The Sabbatical: A Novel

By Michael D. O'Brien

Dr. Owen Whitfield is the elderly Oxford professor of history who first appeared in Michael O''Brien''s novel The Father''s Tale. In the events of The Sabbatical, which occur sometime later, Dr. Whitfield is looking forward to a sabbatical year of peace and quiet, gardening in his backyard, and tinkering with what he calls his latest "unpublishable book".

As the year begins, he is drawn by a series of seeming coincidences into involvement with a group of characters from across Europe, including a family that has been the target of assassination attempts by unknown powers. During his journey to Romania, the situation in which he finds himself becomes more sinister than it first seemed.

The story deals with the tension between fatalism and the providential understanding of history, with the courage and love that are necessary for navigating through a confusion of signs, and with the triumph of faith and reason over the forces of destruction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ignatius Press
• Release date: Jul 29, 2021
• ISBN: 9781642291698

Michael D. O'Brien

Michael D. O'Brien, iconographer, painter, and writer, is the popular author of many best-selling novels including Father Elijah, Strangers and Sojourners, Elijah in Jerusalem, The Father's Tale, Eclipse of the Sun, Sophia House, The Lighthouse, and Island of the World. His novels have been translated into twelve languages and widely reviewed in both secular and religious media in North America and Europe.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

In the spring of a year not long past, a man named Clement von Forschtenberg was playing a game of ball with his two children in the backyard of their home on the outskirts of a small town in Hungary. The woods at the rear of their property were budding with new foliage, and bird-song seemed to come from everywhere. Though lunch was in the offing, with aromas of newly baked bread and melted cheese drifting out of the open kitchen window, it did not dissuade them from playing, for an unusually long winter had just passed, and this was the first day of full liberation. The sun was pulsing in the cloudless sky. The scent of fresh grass was a stimulant to high spirits. The father and his son and daughter found themselves running and leaping and laughing with abandon.

On this bright Saturday afternoon, Clement had no urgent tasks to speak of and was greatly enjoying the time with his children. A high school history teacher, he had a stack of essays to mark, but these could wait. There were a few minor repairs to be made on their house, a small log structure built in the 1800s, but these too could wait. His life, devoted to much seriousness of thought and duty, hid an inherently childlike spirit. As a younger man, he had rowed during his undergraduate years at Cambridge University, had learned to play cricket, had broken an arm when tossed from a horse during his single experiment with polo, and had climbed Tom Tower in Oxford on a lark during a weekend with friends in that alternative seat of learning. Though he loved Shakespeare and Tolkien, both of whom he read with appreciation of nuances, he was at heart a continental European. His childhood had been spent in Romania, but by formation and by temperament he was a philosophical Austrian steeped in Mozart and Schubert, Rilke and Werfel. He was not in essence a Germanic xenophile. He was attached to the ethos of his Austrian ancestors mainly through traditions of festive meals, the singing of Romantic lieder with piano accompaniment, the baroque parish churches in which he had worshiped for most of his life, and the regular practice of religious pilgrimages. He now lived in Hungary because his wife was Hungarian. He was fluent in five languages.

There were further complexities in his nature, for his bloodline had been one of the Hundred Families of titled nobility closest to the last emperor. Technically speaking, he was a count, like his forefathers before him, and moreover, if his lineage were to be examined, it would be found that he was successor to a line of Fürsten, or princes. Though Clement acknowledged this part of his background, he did not attribute to it undue significance, and indeed he rarely thought about it. He was, in fact, vastly prouder of his wife and children, simply for being his beloveds.

Now here was his oldest child, a boy of thirteen years, sweating and red cheeked, his knees smeared with grass stains, running and rolling, and yelping in triumph whenever he outwitted his father: Tossing a blue rubber ball in the air, he dashed away as Clement leaped forward to catch it before it bounced. Successful in this, he in turn tossed the ball high over the head of his ten-year-old daughter. She screamed and ran with arms outstretched, but retrieved it only after it had bounced twice. Swiftly she tossed it back, where it came to rest at her father’s feet.

All three had just paused to catch their breath, grinning at each other, when Clement was arrested for an instant by something so odd that it confounded all his experience. A tiny red bug like a daylight firefly or a luminous bee was quivering on the breast of his son’s shirt. For no reason that he could explain to himself, he quickly bent and picked up the ball and threw it hard at the bee, which had the effect of startling the boy into a sideways stagger. In that very instant, Clement felt or heard a buzz whistle past his head, followed by the report of a gunshot, and a split second later a second shot. It came from the woods behind him.

