Volume 27, Number 1 · February 7, 1980
Fair Play
By Robert Towers
On the Edge of the Cliff
by V.S. Pritchett
Random House, 179 pp., $8.95
In one of the best stories of this exhilarating collection, a rather dim, elderly, sentimentally religious lady, Mrs. Bittell, 'whose family were army people,' befriends an equally dim, sentimentally homosexual young man who works at the tea counter of a famous London shop, Murgatroyd and Foot's. This 'rather quaint person'—as Mrs. Bittell refers to him—comes on Wednesdays (his day off) to have tea at her large flat, where she sits among 'the wrongs and relics of her seventy years.' One afternoon, after gazing at her ancestral portraits, the young man, Sidney, is reminded of a television program, 'The Battle of Waterloo,' which he had seen the previous night.
Review, 1999 words
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