I had believed that all that remained was the prospect of the same acts performed with a new cast and the odd, trivial variation. It was, admittedly, a matter for only a modicum of regret, something easy enough to live with, like the realisation that it is impossible to conquer every longed for object of desire, or the distant prospect of death in old age. Now I see there was always this; the destruction of what we valued, of the property we held dear. I feel that I was blind, not to have understood that some of the morality we shared with others involved restrictions worth the breaking, and hiding in that subversion a deal of previously unglimpsed pleasure. I do not think this is something I could have done; nostalgia, some dreg of familial feeling, respect for craft or the comprehension of the impossibility of undoing such ruination would have stopped me, but the deed having been done by others, why should I not relish it and glory in the result? Who else should? Who else deserves to? Not these casual destroyers, these temporary occupiers; I doubt they knew that the paintings they slashed to shreds, or the vase they threw against a wall or the book they tossed into the moat or the desk they smashed and burned in the grate were each worth more than they might ever expect to earn, in peacetime or in war. Only I can justly and with due discrimination appreciate what has been destroyed here. And did these materials, this wealth of merchandise and art not owe me one last balance of enjoyment, one last cherishing, even if it was just the valedictory recognition of their lost worth?
Gone, then. And with all that, vanished too is so much of what drew us back even as we left the castle, those few days ago. We may now relinquish these walls unencumbered, I think. Only the construction's own fabric now remains, and I would not like to hazard how long that will outlast the trove that it once sheltered. The shell of it, the body alone endures; comatose, vegetative, abandoned by the inhabiting quick, its self possession quite annihilated.
But with that loss, we gain. We are released, able finally to quit, to walk away with our hearts as well as our feet.
I step through the deserted Long Room, passing to the brittle applause of broken glass and the ferrous accolade of collapsed armour figures, fallen swords and unknown metal debris. A little moonlight is seeping from the clouds rending and departing overhead, allowing me to see. I tear one sagging hanging from a wall, gritting my teeth to the fiery handful of pain that results. I set one marble maid upon her base again and set her broken arm on the bookcase by her side; she shines milk white in the grey blue light, luminous and ghostly.
Stooping, I pick up a little figurine. It is a shepherdess; idealised, but still exquisitely realised and quite beautiful, as I recall. She has lost her head, and broken from her base. I squat and look about for other pieces. I find her bonnetted head, and rub a little plaster dust from her delicate features. Her nose has been chipped, its tip shining whitely through the thin blush of glaze. The head sits precariously on her slender flute of neck; I place her carefully on the bookcase shelf beside the arm of the statue then walk on, through the devastation.
… And find I cannot help but recall another tumultuous spoilage, long ago, instituted by Father if carried out by Mother. It was, too, the occasion of our first separation.
The memory's hazed, not so much by the accumulation of, other, intervening events as due to my lack of years at the time. I remember that after the initial exchange of shouts, Mother screamed and Father only talked, that her voice assaulted the ears and that one had to strain to hear his, most of the time. I remember she threw and he ducked, or tried to catch.
We were in the nursery, playing, when we heard their voices, raised, and rising to us in that airy space of brightly painted attic. The nurse looked flustered, hearing the shouts and screams, the harsh words and accusation filtering up from the bedroom on the floor below. She went and shut the door, but still the noise came to us, carried by some by way of the castle's much altered geography while we played with bricks or trains or dolls. I think we looked at each other, keeping silent, and went on playing. Until I could stand no more and ran past nurse and hauled the door open, sobbing as I ran down the narrow steps while the woman cried out after me, calling me back. She ran, following me, and you came padding behind her.
They were in his bedroom; I charged through the door Just as Mother threw something at him. A piece of porcelain, part of his collection, it flew, white as a dove, across the room and smashed on the wall above his head. I think he'd made to catch it, and might have, but for my sudden appearance. He scowled at me as I ran towards my mother, crying and wailing.
She was standing by a display cabinet against one wall; he was by the door connecting to her room. He was dressed for a trip to town. She wore filmy night things under a housecoat, her hair was wild, her face striped with some beauty treatment. In her left hand she held a piece of lavender paper with writing on it.
She was not aware of me until I thudded into her thigh and clamped myself to her, begging her and Father to stop shouting, stop arguing, stop being horrible to each other. I smelled her perfume, the treasured natural odour of her and the light, flowery scent she favoured, but I detected something else too; there was another perfume, darker and muskier than hers, which I realised only later must have emanated from the sheet of mauve notepaper she held crumpled in her hand.
I thought, perhaps, that just by being there, just by reminding them of my existence I might stop them shouting, never imagining that my presence, that very existence, might itself provide a further stimulus for dispute. I did not know that the whole course of our lives from then on had been determined by two pieces of paper in that room. One white, severe and crisply edged, folded neatly in Father's jacket was a letter with a seal of state upon it, sending him to a foreign capital to represent his country; the other a mauvely fragrant tissue, hotly crumpled in Mother's hand had been hidden by Father, discovered by Mother, re hidden by her and then revealed, minutes ago, in response. Both represented an opportunity for the holder, together they defined a calamity for our family.
She clasped me to her as I sobbed into the comforting quilt of housecoat, her balled fist the one holding the note pressing between my shoulder blades and trembling. She shouted again, words tumbling fast, desperate and breathless from her mouth. Fierce, accusing, humiliated words; phrases and sentences of discovery and betrayal and abandonment and sordid, filthy acts and hate. I understood few of those words at the time, can directly remember none of them now, but their meaning, their import pierced my ears like burning spikes and blistered inside my head; I screamed for her to stop and threw my hands over my ears.
Somebody else's hands closed round me and started pulling me away. I clutched at Mother again, tighter than ever, while the nurse tried to prise me away from her and you stood in the doorway, holding on to the doorknob, dark eyes wide, calmly inquisitive.
Father's voice was measured, calm, reasonable. He spoke of duty and opportunity, of staleness and fresh starts, of the weight of the past and the promise of. the future, and of tired land and new lands. That very coolness induced the opposite in Mother and his every word seemed to incite her wrath and draw still greater venom from her, wrenching each word of public responsibility from his mouth and twisting it, forcing it to the question of what was fit private behaviour and finding each one not just wanting but disgraceful.