Get down! he shouted at the children. They dropped to the ground and fell on their faces. Unafraid but puzzled, they looked at their father inquiringly.

Hunters, he said.

At that moment, his wife Cecilia poked her head out the kitchen window, and called, Did I hear gunshots, Clement?

Yes, love. Careless hunters, I think. No harm done. Let’s go inside, children. Quickly now!

He called the local police, and shortly afterward two constables came ambling up the driveway, looking competent, if a little bored. While one took Clement’s statement, the other went into the woods to see if he could track down the miscreant. A mobile unit was called, and a patrolman cruised along the adjacent side roads, scanning for anyone emerging from the trees carrying a weapon. The near accident was serious enough, but it had also occurred outside hunting season. Neither of the investigating officers came upon any evidence. Though they found a nest of crumbled leaves consistent with the line of fire, no shell casings were found. Neither were the bullets, which must have passed close by Clement and his son and been lost in fields and forest beyond.

Disturbing as the incident was, it was at first dismissed by the police as an irresponsible use of firearms by a person or persons unknown. The memory of it would have faded were it not for the anomaly of the little red bee, which had lodged in Clement’s mind. Without discussing the matter with his wife or children, he came to the realization that some kind of targeting device may have been used, a laser dot, he thought. Which meant that the incident was no accident. In a second interview with the police, he mentioned this detail, but they were at a loss for an explanation. There were no such weapons registered in the immediate or surrounding districts, and if Teacher von Forschtenberg was not mistaken about the little red dot, the attack would appear to be a random act of violence committed by a sociopathic or psychotic personality, perhaps a madman passing through. The incident was entirely impersonal, they concluded, for Clement had no known enemies, was loved by his students, and was highly regarded by everyone in the region.

The matter would have been left at that, were it not for three more grievous events that occurred during the following months.

1

If you were to drive through the navigable portions of Oxford at an hour in the late afternoon, you would doubtless notice a variety of human types on foot or cycle, rushing in and out of any number of college gates or along the cobbled lanes. You would, of course, be distracted by your own affairs or by the romance of the ancient university city, and perhaps not very disposed to close personal observation. Were your eye to pass over an elderly man walking up High Street, wearing a gray trench coat, rumpled tan slacks, a tartan scarf, and scuffed brown shoes, and wielding a folded umbrella (or hunching beneath it unfolded), you would invest little time in wondering who he might be. You would probably dismiss him as a generic academic or an alumnus-errant in search of old memories. If you were to indulge in a transient musing, you might think, A pedant, smile at the stereotype, and then let him drift out of your mind, never to return.

His name was Owen Whitfield. A man in his early seventies, he was tall and solidly built though tending to corpulence, and bent a little as if from decades of poring over books in poorly lit situations. His hair and closely trimmed beard were white. He was indeed a teacher, a professor of history and a fellow of Magdalen College. Though the number of students he tutored or lectured was not large, he was held in esteem by many of the brightest ones, who were impressed by his eloquent scholarship and equally by his personal attentiveness to their minds and struggling young personalities, his fairness in marking, his patience, and his ultimate kindness, which did not exclude a certain firmness when needed.

He was the author of three books, all of which had been duly noted in obscure periodicals over the years, reservedly praised or vehemently calumniated, and eventually forgotten; they were now out of print. Currently, he was working on a history of twenty-first-century traces of the Holy Roman Empire, its political, legal, and ethical inheritances, and, by a certain sleight of hand, incorporating his long-standing fascination with the debate between historical providentialism and determinism. He was, in addition, struggling to weave references to Swift’s metaphorical tale of Gulliver’s Travels into the lot and not having much success at pulling it all together. He had been tinkering with the manuscript for more than fifteen years, in his spare time. The thing was unpublishable, he felt sure, and probably would remain so, but he derived a good deal of pleasure from the exercise.

As was his habit five out of seven days a week, Professor Whitfield walked the few streets from his college to center town, where his car awaited him in a public parking complex. The vehicle was very dear to him, a superannuated Humber that he drove carefully and maintained fastidiously and that he had owned for well-nigh fifty years. The measure of his devotion could be seen in the waxed sheen of the powder-blue body, the rust-free chrome, and the stacks of wooden boxes in his garage at home—all manner of items that he had collected from wreckers’ yards throughout southern England, and had stored as insurance against a day of grief when the vehicle might need a hard-to-come-by replacement part. In this, perhaps, he was a little eccentric, though it should be noted that in a nation of eccentrics he was in no way outstanding.

