The last thing she wanted was people looking for her. No, that wasn't true--the last thing she wanted was people finding her.
The future was coming nearer, one relentless goose step after the next. Juliet could still remember when Hitler had seemed like a harmless clown. No one was amused now. (The clowns are the dangerous o...
The Grim Reaper, Gloria corrected herself - if anyone deserved capital letters it was surely Death. Gloria would rather like to be the Grim Reaper. She wouldn't necessarily be grim, she suspected she...
That was how history worked, wasn't it? If it wasn't written down it never existed. You might leave behind jewelry and pottery, ornamental tombs, you might leave behind your own bones to be dug up at...
Teddy wandered amongst the graves. Most of the people in them had died long before his time. Ursula was picking up conkers from the stand of magnificent horse chestnuts at the far end of the churchyar...
Teddy thought of his wife and his sister as two sides of the same shining coin. Nancy was an idealist, Ursula a realist; Nancy an optimist with a lively heart, while Ursula’s spirit was freighted with...
Shropshire, the fatlands of Gloucestershire,
She was twenty-eight but already jaded. Twenty-eight seemed a particularly unsatisfactory age. She was no longer young and yet no one ever seemed to take her seriously as an adult. People still told h...
She wanted to be left alone in peace, to disappear into her own quiet world and meditate upon death. Death. Yes, she could form that blunt, obscene word too. But instead she was the one who was going...
She had never chosen death over life before and as she was leaving she knew something had cracked and broken and the order of things had changed. Then the dark obliterated all thoughts.
Scars heal, Sylvie said. Even the worst ones.
Now we must feast!’ Dorothy declared as they headed indoors. Not on the baby, but on its placenta, fried by Jeanette with onions and parsley. Viola declined her portion – it seemed like cannibalism, n...
Nor, says Nora, do we want commonplace tales of hausfrau Angst, of the woman heroically making over her life with a handsome new lover, a beautiful child, a happy ending. Instead, we shall have murder...
Maths was the one true thing, according to Nancy.
It was the enormity of war, she thought, it left you scrabbling for ways to think about it. Bridget
I'm always so glad, Sylvie murmured, that I don't have to take a turn at being other people.
I don't actually live here, Reggie said.Who does live here then?Ms. MacDonald, except that she doesn't because she's dead. Everyone's dead.I'm not, Jackson said. You're not.
Human nature favors the tribal. Tribalism engenders violence. It was ever thus and so it will ever be.
First things were good, last things not so much so.
Fanning Court. God forbid. Teddy could no longer sit in the chair. He could no longer leave the bed, no longer do anything. He was approaching the end of his twilight, entering into the final darkness...
