Homecoming Kate Morton Quotes

It was, Jess suspected, the common preserve of all true readers. This was the magic of books, the curious alchemy that allowed a human mind to turn black ink on white pages into a whole other world.

There's other ways to travel." She was right. He had books, and there was no barrier to the places he could visit in his own mind.

Reading shapes a person. The landscape of books is more real, in some ways, than the one outside the window. It isn't experienced at a remove; it is internal, vital.

Home, she'd realized, wasn't a place or a time or a person, though it could be any and all of those things: home was a feeling, s sense of being complete. The opposite of "home" wasn't "away," it was "lonely." When someone said, "I want to go home," what they really meant was that they didn't want to feel lonely anymore.

For all that "home" was considered a word of warmth and comfort, policemen knew better. Home is where the heart is, and the heart could be a dark and damaged place.

What is the truth anyway?" Jess had once been asked by a curious friend. "It's what happened." "According to whom?

It was, Jess suspected, the common preserve of all true readers. This was the magic of books, the curious alchemy that allowed a human mind to turn black ink on white pages into a whole other world

We can’t allow ourselves to be the victims of our childhoods,” she said. “One can’t blame one’s parents—or indeed one’s children—for everything. Most people do the best they can and sometimes, sadly, it’s not enough.

A mother is only ever as happy as her unhappiest child.

There’s no point looking backward,” she’d say. “Just make a choice and then trust yourself to have chosen correctly.

Someone I used to know a long time ago told me once that fear is the doorway to opportunity. And I can assure you, my love, that every good thing that's happened to me since has come through acting despite my fears.

Bad things happen to the best of people, and we cannot let them overwhelm us. Life doesn’t always work out the way we plan, but it does work out in the end.” Jess

Reading shapes a person. The landscape of books is more real, in some ways, than the one outside the window. It isn’t experienced at a remove; it is internal, vital.

There were times in a long marriage for pushing and times when the victory of getting one’s own way was not worth the price. Knowing how to tell the difference was key.

that after being responsible for another human being for so long, to be released was not to be set free so much as to be cut adrift.

Bad things happen to the best of people, and we cannot let them overwhelm us. Life doesn’t always work out the way we plan, but it does work out in the end.

There was a truth observed by all good preachers, leaders, and salesmen: tell a good story, tell it in simple language, tell it often. That’s how beliefs and memories were formed. It was how people defined themselves, in a reliance upon the stories about themselves that they were told by others. Nora

Policemen grew tough skins. The job required them to confront the worst of humankind while somehow keeping enough of themselves tender to remain good husbands and fathers, decent members of society.

Polly had certainly made some wrong turns - strange how easy the signposts were to see in the rearview mirror - but she had learned long ago that it was pointless to give in in to the black temptation of regret.

One step at a time," Nora used to say if Jess suffered a disappointment at school. "Anything can be overcome, any distance traveled, just put one foot in front of the other and keep on going until you get there.

inside their covers were whole wide worlds, filled with people and places and hijinks and humor, just waiting for him to join them.

Words could be as tricky as people: seeming to say one thing, when all the while another, secret meaning lay beneath the surface.

And yet, there were times when she felt terror at her own desolation, the gnawing sensation of having lost something she could not name and therefore could not hope to find.

But it has been my experience that guilt shadows a person like a most reliable friend, urging them to reveal the truth when opportunity at last presents itself.

she was the sort of person who felt other people’s unhappiness as if it were her own.

as a family they were so complete, their loyalties and grievances so tightly interwoven, that they did not easily admit outsiders. There simply wasn’t room.

ability to self-critique was one thing, but the analysis-paralysis of overthinking was quite another.

To an extent, all writers of nonfiction relied upon a palette of personal experience to animate their subjects; at what point was the line crossed and too much liberty taken?

They're less careful, less capable, and yet somehow the truly terrible things never happen to them. People want to help; they attract kindness---they're looked after by guardian angels wherever they go.

Home, she’d realized, wasn’t a place or a time or a person, though it could be any and all of those things: home was a feeling, a sense of being complete. The opposite of “home” wasn’t “away,” it was “lonely.

It's quite astonishing how children born of the same mother can be so distinct from one another. You wait and see. Just as you think you've got this mothering thing worked out, the next baby comes along and upends everything you thought you knew.

Jess liked words. She collected them. In her favorite books, it was always in words that true power lurked, whether the enchantments and curses of the fairy tales she’d devoured when she was small, or the wills and deeds and legal loopholes she’d discovered in Dickens.