As usual, he maneuvered his ample body in behind the wheel, turned the ignition key and listened to the satisfying thrumming of the engine, and then began the twenty-minute drive north to the village of Wootton in West Oxfordshire, where he and his wife had lived for most of their married life. As the fields and hedgerows and minor woods passed by, he pondered the papers he had been marking that day, and mentally composed a reply to an e-mail sent from a son in London. After passing Blenheim Palace and the village of Woodstock, his thoughts drifted onto the subject of his daughter’s health—she was a middle-aged woman living in a maximum care home staffed by nuns in Beaconsfield. He rejoiced anew over her expanding vocabulary, which in recent months had grown from about a hundred words to a hundred and ten. He recited her new words aloud in her singsong voice until, realizing what he was doing, he chuckled and changed the mental subject. In this his customary mode of decompression, he rumbled along the country roads, glad as always to be going home.

The Whitfields called their home the cottage, though it was a nineteenth-century brick house with a slate roof, not far from the shore of the River Glyme—or, as Owen liked to call it, the brook, sometimes the trickle. Situated on a lane equidistant from the water and the village’s main street, their property was small and rather private. It was bordered by hedges on the front sides and by high brick walls at the back. Visible beyond these were a few treetops and a glimpse of the green heights of the west woods. The main view was of the sky, and thankfully it was usually empty of human artifice, save for the occasional light aircraft on the way to or from the old RAF base at Abingdon, now a semiretired airfield. All in all, it was a quiet place to live. The neighbors were amiable but not intrusive.

Owen carefully parked in the procrustean driveway, leaving room for Monica’s Vauxhall—the Vox—secondhand, eleven years old, 155 thousand miles on the odometer. Friday was the day of the week when she worked late at the University Science Centre, where she was one of the senior biologists. She would not be home until ten o’clock. As he let himself into the cottage, he knew that ahead of him lay several hours of contented meandering through the ground-floor rooms.

Upstairs, the master bedroom, a guest room, a bathroom, and storage closets angled for breathing space under the steeply sloping ceilings. Downstairs, there was the kitchen-dining room, the sprawling parlor, and the pottery studio that had been Philomena’s special room for the first twelve years of her life. All in all, it was a marvel to Owen that he and Monica had raised their children, including two rambunctious boys, in such cramped quarters.

The parlor, or the Great Hall as they ironically called it, was the largest room, cozy and disorderly. The bookshelves were overloaded and constantly spreading; the well-worn rugs approximately covered scarred oak flooring; and the mismatched comfortable furniture filled much of the remaining space—easy chairs and a sofa that had served generations of Monica’s family. Their pride and joy was the brick fireplace with a facing of Tudor rose tiles. It currently contained an electric fire, which could be removed for the burning of the annual Yule log and for the coldest days of winter.

Various other points of decor offered evidence of his wife’s genius for making run-down places beautiful. There were, for example, small landscape paintings offering touches of warm color here and there, and of course her collection of rustic pottery spanning centuries. Not to mention the smiling photographs of their children and grandchildren. Two glassed plaques displayed his father’s World War II medals, and his grandfather’s medals and ribbons from the Great War. There were also some surprising items, such as the nineteenth-century British cavalry sword hanging above the mantel (once owned by a great-great-uncle who had died in battle in India), beneath which hung a wicked-looking kukri sword that could have been the very instrument of his ancestor’s demise. Monica had always felt distaste for it, and Owen had promised to take it away to his study room at the university. The delay, and the dilemma, revolved around the question of whether one or both of the swords should be removed. Owen preferred that the weapons be kept together, since, combined, they made a story with two sides. The debate had not yet been resolved.

Functioning as an ornamental umbrella stand was the casing of a German bomb that had fallen into his parents’ backyard during the blitz and failed to go off. Sitting on an old pine sideboard was a balsa wood model of the Globe Theatre that Owen had painstakingly made during his late teens when he had aspired to become a Shakespearean actor. Though ages and ages had passed since that youthful enthusiasm, he yet retained a nostalgia for the stage, and for those stages upon which he had indeed appeared during his early twenties, before other kinds of cylinders in his personality had ignited and driven him off in alternative directions. Love of history being one of them. Love of Monica another.

