What is "tolley"

Usage examples of "tolley".

Robert Tolley crumpled the map with an abrupt motion and levered himself out of the rented Volkswagen -- no easy task, for he was a tall man running to fat, and the seat low-slung -- to get a better look at his surroundings.

God, but it seemed to Tolley that the light of science had penetrated every corner of the Universe, right down to the buzzing wavicles of fundamental particles, without any evidence of an Epicurean creator overseeing all.

With the feeling that he was trespassing, Tolley lifted the loop and pushed through.

Ahead was an embankment, and, as Tolley watched, a train drove out of the misty distance and slid past, the lights of its passenger cars like a string of yellow beads, the roar of its passage dragging behind as it dwindled towards Birmingham.

A mill of some kind, Tolley guessed, for the far stream of the bisected river dropped in a glassy rush over a weir.

As Tolley framed this in his viewfinder, it seemed that someone was standing in the shadows there, a man with an oddly shaped head.

Seated in an overstuffed armchair, Tolley began to relax, feeling like a fledgling cuckoo as the Beaumonts fluttered about, plying him with hot, milky tea and a stack of biscuits and small, buttery cakes.

There had been money, but most of it had been squandered before Tolley had been born, the rest lost in the Wall Street Crash.

Driving back to Oxford, headlights of homeward bound commuters flashing by one after the other, Tolley thought that it would have been easy for the woman to have set the whole thing up: the story, the excuse to leave the room, deliberately dropping a cup and acting out a pretence of shock.

The frost made the contours of the ground easy to read, and Tolley could make out the long strips of the ancient field system beyond the hummocks where the village had been.

Perhaps it has been intended as a rebuke, but the man was smiling, and after a moment Tolley smiled too.

But first he led Tolley beneath the spreading shade of the yew tree behind the church, where two gravestones stood apart from the others, their brief inscriptions blotted by lichen.

Rather than funny, Tolley found them prim and touchingly pious, almost wistful.

Alfred Tolley, squire of this parish, and his wife Evangaline, both dead in the same year, 1886.

Beyond were other memorials of his family, and, as Tolley began to examine them, he thought he heard the door creak open.