Ten-year-old Jess liked words. She collected them. In her favorite books, it was always in words that true power lurked, whether the enchantments and curses of the fairy tales she'd devoured when she was small, or the wills and deeds and legal loopholes she'd discovered in Dickens.

The opposite of “home” wasn’t “away,” it was “lonely.

It was possible, Jess supposed, that after being responsible for another human being for so long, to be released was not to be set free so much as to be cut adrift.

If a woman doesn’t take herself seriously, she’ll have a difficult time convincing anyone else to bother.

It was unclear to Isabel exactly when she’d first started taking guilty pleasure in causing that small vertical frown line to appear between her husband’s brows.

A married couple owed one another certain things; balance sheets drawn up over a shared lifetime.

A person should never have to knock to come home.

Kurt,” said Percy. The pointed edges of the name stuck in his throat. Only four letters long, and yet weighted with all possible love and hope and dreams.

She began to feel contempt when she looked at his satisfied face, his rounded shoulders, the crumb in his moustache at the other end of the breakfast table.

Her grandmother was being very kind to her, which had the effect, as kindness often does, of making Jess feel terribly sad and lonely.

S. Eliot line about “the still point of the turning world.

I’ve always found perfection tiresome.

Reading shapes a person. The landscape of books is more real, in some ways, than the one outside the window.

As if she needed to know everything there was to know, to possess the place; as if she felt she had some right to possess it.

This was jet lag, she told herself. The discombobulation, the separation of mind and body, the struggle of each to reclaim the other and together resume circadian rhythms.

For all that the twenty-four-hour news cycle had distorted journalism, politics, and possibly democracy itself,

Stress can make even the most loving mother lose control.

Parenthood is more than the supply of a bit of DNA.

Science was also yet to explain the unique humanizing properties of strawberry jam and butter on warm toast.

my still point in the turning world—is my family.

She knew that history was cumulative. That the past was not something to be escaped from, but a fundamental part of who one was.

the first and firmest human addiction is to narrative. People seek always to identify cause and effect and then arrive at meaning,

...what's lawful and what's right aren't always the same...

She planned to surround herself with animals and plants and as few human beings as she could manage.

Her mother had been right: to walk was to think, to think was to breathe, to breathe was to stay alive.

We can’t allow ourselves to be the victims of our childhoods,” she said.

Then again, he had also enjoyed the benefit of having a wife to pick up the slack—and, it would seem, his wife’s sister, too.

fear is the doorway to opportunity. And I can assure you, my love, that every good thing that’s happened to me since has come through acting despite my fears.

Being old, he had come to realize, was like being stuck inside an enormous museum with hundreds of rooms, each crammed full of artifacts from the past.

[She was] A transplant to a different country, something Jess well understood: belonging, but never quite fully, while another place, far, far away, maintained a stubborn claim as ‘home.

Now, she was as likely to be overtaken with a sudden surge of alarm from nowhere. A sense that she was standing alone on the surface of life and it felt as fragile as glass. Breathing helped.

A cruel fact of life, that parents and children shared so many fundamental experiences but only one of the pair retained the memories. It was a lonely position to occupy, the sole rememberer.

He understood now why the elderly could sit, seemingly still and alone, for hours on end. There was always something else to take out, to look at from a fresh angle and become reacquainted with.

The cold air from outside had crept through the metal cracks and she was acutely aware of being in a liminal space: between terminal and plane, between countries, even between acts of her own life.

It was the height of privilege to expect that her work should bring her purpose as well as the money to pay her bills. To work for spiritual fulfilment was a luxury not afforded many people on the planet.

A Portuguese friend had once given her the word “saudade” when she was trying to describe the feeling of being overcome by a weighty sense of absence for something that couldn’t be had or experienced again;

People who grow up in old houses come to understand that buildings have characters. That they have memories and secrets to tell. One must merely learn to listen, and then to comprehend, as with any language.

I cannot tell you the satisfaction one gets from having planted and loved a garden,’ she’d declare. ‘To be able to leave even a small patch of this earth more beautiful and bountiful than it was when one arrived.

There was no clear corollary between the two events, it was just a matter of coincidence and timing, and yet the first and firmest human addiction is to narrative. People seek always to identify cause and effect and then arrive at meaning...

Lately, it seemed like every conversation she and Rachel had was focused on some disappointment or failure in Jess’s life. She wasn’t sure when she’d become this person, so needful of reassurance. It made her feel like a stranger to herself.