Owen switched on the electric fire in the fireplace and then rummaged around in the kitchen, making a meal of sardines on buttered toast, a pot of Earl Grey, a slice of Stilton cheese, and an apple from his own little orchard of six backyard fruit trees. After that, he sat for a time in his cat-scratched wing chair by the fire, closed his eyes, and listened to a Vaughan Williams piece on the radio. When it was finished, he went out the rear door into the garden.

The cat had left a gift of a sparrow on the patio mat. He gazed at the mangled feathers disapprovingly, then looked about in search of the cat, whom he wished to scold, though with not very much conviction. Mice, yes; birds, no! He knew he could not change her nature, but he always felt some mixed emotion whenever he came upon this aspect of her activities, and a proper scolding was a sort of consolation, if not a minor protest against the consequences of the fall from Eden.

Noting that the ivy covering the entire back wall of the house was unfurling leaves nicely, he checked for any signs of nest building and then eased himself down onto the wooden lawn chair facing the garden. This was the moment he looked forward to each day, when his mind grew quiet and his interior life settled into an approximation of repose, attentiveness, perhaps even a fugitive contemplative state. The quarter acre was mainly green, with spring officially not far off. Crocuses speared through the grassy plots alongside the flagstone path, competing with the first daffodil shoots pushing up through the flower beds. The brown tangles of vegetable beds also had their harmony. Beyond these was the row of three apple trees, as well as a plum, a cherry, and a pear tree that no partridge had as yet deigned to perch in. The whole was enclosed within the brick walls that he had built by hand during the early years of the marriage, with a few Churchillian curves and discreetly artful angles that kept it from being a box.

This evening there were plenty of birds, tomtits and wrens flitting about, and a single robin sitting on the handle of the spade among the dead tomato plants. Owen watched her for a while, pleased that his miniature enclave of the peaceable kingdom was relatively protected. The robins returned to nest in the ivy each spring, generation after generation; swallows returned to their mud constructions under the eaves of the roof; and warblers and twitterers of all sorts built delicate grass cups in the high branches, while throughout the nesting-fledgling season Monica kept the cat indoors. Clearly that time had come again.

In the fading light, he pondered the fact that his sabbatical year was close upon him, and that he had no precise plan for what he would do with it. Surely there would be focused gardening, and more time for the perennial labors on the book, and perhaps even the long-dreamed-of hike with Monica through the Scottish Highlands. The thought of the latter suddenly filled him with a kind of woe, though in his younger years (not so long ago) he had kept it alight as a beacon on a distant hilltop, yearned for, yet ever delayed. Now he admitted with some chagrin that he was feeling his age. This general state of fatigue, he thought, was probably due more to the lack of mental diversion than to physical decline. Busmen might take holidays, but how, pray tell, should a historian recreate?

Realizing that he did not want his wife to find the mangled bird on the doormat, he got up and retrieved its ruined body, feeling a pang for its lost glory, and pocketed it in his tweed blazer. Back in the kitchen he poured himself two fingers of whisky, on ice, and brought the tinkling sedative outside. There, seated again on the lawn chair, he sipped and, saddened still further, he lay the bird on his knee and stroked its head with a fingertip.

This is the way the world ends, he thought, not with a bang but a whimper. Another sip. No, neither with bang nor whimper but with silence.

After two or three more sips he decided that, altogether, there would be plenty of bangs and whimpers. Then would come fire. And after that, would come the silence.

When the sky to the west finally blazed with streaks of pink coral and saffron, he got up and buried the bird beneath the pear tree, using a gardening trowel. Then he went in search of the cat, whose name was Possum.

He found her skulking in hunting posture behind a stack of terra-cotta pots by the toolshed, scooped her up, and brought her indoors, frowning at her and muttering, I’ll send your footprints to Scotland Yard.

She seemed indifferent to the Eliot reference. A killer without conscience, she ate her kibble heartily and lapped up all her milk from the dish by the refrigerator. He ignored her after-dinner purring and her attempt to cajole him into playful badinage. He did not employ her name, which was a departure from his usual custom.

After praying Compline from the tattered book that had belonged to his father, he went upstairs, put on pajamas, and crawled into bed. He was more or less asleep when he felt a kiss on his forehead and the rustle of his wife sliding in beside him.

