Status Updates From The Road to Lichfield

Best read of the year

Oh, the past is disagreeable all right, she thought, no wonder we'd rather not know. And it has this way of jumping out at you from behind corners when you're least expecting it, so that you have to spend time and energy readjusting to it, redigesting it. Or it hangs around your neck like an albatross, so that there is no putting it aside ever, even if you wanted to.

‘This summer,’ said Don, ‘has been a bit of a strain, hasn't it?’ Don, of course, is not given to emotion. The remark is made in as cool and level a tone as he might, not to promote undue alarm or anxiety, point out that the neighbouring house is on fire, or that war appears to be imminent. It might mean anything, or nothing.

So far as I am concerned – have been concerned – he existed to be my father, and now one finds that was not the case at all, or only a small part of it.

I begin to see how slippery the past is….The problem is the shadows it throws. This happened, and then this, and then this. But if you keep your eyes only on that, you miss another dimension and end up with something that is not the truth at all, or only part of it. For instance, she said, …in that photograph where we're all grinning away outside the church at Starbridge, that I almost called the whole thing off…

She clasped her hands behind her head and stared into the darkness of the room, beginning the slow re-adjustment of the past, roaming to and fro across the years, without regard to chronology, sifting through a jumble of events and occasions. What I thought was thus, was otherwise. Things that appeared so, were not.

Once, before her marriage, she had worked for a short time in the manuscript room of a museum. Sitting now on the floor of her father's study it seemed to her that this random archive of paper in his desk was the same kind of fitful evidence about people's lives as those miraculously surviving scraps of Saxon writs and medieval tax returns. They told you facts, but facts stripped of the whole truth.

The road reached out ahead of her, empty of traffic, darkly grey between the green verges, its width neatly defined at every bend by a run of white lines in the centre. She could have been quite alone on it, as though it were there for her only. Behind her, clear in the driving-mirror and yet curiously diminished, it reached away again in reverse.