Now, she made a brief note of an experience all too familiar from previous flights back to Australia: the befuddlement of long-haul travel; how it felt to lose a day from the calendar; the dizziness and sea legs on arrival and the irresistible pull towards sleep when one was least expecting it.

She was no longer the shy girl her schoolmates had teased or ignored; conversation came naturally, he laughed easily, they ranked their five favorite Keats poems, agreeing to tie "Bright Star" and "To Autumn" for the top spot. Flowers rained down as the light breeze set them free, surrounding them in a purple haze. "La Belle Dame," he said softly, reaching to take a bloom from her hair. His expression was serious, his keen eyes studying hers. "Full beautiful---a faery's child. Have mercy on me." Polly felt something turn deep inside her, like a key in a lock, and knew that there was no way back from here.

As Mrs. Turner took what would be her last walk around the vegetable garden, Smarty, the ginger tabby, materialized to sit beside the flowerpot man, a position that afforded him a bird's-eye view of the petit fishpond. There was a larger, more formal water feature on the western side of the house, a rectangular pool with a leafy canopy above it and marble tiles around the rim, well-fed goldfish gleaming beneath glistening lily pads, but this little pond was far more cheerful: small and shallow, with fallen petals floating on its surface. The cat's focus was absolute as he watched for flickers of rose gold in the water, paw at the ready.

Jess stayed very still, waiting, hoping, trying to fall back into slumber. Just an hour or two more, and she could get up and start the day. But sleep was elusive. Lying in the dark, she felt divided, dissolvable, displaced. She pictured her bed in London and it seemed like make-believe. But this place was not right or real either.

There was no chance she'd be able to focus on anything else, and so she'd walked all the way from Hampstead, through Primrose Hill, across Regent's Park, to arrive at the museum in time for opening. It hadn't taken long for her to find herself in the tearoom, where she was now finishing off a pot of Darjeeling and a slice of banana bread.

Tea and toast were the rule after long-haul flying. It was one of the great mysteries of the universe, that a person could be fed continuously over the course of a twenty-four-hour transit only to arrive at her destination ravenous. Science was also yet to explain the unique humanizing properties of strawberry jam and butter on warm toast.

Jess and Polly stood without speaking, letting the sounds of the garden resettle. A flock of tiny fairy wrens darted busily in and around the base of a nearby plum tree, crickets ticked in the long grass, and a sense of timelessness, of nature, older and more pervasive than anything human beings and their histories could generate, grew thick and warm around them. "Shall we take a walk down together?" said Polly. Jess noticed a new note of self-possession in her mother's voice. Summery air threaded across the back of her neck, and she felt a pull, suddenly, deep inside her. She didn't know whether it was being here, in this place, or the beautiful weather that evoked long childhood days in which the hours stretched away to be filled only with pleasure, or the fact that it was Christmas Eve, or that her mother was standing here with her, solid and present in a way she hadn't been before, so that Jess was seeing her as if for the first time. But she felt a sensation in her chest that was quite the opposite of loneliness. "Are you with me?" Polly was searching Jess's face, waiting for an answer. Jess gave a nod and smiled. "I am.

It was seven o'clock but still light, a drowsy early evening on a warm summer's day, the sky starting to soften into the pink, purple, and gold folds of dusk, and the lower reaches of the garden just beginning to darken and cool. The colors and smells, the quality of the light, were visceral. Jess could feel them in the rhythm of her heartbeat, deep in her lungs, in the cells of her skin. She knew them as one can't help but know the cadence of their mother tongue.

The netsuke in question had been Mrs. Turner's favorite. Although not as elaborate as the others, there was something beautiful about the white rabbit. Human beings are drawn to symmetry, and the small figure crouched on all four haunches was a deeply satisfying creation. "She used to say it fit perfectly in one's palm," Mrs. Pike remembered to police. "She got me to hold it once, very gently, and wrap my fingers around its smooth back, and I'll be darned if she wasn't right."

Polly had a sound. It came from the necklace she always wore: a long silver chain, from which she'd hung two pendants---one fine and shaped like a jacaranda tree, the other a sterling silver cat. The jacaranda tree had been a gift, and the cat had come from a secondhand shop; it had once been the top of a baby's rattle, Polly said, back in the olden days, a "hey diddle diddle" cat with a ball inside that made a soft tinkle whenever she walked. Jess loved that sound. It always made her feel safe and warm and happy.

