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Pride would not let her reply that she hadn’t volunteered for anything in particular – that she had simply volunteered, assuming the issue would be decided favourably, as it always had been until now, by influences unseen.
This was the velvet rope mothers offered: enough silence to make a noose with.
‘But what good is it to teach a child to count, if you don’t show him that he counts for something?’
It occurred to him that no one who hadn’t been in battle could know what things were worth.
one could continue to operate quite adequately, so long as one stayed in the hour.
If it’s an hour, one can say what one likes. If it’s a year, one can be what one is like.
How perfect that a saviour had come to a earth who could heal and forgive, but that what everyone sang about was the local guest house being full. It was a perfectly English take on a divine visitation – the kind of thing old colonels wrote indignant letters to the Daily Telegraph about.
Perhaps this was what love was like after all – not the lurch of going over a humpback bridge, and not the incandescence of fireworks, just the quiet understanding that one should take a kind hand when it was offered, before all light was gone from the sky.
In the end I suppose we lay flowers on a grave because we cannot lay ourselves on it.
I was brought up to believe that everyone brave is forgiven, but in wartime courage is cheap and clemency out of season.
This was how a kind heart broke, after all: inwards, making no shrapnel.
When Alistair looked up, he was surprised to find the war. She had done it again, her trick of making it all disappear.
When they reuse the rubble you will see that it can only fit back together one way.’
‘Women fall differently, that’s all. We die by the stopping of our hearts, they by the insistence of theirs.’
It had taken the war to reveal London’s heart, centrifugal for white children and gravitational for negroes.
Men were empty hats after all, from which rabbits popped only by a learned effort of conjuring.
The true moments of one’s life were sadder for the fact that they must always be synchronised with the ordinary: with rail timetables, with breaks in the traffic.
never be afraid of showing someone you love a working draft of yourself.
