitan and aloofly glamorous Olivia — packed off by her parents, it is rumoured, to escape a fortune-hunter. A small group of girls sets out on the grand tour of Europe for which their ‘entire education had been, if unintentionally, a preparation’. They travel under the enlightened but — despite her sensible shoes and ‘greying hair set in a cold wave’ — wildly irresponsible chaperonage of Miss Grist the history teacher. Three young men join the party in Rome — a brother, a lover and an aristocratic English cousin (Miss Grist being too busy kicking up her lace-up English Oxfords in the Coliseum by moonlight, or too wise, to object) and after a spot of dolce vita — masked balls in Renaissance palaces and picnics on the Palatine hill — a reduced party proceeds duenna-less to Egypt where the story reaches its unexpectedly tragic climax.