2

Morning:

He was seated at the breakfast table in his bathrobe, staring out the window, his thoughts a muddle.

Owen, wake up, said his wife, tousling his hair with a brisk hand and setting a cup of coffee in front of him.

Owen is not here, he mumbled. This is his body.

Mmm, well, Owen’s body, would you kindly ask his mind to join us?

I’ll ask. He took a sip of coffee.

Remind him that we’re going to the Romanian art exhibition this afternoon. I need him awake and congenial.

Did he actually, in his right mind, say he would go?

Yes, he did.

Oh, he groaned.

It’s for a good cause, darling. The student scholarships for young Romanians in financial need, remember?

He nodded as she set a plate of toast in front of him, along with a pot of her homemade gooseberry jam. He stared at them as she spooned soft-boiled eggs into the eggcups.

As was her occasional jest, she put his egg wrong side up.

It’s too early in the day for Lilliput and Blefuscu egg war, he grumbled.

Anyone who can pronounce those words is, in fact, awake, she retorted.

Automatic reflex. Now explain why we must attend the exhibition.

I promised Broca I would bring you. It wouldn’t be fair if Rupert goes and you stay home.

Rupert’s uxoriousness is his downfall.

Ignoring this, she buttered her toast with undue attention. You will come with me, won’t you, Owen?

Darling, you know I hate surreal.

How do you know the artists are surrealists?

A guess.

A guess based on a stereotype—feuding peasants, disturbing folk art, Dracula, Ceaus, escu? Surely there’s a lot more to Romania than that. It’s a country with twenty million people.

I should add that I saw the poster in Blackwell’s. The paintings are definitely surreal. Grotesque, actually.

You could try to see it as an interesting excursion into the subconscious.

"A great deal of it is blatantly conscious. It’s an industry. It’s a growth industry. It’s even self-parodying."

I don’t know what you mean by self-parodying, she countered with a whiff of censure. You sure you’re not being a little too intellectual?

Monica, he declared, shattering the egg with a series of blows from the too-small spoon, "I am an intellectual."

Yes, dear, she said, gazing at him with affection, and that is quite why you need this sabbatical. So, will you come with me to the show?

He struggled to find the connecting thought, tripped, and fell into a pit of non sequitur.

He took a sip of coffee.

I’ll come. Yes, I’ll come. But only as a pure act of devotion to you, my love.

I knew you’d see it my way, she laughed.

I knew I would too, he said with a sigh, and demolished the rest of his egg.

Humber or Vox? she asked.

Humber. It allows me the illusion that I’m still in charge of my life.

Broca (not the given name on her birth certificate) was a colleague of his wife’s, a woman who, unlike Monica, had explored a good many of the highways and byways of the previous century. In her youth, she had been a drug culture bird from Soho, then a twentyish neo-Marxist, then a stock market investor, and finally a doctor of biology. She was also a sometime spiritualist and currently an obsessive-compulsive Jungian of the nonprofessional kind. She and Monica shared an interest in Berkshire cottage pottery and pesto recipes, but any semblance of deep affinity ended there. Monica knitted sweaters for her grandchildren, baked for church bazaars, and grew basil in her herb garden; Broca wrote learned papers and was working on a book provisionally titled The Tao of Microbiology. Her life was wonderfully organized and productive. She had no interest in children or flora or cats—indeed, she and her husband had none.

Rupert, a wry and gentle man, taught Greek at one of the lesser colleges. All colleges are equal, he was wont to say at wine and cheese receptions, but some colleges are more equal than others. A pause, a twinkle of the eye, a sip of sherry, and then: Marriages too. He drank a bit too much in social settings but was looked upon with fondness by all. Not so his wife, who was brilliant in her field but whose irrational side was coupled with willfulness. Owen treated her with unfailing courtesy, for the sake of Rupert, whom he liked.

Why have you befriended her? he once asked his wife.

Broca is accustomed to overwhelming everyone she meets, Monica replied after a thoughtful pause. Her charm, her energy and iconoclasm, the way she leaps from victory to victory. Her ability to out-talk and outmaneuver anyone.

I am completely allergic to that sort of person. I hate the way she talks at me without blinking. The way she alternates between moist eyes and eyes like ice, if you disagree with her. Body language coy or hostile. Reward and punishment. That and more—a formidable array of tools to control reactions.

"Oh yes, the poor dear is all about control."

People like that deliver a subliminal message under the surface friendliness. On some level they hold you in contempt.

