PEPAC novel: excerpt: "Meanwhile ..."

Meanwhile, some forty miles to the North West of Hillingdon in the village of Tweedale, nestled deep in the beech forests of the Chiltern Hills, a High Court Judge sits in the grand sitting room of his Tudor manor house.

Sir Ronald Armitage is a smug, fat little man.  Big, round spectacles and a flat nose make him look like a goggle-eyed toad.   Replete and slumped in a Louis XV armchair, he is all Toad now, and happy within his Hall. 

To hand, on an antique occasional table, are a drained tumbler of whisky (Speyside) an opened packet of painkillers (Tramadol), and the local paper (the Tring Gazette; turned to the Births and Deaths page).    

In the hearth of a handsome, stone fireplace, the embers of what Sir Ronald’s wife calls a “Summer Heartener” have almost given up the ghost, holding out silently as pinpricks of red in the gloom. 

Earlier in the night, the Judge had indeed been heartened by the heat and light of the fire, had been struck by nostalgia too by the honest, yet mysterious, tang of woodsmoke; but whatever memory had been evoked he could not recall, nor was he sure that specifics were commonly a part of the mental process of nostalgia at all.  Just one of those cognitive peculiarities on which entire professions, myths, obsessions — wars even — were so flimsily based.

The Judge is lethargic now.  Tranquilisers, natural and pharmaceutical, throb gently through his bloodstream.  He is content to let this quiet hour pass him by as it pleases.