He lifted his hands, indicating the garden canopy, the silver-grassed mountain on the other side of the valley, the white-trunked gums. "This is my church. My dad used to talk about places overseas, like St. Paul's Cathedral in London, the Notre-Dame in Paris---places he'd read about in books and wanted to see. But I always felt most connected when I was outside; not just surrounded by nature, but intrinsic to it, a tiny part of a system much larger than I was. Reverence. Grace. Meaning. Purpose. I feel those things when I'm working. Nature is my cathedral.

The one time that Nora had relied on Jess to advocate for her, she had failed. Jess had never before considered herself a failure, no matter the setbacks she’d endured. “One step at a time,” Nora used to say if Jess suffered a disappointment at school. “Anything can be overcome, any distance traveled, just put one foot in front of the other and keep on going until you get there.” But what if one didn’t know where “there” was? What was a person to do when she was stuck in a place she didn’t recognize, with no signposts, and no idea where to put the next step?

The house stood high on the peninsula of Vaucluse, three stories tall with a turret on one side. It had been built in the middle of the nineteenth century, when Jess's great-great-great-grandfather arrived in the colony of New South Wales, and had been featured in several glossy books about architecture that her grandmother kept open on the display tables in the library. Inside it was entirely unpredictable: unexpected doorways led to hidden staircases that wound around brick chimneys and allowed a person to arrive in a vastly different part of the house from that which they'd left.

He felt like a character in a book. He thought of Mary Lennox as she discovered her secret garden. The blackberry bushes had become too thick to ride through and Percy dismounted, leaving Prince beneath the shade of a thick-trunked oak tree. He chose a strong whip of wood and started carving his way through the knotted vines. He was no longer a boy whose legs didn't always do as he wished; he was Sir Gawain on the lookout for the Green Knight, Lord Byron on his way to fight a duel, Beowulf leading an army upon Grendel. So keen was his focus on his swordplay that he didn't realize at first that he'd emerged from the forested area and was standing now on what must have been the top of a gravel driveway. Looming above him was not so much a house as a castle. Two enormous floors, with mammoth rectangular windows along each face and an elaborate stone balustrade of Corinthian columns running around all four sides of its flat roof. He thought at once of Pemberley, and half expected to see Mr. Darcy come striding through the big double doors, riding crop tucked beneath his arm as he jogged down the stone steps that widened in an elegant sweep as they reached the turning circle where he stood.

I don't suppose you remember, but you gave our lovely lady here a name." Jess glanced up at the statue. "Grace," she said suddenly, the word coming from nowhere. Nora smiled. "That's right. Grace. I'm not sure where you got it. Divine inspiration, I've always thought, because of course that is her name. What else could it be?" Jess had looked up at the statue then, taking in her features as if for the first time. Lichen had grown along the coils of her hair and across her face and down her naked torso, but no matter her exposure to the elements, there was something transcendent about her expression and her pose.

She knew a lot about nature, and although she wasn't one for volunteering information or lecturing her daughter, she could always be counted on to notice and share small instances of beauty. The curled side of a gray-green gum leaf, a delicate discarded nest, the way an Illawarra flame tree in flower was a firework against a deep blue sky. They never managed a trip down to the beach without amassing a collection of seaweed and shells and elegant pieces of driftwood that would then be carted home and displayed on windowsills or turned, by Polly, into a striking mobile, or even, on one occasion, a spidery dreamcatcher for Jess.

It was an irony---and perhaps, even, a foreshadowing---that she had been struck especially by the majesty of the house that long-ago day. It had looked to ten-year-old Jess like something from a fairy tale, standing tall with its gleaming weatherboards and elaborate tangle of wisteria branches. The longest boughs of the tallest trees arched together to form a proscenium around the house at center stage, the sweep of green leaves fell away on all sides, and the round pond was just visible on the western slope, with its glossy lily pads and graceful stone statue. The effect was of a place set apart from the rest of the big wide world.

Sunlight glowed orange through the lacework of slender eucalyptus trees that lined the ridge to the east, and in the vegetable garden, directly across the driveway, pale purple garlic flowers swayed at the top of their stems. The sweet scent of basil reached her with the breeze and, on a whim, Mrs. Turner crossed the driveway to inspect the beds. The four square planters were set like windowpanes and divided by truncating brick paths, each box overflowing with carefully-tended strawberries, tomatoes, and spinach, as well as copious herbs. A row of bay trees lined the back wall of the garden, either side of a wooden arch trailing white wisteria flowers.

