Gardens

They strolled on through the gardens, arm in arm to preclude any chance of a stray brush of hands. The folds of her full length long black crinoline dress whispered against the high laced boots she still affected. She wasn't quite yet ready to surrender to her age. Old men played chess with strangers beneath the elms. It is impossible to beat, or be beaten by friends over time and remain friends. If she glanced to her right she knew she'd see the sky was clearing, but over her left shoulder the clouds were dark as iron with rain.

Given a choice between friends and lovers, she'd always plumped for the former. Comradeship lasted longer than passion and, when she let them down in the end as she inevitably must, the pain though sharp as ever, didn't cut to the heart. She thought of herself as a good person, she couldn't help it, but her choices were catching up with her now. In this, if in nothing else, she knew herself less than exceptional. From her times in prisons, on slave ships, with the whip in her hand or lashed to the oar, she'd never met anyone who thought of themselves otherwise. Every rapist thought the girl was asking for it, every thief that the victim deserved to be robbed or somehow, bizarrely, just didn't exist. Every traitor had a moral rationale for his betrayal and rehearsed it to himself as he counted his gold. She wondered if her fondness for the company of L and her other friends in her youth, long gone but still sweetly remembered, was not in some way born of this. The gentle, furtive acts they perfected or blundered into could be seen by one as the ultimate expression of love and love making and the other as simply messing around. Her fulfillment was found in what others, in other circumstances, would dismiss as mere idle foreplay. The girls could dismiss it a childish games if they wanted, at least later on, and she too could cast it aside when the pull of the time streams tugged her rootless body away. In the final analysis most people's lives are tinged with tedium and their loves are much the same. We all have our moments, she mused, but few escape regression to the mean.


All in all, she was glad she'd opted for the quiet life this time around. An unlived life may not be worth examining but too much experience drains too much out of you. Quite why she'd married a Russian, particularly this Russian, was a mystery best forgotten. Their attraction had never been attraction per se, she was no stranger to that despite all appearances, it was more attritional somehow and to her chagrin and relief she'd succumbed. Alexi Markov fingered the brown paper package in his hand. A devotee of every second hand bookshop in town, he loved the feel of books beyond their contents. He spent hours admiring the heft of the leather bound volumes, crowding the shelves in the firelight, while she sat reading or staring into the flames.

Tiring of the clump of the mechanical stilts of the motorpedes on the roadway and the clatter of the Gentleman's Ornithopters overhead, they stopped for tea in Regents Park before returning to their town house. With the boys both off at boarding school there was no hurry to return. Despite the stern public notices warning patrons off such behaviour, she fed crumbs of seedcake to the fat, waddling pigeons. Once driven to extinction on their native isle by the pigs and the rats and the clubs of visiting sailors, a few stray sailors amusements had thrived in the botanical gardens of England and France. Some kept them as pets though, in truth, their smelly habits and querulous squabbling made them less than ideal in the house. She patted a Quagga, quietly cropping the verge, as the howls of the Thylacines carried over the limes. She was content, if not exactly happy. England had fallen without firing a shot. The last of her battleships rusting in port. It was hard to see how things could ever be otherwise.