Half Broken Things by Morag Joss

Author:Morag Joss [Joss, Morag]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Psychological, Fiction
ISBN: 9780440335597
Google: Ao-KDktl-AAC
Amazon: 0440242444
Barnesnoble: 0440242444
Goodreads: 7615908
Publisher: Delta
Published: 2003-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Michael listened to make sure that the house was quiet. Then he pulled a tartan rug from one of the library sofas, brought it into the utility room and spread it out on the floor. He thought that he would be safe from interruption here, even if Jean should wake up.

They had not had lunch until after half-past three. Neither of them had commented on Steph’s absence. They had chosen to assume that she must be resting and therefore did not remark on it—in this way they disallowed the possibility that there might be any significance in her failure to appear. Because as long as a thing remained unsaid, it could be deemed to be not happening. It would remain untrue, for as long as they did not draw attention to it, that dozens of little hairline cracks in their arrangements were about to open into fissures. They were afraid to refer even to how late it was to be eating lunch, lest it make them take a mere irregularity in mealtimes seriously. Since Miranda’s death everyone had been rising late and, in between daytime naps and lie-downs, scratching effortfully at things, in search of some sort of purpose in anything. To mention a lapse in the punctuality of lunch might be to suggest that they were failing to find it, or even that they might be falling apart. What did it matter, anyway, what time they had lunch? It was only time after all, told by a clock somewhere, and these days, except to notice that there seemed to be too much of it, they were hardly aware of it. Time did not seem to have any need of them nor they for it. Lunch itself, a sparse soup that had been getting weirder as well as sparser by the day, had not been worth waiting for anyway. This was its fourth manifestation, and since flavour had quite deserted the original stock, which had been made with the last cube, today Jean had added a shake of angostura bitters and a small tin of macaroni. Defeated by the effort of pretending it was edible, she had left hers unfinished and agreed to lie down for the rest of the afternoon.

Michael moved silently in bare feet through the house while he pictured her sleeping above, trusting but unaware. He was conscious of the first pleasurable sensation he had felt since before Miranda died, an agreeable certainty that what he was working quietly at now, without her knowledge, would please his mother. From the library he brought first a set of leather-bound volumes with the title The History of Scotland, during the Reigns of Queen Mary and of King James VI dated 1752, and placed them on the tartan rug. Then from the library desk he carried a brass inkstand, a pair of Sèvres inkpots, and two lace and ivory fans from a glass case that contained seven or eight others, and put them next to the books. That would do for the library.

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