Love Is Like That By Cecil Roberts

In church one Sunday Morning, in the gay seaside resort of Ligurio on the Italian Riviera, the Reverend Tobias Smollett began to read, for the First Lesson, The Song of Solomon. Mr Smollett, a benign octogenarian, found himself accidentally embarked on that Old Testament love song without realising in the least its effect on the three dozed representatives of the sadly-shrunken English colony who were in his congregation. Mrs Gavin, bitter as the aloes that grew beneath her pension, sat up and took notice, not without pleasure. Commander Maysmith, the community’s aged Beau Brummell, recalled his youth and the Haiti revolution from which he rescued the lovely young widow who became his wife. The colony’s nonagenarian, Mr Henry Crackenthorpe, looked back on a long life and remembered the time when he too had been like a young roe upon the mountain. Ages ago, he had fled from a convent-hospital on a Tuscan hillside with the lovely young nun who had nursed him, an abduction that had changed his life. Most startled of all by the Reverend Tobias’s entanglement with Solomon’s love song was Sir Audrey Wellington. The eminent conductor had just returned from an idyllic adventure in Merano. In that mountain paradise he had been shaken by an experience devastating in its lyrical quality. The Reverend Tobias could surely have no knowledge of how, only a few days before, a vivacious young woman had showed him, scarred as he was by two unhappy affairs, that romance had not passed him over for ever. There were others in the congregation that morning who were perturbed. There was Mrs Callender, wo lived like a recluse in her walled-in villa above the church