More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Most of it was heroic in tone, as befitted a war in which the moral cause had been so much clearer.
This was raw material, authentic, mud-stained and unshaped by any extraneous demand.
In 2000, the turn of the century seemed more significant than that of the millennium, since the former (unlike the latter) was small enough to have a character.
The function of music is to liberate in the soul those feelings which normally we keep locked up in the heart.
There was something magnificent about the way Madame Azaire turned this absurd man aside. He was only a small-town bully, it was true, but he was clearly used to having his own way.
When any art is put to practical ends it loses its essential purity.
‘But I think if any song can touch the heart, then one should value it.’
dewlaps
When she rose again it was without any leverage from her hands or arms but with a spontaneous upward movement of grace and propriety.
While everything was feminine about her face, her nose was slightly larger than fashion prescribed; her hair had more different shades of brown and gold and red than most women would have wanted. For all the lightness of her face, its obvious strength of character overpowered conventional prettiness. But Stephen made no judgements; he was motivated by compulsion.
The satisfaction of acting on impulse had lent him calm.
Isabelle didn’t care whether he married her or not, but when he said he would not see her again she felt the simple agony of bereavement, like a child whose only source of love has gone.
ground floor, his footsteps alive in the closed air. There were still rooms in the house he had not visited and others which, having once glanced into, he could not refind.
She was dressed in cream linen with a blue sash and a panel in the dress with a row of buttons that neither opened nor held anything together.
The dress in question emphasised the plump swell of her breasts, of which she was clearly proud.
flat-bottomed boat which was shaped, after long local tradition, like a punt with a raised and squared-off end.
He noticed the delicate definition of her ankles and the beginning of her calves and found himself wondering what fastening beneath the folds of her linen skirt achieved the tension that made the stocking’s fabric look so light and open on the arch of her foot.
He had lost sight of his initial aim, which was to restore peace, and now wanted only to damage the man who had enraged him.
In her room Madame Azaire wept as she paced back from one side to the other. She was choking with passion for him, but he frightened her. She wanted to comfort him but also to be taken by him, to be used by him. Currents of desire and excitement that she had not known or thought about for years now flooded in her. She wanted him to bring alive what she had buried, and to demean, destroy, her fabricated self. He was very young. She was unsure. She wanted the touch of his skin.
‘Come to the red room.’
trousseau.
Isabelle searched for reassurance in Stephen’s eyes in the safe mêlée of movement.
For a moment she was naked again. She recalled how she had shown herself to him in her hot afternoon abandonment and how perversely right it had then seemed. Suddenly the shame and guilt belatedly overpowered her as she felt his eyes pierce her clothes, and she began to blush all over her body. Her stomach and breasts turned red beneath her dress as the blood beat the skin in protest at her immodesty. It rose up her neck and into her face and ears, as though publicly rebuking her for her most private actions. It cried out in the burning red of her skin; it begged for attention.
Stephen was uneasy. ‘I’ve known only two or three other women. It was quite different with them. I think what we do is its own explanation.’ ‘I don’t understand.’ ‘Nor do I. But I know you mustn’t feel ashamed.’
Isabelle said, ‘No. I feel that what I have done, that what we are doing, is right in some way, though it is surely not the way of the Catholic Church.’ ‘You believe there are other ways of being right or wrong?’ Isabelle looked puzzled, but she was clear in her mind. ‘I think there must be. I don’t know what they are. I don’t know if they can ever be explained. Certainly they are not written down in books. But I have already gone too far now. I can’t turn back.’
Although his mind worked clearly and had never had any difficulty in dispatching the tasks set for it by schoolmasters or employers, Stephen had not developed the habit of analysis.
Stephen was endlessly curious. He asked Isabelle to describe her early life in the smallest detail; he never seemed to tire of stories of her days in Rouen. ‘Tell me more about Jeanne.’ ‘I’ve told you everything I can think of. Now you tell me how you came to be in this place, this institution.’ Stephen exhaled slowly. ‘There’s not much to tell. My father worked for the post office in a flat part of England called Lincolnshire.
the ages of his life would be united.
This is not a war, this is an exploration of how far men can be degraded. I am deeply curious to see how much further it can be taken; I want to know. I believe that it has barely started. I believe that far worse things than we have seen will be authorized and will be carried out by millions of boys and men like my Tipper and your Firebrace. There is no depth to which they can’t be driven. You see their faces when they go into rest and you think they will take no more, that something in them will say, enough, no one can do this. But one day’s sleep, hot food and wine in their bellies and they
...more
In the wonderful quiet, when the German guns had stopped, they heard the song of a blackbird.
In late May the air was so pure you could get drunk on it. The fields and hedgerows were alive. It was the most beautiful time.
In the morning Jack took out a sketchbook and made some drawings of his friend Arthur Shaw. His big head had a sense of weight and shadow that yearned for the soft lines of the pencil.
The Big Push.
He was resigned to it. He felt that he had lost control of his own life: when he had finally tried to alter some central part of his existence it had come to nothing but humiliation. The guns would not be much worse.
They were digging a mass grave. He thought of shouting an order to about turn or at least to avert their eyes, but they were almost on it, and some of them had already seen their burial place. The songs died on their lips and the air was reclaimed by the birds.
At that moment, as they left the village and its trappings of normality, time seemed to stall and collapse. The passage of the next three days passed in the closing of an eye; yet the images retained a fearful static quality that stayed in the mind until death.
He felt no fear for his blood and muscle and bone, but the size of what had begun, the number of them now beneath the terrible crashing of the sky was starting to pull at the moorings of his self-control.
Having communed with their beginnings they wanted to die where they were without enduring the day ahead of them.
Dear Isabelle, I am sending this to you at the house in Amiens where it will probably be destroyed, but I am writing to you because I have no one else to write to. I am sitting beneath a tree near the village of Auchonvillers where we once came to spend the day. Like hundreds of thousands of British soldiers in these fields I am trying to contemplate my death. I write to you to say that you are the only person I have ever loved. This letter will probably never find you, but I wanted to tell someone what it feels like to be sitting on this grass, on this Friday in June, feeling the lice crawl
...more
Stephen felt the acid of a sleepless night run from his stomach to his tongue.
He breathed in as he reached it, clenching for his death.
It was not his death that mattered; it was the way the world had been dislocated. It was not all the tens of thousands of deaths that mattered; it was the way they had proved that you could be human yet act in a way that was beyond nature.
‘I run a clothing company.’ She disliked being asked this question, thinking people ought to ask new acquaintances who they were rather than what they did, as though their job defined them.
In the cinema she could drown in the sensuous load of picture and sound without the distraction of company or conversation. In the worst films she wandered off from the story and inhabited the scenery in a plot of her own. She felt self-conscious about going unaccompanied in case she should meet a couple she knew hand-in-hand in the foyer on their evening out; so she generally went on Saturday afternoon, entering in the after-lunch daylight, emerging in the darkness with the full evening still ahead.
evincing
confrères,
She enjoyed the small physical details she noticed on her own; in company she would just have talked and swallowed.
‘I promise I didn’t put any tonic in. I just showed it the label. You look wonderful.’ ‘Thank you. You look all right too. Are
nugatory
concomitant
