Shrines of Gaiety

by Kate Atkinson

(yes, a man—a man, it seemed, must always be the Head),

Many things were lost—wars and keys and hearts and boys at sea—but family fortunes, even modest ones, were stolen.

She had lost her two sons to the war—Gwendolen’s two younger brothers—and wore her bereavement with triumph rather than sorrow.

Gwendolen’s mother had been a foolish woman, inclined to believe any passing nonsense. Of such people were patriots made, in Gwendolen’s opinion. More’s the pity.

The dull days of her dying seemed to stretch ahead with no end, just as the dull days of her living had.

Gwendolen was so touched that she wept, but quietly, for her mother would have been monstrously jealous of such emotion. She had claimed grief for her own long ago.

“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.

She had been overly fond of purple shades—it was a dreadfully suffocating colour to put up with. Gwendolen would be happy if she never saw mauve again.

“I am a librarian,” she had reassured him. “We are accustomed to moving through the world unnoticed.”

How full of vigour she was. It felt as if a great weight had been removed from her, which it had, of course, because her mother was dead. Alleluia!

You could say what you liked about Mrs. Bodley but the Distressed were never knowingly underfed by her.

How full of rude health she was. She was not yet thirty-two, she reminded herself. She had lived beneath the shadow of the war for long enough. She could be free of it now.

Could she do what Frobisher had asked? She had no idea, but she would give it a go. It would be an adventure. With any luck it would not be sensible.

people had been talking about the end of civilization since Babylonian days, or, indeed, Tutankhamun.

Girls who left no note walked through a door and disappeared into thin air. Girls who wrote notes left some evidence behind. A note had purpose behind it.

Nothing was free in Nellie’s world, not even love. Perhaps especially not love.

Betty was very hard-nosed yet occasionally mawkishly sentimental, a combination shared with her mother and many dictators both before and since.

They rarely resorted to good manners with each other.

The “life of the mind” was a waste of both life and mind as far as they were concerned, despite Cambridge. Or perhaps because of it.

With each child she had produced, Nellie’s interest had waned, so that Ramsay and Kitty at the tail end were dreadfully neglected.

“Don’t they say ‘write what you know’?” Betty said. “But you don’t know anything, do you?”

Anyone could write a provocative but ultimately quite tedious contemporary novel.

Ramsay didn’t know that Shirley painted. “I don’t,” she said airily, “but I’m sure I could.”

Nellie was in two minds about this gift—more useful than flowers, certainly, but to what end would you give a woman a knife?, she puzzled. It was an invitation to a stabbing,

He was someone who was always either coming or going, they found it disconcerting when he lingered like this between the two states.

Niven, on the other hand, liked to keep his virtues well hidden from the world.

Betty was both long-sighted and short-sighted at the same time—a considerable feat (or “blind as a bat,” according to Nellie). If she had been wearing her spectacles, she might have recognized the woman as one of the cleaners from the Amethyst. (Or perhaps not. Betty wasn’t the sort to remember cleaners.)

Niven could have done with his mother by his side in the trenches during the war. The peace was a different matter.

came across more like a pantomime villain than a threat. Niven wouldn’t have been surprised if he was not in fact from Malta but Ramsgate or Southend and had adopted this theatrical persona for effect. A clown, Niven concluded.

Lying came easily to Niven, he thought of it as a means of protecting the truth.

“You sound like an anarchist,” Niven said. “Or an Italian fascist.” “No, Mr. Coker, I sound like a businessman.”

Life was for absorbing, not recording. And in the end, it was all just paper that someone would have to dispose of after you were gone. Perhaps, after all, one’s purpose in this world was to be forgotten, not remembered.

The rendering of suffering into cold stone could not convey the horror.

Like many others, Gwendolen had considered that it would be better to do something for the living of York—a maternity hospital or a park like the one that Rowntree’s had donated to commemorate the men of the Cocoa Works who had died. Their name liveth for ever more was carved into the York memorial. Another lie. Who remembered Dickie now?

The war itself was of no interest to her, only the aftermath of her bereavement.

What a wicked, wicked world it was that had allowed such a war.

The one thing that it would not be would be dreary. The time of dreariness was over.

What a friend we have in Jesus. (Do we?, Gwendolen wondered. She had lost any religion she may have once had.)

They were words one didn’t hear in mixed company—not just “bloody” but “arse” and “fucking”—and when they spotted Gwendolen, they all grinned ruefully and gave apologetic little salutes, murmuring down the line Sorry, Sister…Sorry, Sister…Sorry, Sister. As if—years into the war by then—she could still be discomfited by words alone.

Patients in extremis were inclined to obscenities and men close to death were not always as polite as people liked to think.

Suffering in silence was for saints, not soldiers, in Gwendolen’s opinion. Where was the virtue in a quiet death—slipping below the waves, sinking into the mud? Or living on, limbless after gas gangrene or with a body flensed of flesh or ripped to ribbons by artillery fire?

She could have wept for them, but what good did weeping do?

Her father knew he had blood on his hands, it had been unkind of him to pass on the poisoned chalice to her, tainting her new-found sense of release. She had been wrong, the war would never be vanquished. And, even if it was, another one would come along and overlay the memory of this one.

It would take a good deal more than an accent to capture Gwendolen.

She was embarrassed—he had witnessed her weak and undignified, it was not how she liked to be seen.

Mrs. Bodley was the kind who would censure you for the faults of others.

She was annoyed with herself for the little pang of disappointment she felt.

Cissy had “ideas above her station,” according to Gladys. Freda thought that seemed like a good thing—how else did you elevate yourself out of a lowly little life?

I am not a brat, merely unusually confident, she thought, observing herself practising port de bras in the narrow cheval mirror in her bedroom.

She took pride in her achievements, particularly as no one else seemed to—apart