Contempt? No, Owen, I believe she thinks she’s helping others.

By manipulating them—for their own good, of course.

Yes, it’s so obvious, and yet for some reason most people don’t know how to cope with it. They either flee or succumb. I suppose at some point I felt moved to become the one person in her life who shows affection for her but remains impervious to her powers.

She’ll never stand for it, Monica. She’ll punish you subtly, or not so subtly, if you don’t cave in.

Oh, she tries. Whenever she employs her little tricks, I just laugh and give her a knowing look. I confound all her normal categories of thought, you see, without getting defensive or hostile.

But why? Why bother?

Why? Because she’s a soul, Owen. One of the most imperiled kind.

And you think you can convert her?

No. But I can insert a little doubt into her airtight world.

Monica suffered from a tendency to naiveté, having been raised in a school run by a community of devout nuns. Owen suffered from a touch of lingering cynicism about human nature, having been raised in the theater of Angry Young Men in the sixties and seventies, becoming in later decades a failed actor and a successful teacher. And, of course, a reconverted recusant. In other words, a now-practicing Catholic with a certain residue of absolved, though remembered, guilt.

If you can’t stand Broca, why do you like Rupert so much? she asked.

Because he’s a good-natured wit and an excellent scholar. He’s not ambitious, he loves Plato, and. . .

And he loves double-malt whisky, like you.

Single malt, actually. Also, there’s a kind of humility in the man. That, and a long-suffering quality that moves me, I suppose. And—to quote your own words—he’s a soul, Monica.

Aha, then you will agree that the walls of Troy may not be entirely impenetrable.

Over the past twenty years, the occasions when Broca and Rupert had accepted invitations to the Whitfields’ home had been few. They had always arrived late and departed early; conversations were awkward, topics ricocheting in various directions. Whenever other guests were present, not infrequently Catholics, the atmosphere was strained. It was all very strange, but from time to time the two couples still made an effort—no one quite knew why.

The invitations they had received to Broca and Rupert’s home could be numbered on the fingers of one hand, minus the thumb. Their place was on a side road not far from Blenheim Palace, a blend of Le Corbusier architecture and Zen chic, molded concrete and glass. Its interior was furnished with uncomfortable avant-garde chairs and sofas, plastic and steel, the cement walls decorated with abstract paintings and eclectica such as frightening African masks and fetish objects from primitive religions.

Any domestic trace of Rupert’s presence was to be found in the garden shed far at the back of the property, hidden behind manicured bushes. Inside and out, the shed was decrepit. It might once have been a residence for chickens. Wire mesh covered the single window. The interior contained a i930s-era easy chair upholstered in moth-eaten burgundy. On the table beside it, a copy of Herodotus’ Histories in Ionic Greek shared space with a stack of tragedies by Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides; an oil lamp; and a glass jug of isle of Islay single malt. The table was a wooden crate stamped with faded ink, Property of U.S. Army.

The dregs of solitary vigils could be seen in the clutter of abandoned teacups and shot glasses crowding a rickety bench. An atmosphere of evaporated whisky, fowl dust, and tobacco seeped into the clothing of any human being who dared enter the place. Owen had once spent two hours there during one of Broca’s parties, from which he and Rupert had surreptitiously escaped. Having broken away from a monologue delivered by a Danish warlock and another by a drunken BBC actress, Owen had listened with gratitude to Rupert downloading his astonishingly articulate, well-lubricated lamentations about the end of civilization as he knew it.

In short, the garden shed was Rupert’s exclusive demesne, a space for private thought, drinking, and pipe smoking, which was prohibited in his home. He called it the eyrie.

In any event, here they were at the gallery—caving in to Broca. Owen braced himself, opened the faux Tudor door for his wife, and entered warily behind her.

There were upwards of thirty people milling about, among them Broca, who was head to head with a fellow who looked very much like the curator, attentive to whatever she was saying. The man’s polished conviviality was of the cultured mercantile genre, his eyes flickering left and right as he kept potential customers in view. When Broca broke off to greet Monica, he quickly stepped away and joined a group of foreign-looking people sipping wine in a side gallery off the main room.

Darling, said Broca, embracing Monica. She turned to Owen and bestowed on him a little smirk of approbation. "And

Reviews for The Sabbatical

[david9puig · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Engaging, thought provoking, prophetic. O’Brien is a mystic. I am grateful for this book.