The Clockmaker's Daughter

by Kate Morton

Sentimentality was mawkish and cloying, where nostalgia was acute and aching. It described yearning of the most profound kind: an awareness that time’s passage could not be stopped and there was no going back to reclaim a moment or a person or to do things differently.

life is inherently unfair. That the only truly fair thing about it is the randomness of its unfairness.”

wanted you to see what a balm love is. What it is to share one’s life, to really share it, so that very little matters outside the certainty of its walls. Because the world is very noisy, Elodie, and although life is filled with joy and wonder, there’s evil and sorrow and injustice, too.”

“You are in love,” he said, “for that is exactly how love feels. It is the lifting of a mask, the revealing of one’s true self to another, and the forced acceptance, the awful awareness, that the other person may never feel the same way.”

Tom had been buried in a cemetery in France, near a village he had never set foot in alive. Leonard had seen the letter sent to their mother and father and had marveled at the way Tom’s commanding officer made things sound so brave and honorable, death in duty a terrible but noble sacrifice. He supposed it was all down to practice. Lord knew, those officers had written an awful lot of letters. They’d become expert at ensuring they betrayed not a hint of the chaos or horror, and certainly no suggestion of waste. Incredible how little official waste there was in war, how few mistakes. Leonard had read the letter twice when his mother showed it to him. She’d drawn great comfort from it, but beneath its smooth words of gentle consolation, Leonard could hear the ill choir shouting out in pain and fear, calling for their mothers, their boyhoods, their homes. There was nowhere farther from home than the battlefield, and no more wretched homesickness than that of the soldier facing death.

My earliest and fondest memories are of Edward telling me stories. If you are to understand my brother, Mr. Gilbert, you must stop seeing him as a painter and start seeing him instead as a storyteller. It was his greatest gift. He knew how to communicate, how to make people feel and see and believe. The medium in which he chose to express himself was irrelevant. It is no easy feat to invent a whole world, but Edward could do that. A setting, a narrative, characters who live and breathe—he was able to make the story come to life in someone else’s mind. Have you ever considered the logistics of that, Mr. Gilbert? The transfer of an idea? And, of course, a story is not a single idea; it is thousands of ideas, all working together in concert.”

It was not love at first sight. Such claims make a mockery of love. It was a presentiment. An inexplicable awareness that something important had happened.

What it was to be the youngest of three—what luck to be born into a jumbly, rowdy group of bigger people and be simply adored.

It struck her now that maybe she needed to let go a bit more often. To try and, yes, occasionally to fail. To accept that life is messy and sometimes mistakes are made; that sometimes they’re not even really mistakes, because life isn’t linear, and it comprises countless small and large decisions every day.

“A fool always wants to shorten space and time,” he had announced when he was leaving the house in Hampstead the other day. “A wise man wants to lengthen both.”

“Time is a strange and powerful beast. It has a habit of making the impossible possible.”