Shrines of Gaiety

by Kate Atkinson

Nellie Coker’s progeny in the order in which they entered onto the world’s stage. First of all, Niven—unsurprisingly absent from Holloway this morning—followed soon after by Edith. There had followed a hiatus while Nellie attempted to refute further motherhood and then, having failed, she produced in quick succession Betty, Shirley and Ramsay, and bringing up the rear, the runt of the litter, eleven-year-old Kitty,

“Wear their learning lightly,” Nellie said proudly to prospective suitors. (“Hardly wear it at all,” Niven said.)

Ramsay, at just twenty-one, was continually beset by the feeling that he had just missed something. “As if,” he struggled to explain to Shirley, his usual confidante, “I’ve walked into a room but everyone else has just left it.”

“Copulation,” Jaeger said, even more phlegmatically. “Makes the world go round, don’t it? And better than killing each other. Fucking’s natural, innit?”

There was nothing wrong with having a good time as long as she didn’t have to have one herself.

At no point in the war or after, including the Armistice and the Peace, did Niven ever think anyone had won. He no longer had the patience for people’s foibles. No patience for people at all. No time for religion, no time for scruples, no time for feelings. Niven’s heart appeared adamantine, fired in the crucible of the war.

Neither Betty nor Shirley had much time for thinking. 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.

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.

Cover her face. Mine eyes dazzle. She died young.

“Betty and Shirley got the looks,” Nellie said, “you got the brains. You take after me in that respect. You should be thankful.” Betty and Shirley had got scholarships to Cambridge, Edith reminded her mother. “And look how stupid it made them,” Nellie said.

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.

“There’s always something to see,” Nellie said, “even if it’s nothing.”