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Mary decided that she would never speak of how she felt.
London could, but here the great old nautilus lay gasping and cracked at the throat of the Thames, at the place where sweet water met salt.
if I went along with you, and attended your functions and married some outrageously suitable Henry, or whether you wouldn’t secretly be much happier if I just said ‘hang it all,’ and flew as close to the sun as I jolly well dared.” “Yes, you are quite right, you don’t know that.”
There in the sweet sacking smell of the mailbags he understood that he was dying, and it pleased him that he was going in the company of so many soft words home. He looked down through the Perspex side panel of the Wellington and watched the endless blue Mediterranean wash the blood away from all shores.
This was how a kind heart broke, after all: inward, making no shrapnel. Dear Tom. Without the war they might have finished as friends.
“Don’t you think we shall all be kinder to one another? I hope one’s class will matter less and one’s convictions more. I hope we might be more inclined to pardon one another for our errors with both.”
You’re what I might have been if I’d ever had the courage to tell my mother to mind her own business.”
The true moments of one’s life were sadder for the fact that they must always be synchronized with the ordinary:
EATS NNLDNN CEMTHGY. He had drawn his thumbs together, isolating each letter as Mary had shown him. He had made a one-letter prison between his thumbs and slid it across the first word: E . . . A . . . S . . . T. He had repeated the word to himself, then interrogated the whole sentence. EAST LONDON CEMETERY. Beside the location had been written a plot number for a mass grave.
and so what if the man wrote around?
The staff at the Ritz had the quality of apologizing with a murmur for each of their perfect actions. They smelled of nothing and had faces that made no demands on the eye or on the heart. They melted into shade, not allowing themselves to be silhouetted against the chandelier. They eluded cognition entirely, like sorcerers, or fathers. At the tables all around them the guests chattered away as if life were not on the meter, while the waiters took away ash.
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