198
Mrs Beverly Tompset
Outward appearance
Worn, middle-aged woman, grey face, bright red hair, green overcoat,
black jeans, loafers. Reading The English Verb . The
lettering is 3-D and emerges from the distance, like the opening of
Star Wars . LTP, it says, as if that
were something thrilling.
Inside information
Lecturer in commercial sociology at Bruenwalt
International. Her foreign students tend to speak textbook English.
They cannot fathom English verbs, which are modified out of
recognition by prepositions. 'To beat' is different from 'to beat up'.
Beverly is yet to find a textbook that adequately explains this.
What she is doing or thinking
She is thinking of Attila, the homeless Big Issue
salesman outside Waterloo. She wants him to lecture her students on
English. He's a Cossack but his English is flawlessly American and
colloquial. Perhaps he could explain prepositional verbs to them. As it
happens, there is a lad on the course from the old Soviet Republics.
Beverly is sure that it would be a relief for Attila to talk to someone
from home.
She thinks of her lovely, plump, pallid husband. How can she explain to
him or herself that she is love with wild Cossack who worked many
years on American merchant vessels? Beverly has spent her life
banishing romance, all that novelettish stuff. She can banish it again.
But for now, surely it's all right to dream a little bit of being swept up
in firm, brown, young arms? She lowers the book and sighs.
In the meantime, she can at least get him work. Again, she lifts up
The English Verb .
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