Why was it that the females of the species were always the ones left to tidy up, she wondered? I expect Jesus came out of the tomb... and said to his mother, “Can you tidy it up a bit back there?
The “eat” part was easy. The praying and loving were harder.
People always said they wanted the truth, but really they were perfectly content with a facsimile.
Running wasn’t pointless, of course. Sometimes you did it to try to outrun your thoughts, sometimes you did it to chase them and bring them down. Sometimes you did it so that you didn’t think at all.
Writing felt like something she knew, although she only knew it from the other side – reading – and it took her a while to realize that writing and reading were completely different activities – polar opposites, in fact. And just because she could do joined-up handwriting, she discovered, didn’t mean that she could write books. But she persevered, perhaps for the first time in her life.
By the end of the war there was nothing about men and women that surprised him. Nothing about anything really. The whole edifice of civilization turned out to be constructed from an unstable mix of quicksand and imagination.
What would I put in my bottom drawer? – I would put only sharp objects, the clean lines of broken glass, the honed steel of paring knives, the tiny saw-teeth of bread knives and the soothing edges of razor blades, I weigh knives in my hands like strange comforters.
The only time you were safe was when you were dead.
The aircraft found the ground before Teddy did and he watched as it exploded in a glittery starburst of light. He would live, he realized. There would be an afterward after all. He gave thanks to whichever god had stepped in to save him.
Best always to praise rather than criticize.
Juliet felt slighted yet relieved. It was curious how you could hold two quite opposing feelings at the same time, an unsettling emotional discord. She felt an odd pang at the sight of him. She had been fond of him. She had been his girl. Reader, I didn’t marry him, she thought.
Happiness, like life itself, was as fragile as a bird’s heartbeat, as fleeting as the bluebells in the wood, but while it lasted, Fox Corner was an Arcadian dream.
Because that was how it happened: one moment you were there, laughing, talking, breathing, and the next you were gone. Forever. And there wasn’t even a shape left in the world where you’d been, neither the trace of a smile nor the whisper of a word. Just nothing.
A handful of heartbeats. That was what life was. A heartbeat followed by a heartbeat. A breath followed by a breath. One moment followed by another moment and then there was a last moment. Life was a s fragile as a bird’s heartbeat, fleeting as the bluebells in the wood.
I loved him so much. Love him so much. I don’t know why I use the past tense. It’s not as if love dies with the beloved.
What a good husband you are”, Nancy said afterward, “always taking your wife’s side rather thn your mother’s.” “It’s the side of reason I am on”, Teddy said, “It just so happens that that’s where you’re always to be found and my mother rarely.
Home’, it had struck her on the torturous drive back to London, wasn’t Egerton Gardens, wasn’t even Fox Corner. Home was an idea, and like Arcadia it was lost in the past.
This was love. It didn’t come free, you paid in pain. Your own. But then nobody ever said love was easy. Well, they did, but they were idiots.
Now we must feast!’ Dorothy declared as they headed indoors. Not on the baby, but on its placenta, fried by Jeanette with onions and parsley. Viola declined her portion – it seemed like cannibalism, not to mention utterly disgusting.
It was funny how so many men were defined by their downfall. Caesar, Fred Goodwin, Trotsky, Harvey Weinstein, Hitler, Jimmy Savile. Women hardly ever. They didn’t fall down. They stood up.