Half Broken Things by Morag Joss Read Free Book Online Page A

reasons which must have been valid enough and perhaps even compelling at the time. But now those reasons didn’t matter any more, nor whose reasons they were. Less still did it matter
when
those reasons mattered, whether last month, last year or 1600, because they were in the past.
    I saw then that everything that is ever thought or done by people disappears. All human reasoning and actions die, because the minute they’re done with, they belong to a time past and they don’t come back. Oh, but you might say, what about memory, or the consequences of what people do? They last, don’t they? Well, they may survive for a while, but they are on borrowed time. I mean that quite literally. Though it may be longer in coming, the death even of memory comes around, and the effects of actions grow weaker until they are unfelt and cease, and then it is as if they have never been. What is history, then, I suppose you might ask next, if not the past lasting into the present. And I would reply that history is only what we keep hold of in order to explain the present in a way we like. If history is a sort of looking through a window into the past, we choose not just the shape of the window but the view we get from it too. I have read enough historical biography to see that. History is not the remembering of events that were significant in their own time, it is only the resurrecting and preserving of things dead and past upon which we hang our reasons for the way things are now, in the hope that those reasons may seem less paltry. Nothing in the history of anything, not one thought or deed of a single soul, can ever outlive its usefulness in providing acceptable reasons for the present. So not even history lasts.
    But things, things last. They last beyond the time when their significance, or that which originally made them significant, has been forgotten. Whatever the things in this house had meant to someone once, whatever fond stories were attached to them no longer mattered, because time had passed and now the things simply belonged here, neutrally. I could disregard the old stories and tell new ones, and who’s to say mine would be less true? That teapot—looked it up on the inventory—was made in Canton around 1650, silver gilt mounts added later at Augsburg. Insured for hundreds of pounds (I forget the exact figure, it isn’t important). Isn’t that ridiculous? Now suppose I were to add that it had been bought by, let’s say John Walden, an ancestor on my father’s side. I could put that it was mentioned in a Deed of Probate (since lost) at Walden Manor in the mid 19th century. Suppose I were to go on to say that it was used by my beloved great-aunt as a button box? Who’s to argue? I will admit that these thoughts, as I sat that evening with the owls calling in the dark outside, quite excited me.
    I had already begun to picture this kind great-aunt of mine sewing a button from the teapot on my favourite dress, talking softly as she did so to her little niece Jean, and it suddenly seemed perfectly right to continue with the story (this teapot was letting me tell any story I wanted) and say that at some point later on in all this huge, wasteful expenditure of time, Jean conceived a child out of wedlock, gave birth to a son and had him adopted. Forty-seven years ago, say, that would make it 1955, when I was seventeen, the year after Father died. A man of forty-seven might well have children of his own by now, perhaps even grandchildren! How happy I would be to find him again. This would be a fine house for a large family, with its gardens, the pool, the paddocks, so many fine rooms.
    I swear that this notion that I could once have had a baby and that nobody could insist that I hadn’t, it actually made me happy, because it seemed not at all an invention but more like a forgotten thing remembered. So later that evening before I retired to my new bedroom for the first time, I made up all