Synopsis:
ADAM and BEATRICE have been bruised by their separate marriages and love affairs, and have agreed to spend time together in a remote cottage - a kind of sabbatical from life.
In winter she is catatonic, he must attend to things. By the spring his caring has thawed her frozen feelings. When summer comes they are in love, and BEATRICE begs ADAM to come away and begin a new life together in the real world. He hesitates, afraid. They linger till Autumn.
Mistakes, which destroyed previous relationships, are repeated. Love dies.
Excerpt:
"Do you think when the millennium comes there won't be lovers who grow weary of their sad girls, or that wives won't weep over empty beds? Even when Jerusalem is built friends will grow apart and mothers will mourn their sons growing old.
You want me to feel for starving children? I feel for them. You want me to protest at wars that go on in the mountains? I protest. But the heart has its private aches. You must allow the heart its private aches. Not all the good great causes in this world can stop me crying for a passing love."
Reviews:
It sings, often beautifully, of how love came, and worked its transfiguration, and then went away.
Harold Hobson, The Sunday Times
