When everything was finally outside, and some pieces of furniture and other objects had been separated out from those selected and officially recorded as being for destruction, they sprayed the lovers’ seat and chairs with petrol, and set them on fire. As I stood watching the flames I thought of Viola. This was where he had grown up, on this sofa; this was where the old woman had always rested; it had been her bed. And here too the cats — the sometime, never again, eternal cats — had sat, like birds on a telephone wire. Into the conflagration went Emerence’s shoes, stockings and headscarves.
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