After that Sylvie made sure they all went to the swimming baths in town and took lessons, from an ex-major in the Boer War who barked orders at them until they were too frightened to sink.
She fingered the strand of pearls at her neck. Inside each pearl was a little piece of grit. That was the true self of the pearl wasn’t it? The beauty of the pearl was just the poor oyster trying to protect itself. From the grit. From the truth.
Courtney was astonishingly reckless. A kid without reck was a dangerous thing. Other children in the play park yelled and screamed and laughed but Courtney was merely determined to test everything, including herself, to the limits, like a dogged little crash-test dummy.
Boys took a long time to become men but daughters were women from the kickoff.
Ladies who lurch.
Why did people understand how precious each day was only once the doors to the grave had opened and they had looked inside? What was the point of that?
Another day where nothing has happened, he thought. That was a good thing, he reminded himself. What was the Chinese curse? May you live in interesting times.
The last place he intended to end up in was the place he had started from, the place where his entire family lay restlessly in the earth.
Laika,” she would say, “the first dog in space. She died of heat and stress after a few hours. She was rescued from an animal center, she must have thought she was going to a home, to a family, and instead they sent her to the loneliest death in the world.
After he was born, the midwife said, “Boys wreck your house, girls wreck your head.” Archie seemed intent on doing both.
The cats are murdering sleep, the wall rumbling with their engine purrs -prut prut prut as they snore their way to oblivion.
All those tiny ancient marine life forms falling to the ocean floor to come back to life one day as a Disney Fairies Tea Set.
What do you think you’re doing?” she asked when Jackson took his own phone out of his pocket. Another chippy woman, Jackson thought with a sigh. Chippy women wherever he went. Chippy mothers who begat chippy daughters and so the circle of chippiness was unbroken.
A garden, as far as Teddy could see, was nature tamed and constrained by artifice.
Gossip,” Mr. Pollock called it dismissively, but Gwendolen thought that was the word men gave to women’s conversation. Men talked in order to convey information or to ruminate on cricket scores and campaign statistics. Women, on the other hand, talked in an effort to understand the foibles of human behaviour. If men were to “gossip,” the world might be a better place. There would certainly be fewer wars.
The library had not been a career choice. After all, who would choose to be a librarian?
Maurice had disappeared after breakfast. He was a nine-year-old boy and free to go where he pleased with whomsoever he pleased, although he tended to keep to the exclusive company of other nine-year-old boys. Sylvie had no idea what they did but at the end of the day he would return, filthy from head to toe and with some unappetizing trophy, a jar of frogs or worms, a dead bird, the bleached skull of some small creature.
Some people were complete in themselves, as if born from the earth or the ocean, like some of the gods. Which was not a compliment. The gods were ruthlessly indifferent to humanity.
Really, every time a person said good-bye to another person, they should pay attention, just in case it was the last time. First things were good, last things not so much so.
Sometimes he had the feeling that he existed only on the fringes of other people’s lives, not at the heart of his own.
He brought her a cup of tea, the first and last resource of an English husband.