As in Northern Ireland, children, shoppers, ordinary working men were all suitable targets. Bombs in department stores and pubs would have even more impact in the context of the widely anticipated social breakdown brought on by industrial decline, high unemployment, rising inflation and an energy crisis.
She had returned from Cambridge with a vague notion that her family was owed an uninterrupted stretch of her company.
Without a specific destination, the visitors chose routes as they might choose a colour.
Surely, there was grandeur in experiment.
This sense of absence had been growing since Molly’s funeral. It was wearing into him. Last night he had woken beside his sleeping wife and had to touch his own face to be assured he remained a physical entity.
She felt like a hospital patient who longs for her kindly visitor to leave so she can resume being ill.
Instead, she found her argument in the “doctrine of necessity,” an idea established in common law that in certain limited circumstances, which no parliament would ever care to define, it was permissible to break the criminal law to prevent a greater evil.
These clever, amoral, inventive, destructive men, single-minded, selfish, emotionally cool, coolly attractive. I think I preferred them to the love of Jesus. They were so necessary, and not only to me. Without them we would still be living in mud huts, waiting to invent the wheel.
Their sister, who sat between them, with left leg balanced on right knee, was, by contrast, perfectly composed, having liberally applied perfume and changed into a green gingham frock to offset her colouring. Her sandals revealed an ankle bracelet and toenails painted vermilion. The sight of these nails gave Briony a constricting sensation around her sternum, and she knew at once that she could not ask Lola to play the prince.
For love doesn’t stand alone, nor can it, but trails like a blazing comet, bringing with it other shining goods – forgiveness, kindness, tolerance, fairness, companionability and friendship, all bound to the love which is at the heart of Jesus’s message.
Love stories like Jane Austen’s used to conclude chastely with preparations for a wedding. Now their climax lay on the far side of carnal knowledge, where all of complexity waited.
Get in first and shape the terms.
Soon human meaning would be bleached from the rocks, the landscape would assume its beauty and draw him in; the unimaginable age of the mountains and the fine mesh of living things that lay across them would remind him that he was part of this order and insignificant within it, and he would be set free.
It can happen sometimes, with those who brood on an injustice, that a taste for revenge can usefully combine with a sense of obligation.
They would also need to talk sense to her. The almost-existing children, the husky-voiced daughter, a museum curator perhaps, and the gifted, less settled son, good at too many things, who failed to complete his university course, but a far better pianist than she. Both always affectionate, brilliant at Christmases and summer-holiday castles and entertaining their youngest relations.
The journal preserved her dignity; she might look and behave like and live the life of a trained nurse, but she was really an important writer in disguise. And at a time when she was cut off from everything she knew – family, home, friends – writing was the thread of continuity. It was what she had always done.
But the crowded recent past can be difficult to recall.
She resented the way she was listening out for him, her attention poised, holding its breath, for the creak of the door or a floorboard. Wanting it, dreading it.
And there was something I’ve since noticed over the years – the mountain range that separates the naked from the clothed man. Two men on one passport.
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