It was the war, Juliet thought, remembering the photograph of the flamingo’s creased wife, it has made refugees of us all.
He noticed that Ursula’s ox-eye daisies, wrapped in damp newspaper, were drooping, almost dead. Nothing could be kept, he thought, everything ran through one’s fingers like sand or water. Or time. Perhaps nothing should be kept.
There’s too much history in York, the past is so crowded that sometimes it feels as if there’s no room for the living.
She didn’t feel she had the fortitude for all those Tudors, they were so relentlessly busy – all that bedding and beheading.
She was wearing an aggressive three-piece outfit that was probably very expensive but had the kind of pattern you would get if you cut up the flags of several obscure countries and then gave them to a blind pigeon to stick back together again.
Teddy wandered amongst the graves. Most of the people in them had died long before his time. Ursula was picking up conkers from the stand of magnificent horse chestnuts at the far end of the churchyard. They were enormous trees and Teddy wondered if their roots had intertwined with the bones of the dead, imagined them curling a path through ribcages and braceleting ankles and fettering wrists. When.
So much for progress. How quickly civilization could dissolve into its more ugly elements.
Being flippant was harder work than being earnest.
Fanning Court. God forbid. Teddy could no longer sit in the chair. He could no longer leave the bed, no longer do anything. He was approaching the end of his twilight, entering into the final darkness. Viola imagined the synapses in her father’s brain flaring and dimming like the slow death of a star. Soon Teddy would burn out completely and implode and become a black hole. Viola was hazy on the subject of astrophysics, but she liked the image.
That was the one thing June had been terrified of having – a standard life, an ordinary life, a life like her parents’ – living in a pink sandstone semi-detached villa in the suburbs with a neat garden and an en-suite master bedroom with fitted wardrobes.
She had one of those husky voices that sounded as if she were permanently coming down with a cold. Men seemed to find that sexy in a woman, which Jackson thought was odd because it made women sound less like women and more like men. Maybe it was a gay thing.
Teddy shuddered. The idea of the sublime little bird being plucked from the sky, of its exquisite song being interrupted in full flight, was horrible to him.
Viola felt as if she spent her life wading through a sea of ignorance, shallow but without a shore in sight.
She had never been without a book for as long as she could remember. An only child never is. Literature had fuelled her childhood fantasies and convinced her that one day she would be the heroine of her own narrative.
But then, what constituted real? Wasn’t everything, even this life itself, just a game of deception?
Bridget wiped her tears vigorously on her apron and said, “Must get on with the tea.
We’re all Bolsheviks now,” Izzie said blithely. “And at my table!” Hugh said and laughed.
There was a strangeness in the shimmering air, a sense of imminence that made Ursula’s chest feel full, as if her heart was growing. It was a kind of high holiness – she could think of no other way of describing it. Perhaps it was the future, she thought, coming nearer all the time.
Civilizations rose and fell and in the end everything was dust and sand. Nothing beside remained. Hotels, maybe.
She seemed to have no inkling that life wasn’t as orderly as her pencil case and that everything is chance and at any moment any number of remarkable things can happen that are totally beyond our control, events that rip up our maps and re-polarize our compasses – the madwoman walking towards us, the train falling off the bridge, the boy on the bicycle.