To describe the effect as ‘menacing’, was too melodramatic for her tastes, but there was something undeniably charged about it – secretive, even. It was the ghostly gums, she had decided, their smooth silver limbs like ladies’ naked bodies in the mist. There were eerie sites in England – the haunted cliffs and caves of Tintagel, the ruins of Ludlow Castle, Hadrian’s Wall, and Stonehenge – but their mysteriousness stemmed from their role in the human story, the crumbling vestiges of people from the past. In Australia, the strangeness came from the land itself. Its mystery and meaning existed outside language – or outside her own language, at any rate. It told its story in far more ancient ways and only to those who knew how to hear it.

Enormous hydrangeas with vibrant pink sponge-like blooms, rhododendrons and impatiens, tall spears of flowering oyster plants jostled together with Jurassic-looking philodendron leaves and tree ferns, a mixed bag all tied by a wild creeper with bell-shaped blue flowers. The damp smell of the garden reminded Jess of places she'd visited in Cornwall, like St. Just in Roseland, where fertile ground spoke of layers of different generations, civilizations past. At last, beyond the tangled greenery, Jess glimpsed the jutting white chimneys of a large roof. She realized she was holding her breath. She turned a final corner, just like Daniel Miller had done on his way to meet Nora, and there it was. Grand and magnificent, yet even from a distance she could see that the house was in a state of disrepair. It was perched upon a stone plinth that rose about a meter off the ground. A clinging ficus with tiny leaves had grown to cover most of the stones and moss stained the rest, so that the house appeared to sit upon an ocean of greenery. Jess was reminded of the houses in fairy tales, hidden and then forgotten, ignored by the human world only to be reclaimed by nature. Protruding from one corner of the plinth was a lion's head, its mouth open to reveal a void from which a stream of spring water must once have flowed. On the ground beneath sat a stone bowl, half-filled with stale rainwater. As Jess watched, a blue-breasted fairy wren flew down to perch upon the edge of the bowl; after observing Jess for a moment, the little bird made a graceful dive across the surface of the water, skimming himself clean before disappearing once more into the folds of the garden.

My grandfather built Darling House five years after he'd arrived from Scotland. He knew by then that the climate was going to require something different from what he'd been used to as a boy." "She's a grand old lady," Matt said of the house. "Dressed up in an iron-lace shawl, looking out over her harbor." Nora smiled. "That's exactly what she is. It's the reason she and I get on so well together. We're two of a kind." Nora had lived in Darling House all her life and was as much a part of the building as the pair of lions guarding its entrance gate and the brick chimneys punctuating the sparkling blue sky. It was almost impossible to imagine her anywhere else. Jess had only to close her eyes now to invoke a vivid picture of her grandmother standing on the wide concrete steps that led to the front door, both arms lifted in welcome.

She was studying a nearby bush covered with vibrant yellow pompom flowers. "Wattle," he said. "Golden wattle," she corrected. "You're right." "Did you know," she began, "that the seedlings from a golden wattle can live for up to fifty years?" "That so?" "That's a long time." "It is." "How old are you?" "Younger than fifty." He was thirty-six, in fact. "Wattle seeds are germinated by bushfires." Evie Turner nodded with vague disdain toward her parents, still engaged in heated discussion in the distance. "She's frightened of bushfires. That's because she's English. But I'm not. I'm Australian and golden wattles are my favorite flower and I'm not going to live in England no matter what she thinks." With that, before Percy had a chance to tell her that golden wattles were his favorite, too, she'd run off to join the adults, sun-browned legs leaping over fallen logs with the expertise of one who seemed more familiar with this lonely place than she ought to be.

From somewhere in the garden came the sound of a magpie singing, and a thousand days of childhood arrived with it. Jess glanced to her right and spotted the black-and-white bird perched atop the statue in the middle of the pond. There were magpies in England, too--- Jess had seen them often on the Heath--- but although they shared a name, they were different from their antipodean cousins: smaller, neater, prettier, and without the eerily sublime song. This magpie was looking directly at her. Jess tilted her head, watching the bird as he watched her. Suddenly, he spread his wings and flew away. She crossed the turning circle toward the lawn. The grass was still damp with dew, even though the sun was rising fast, and cool shadows stretched toward the harbor. Jess reached the edge of the pond and followed the line of its curved rim until the elegant stone lady was directly before her, kneeling as she always had, arms folded above her head, face bowed to gaze at the goldfish and lilies.

People used to say Evie was weird, but she didn't care. She said she liked weird things." This professed love of the weird might go some way to explaining Evie's particular interests in the world of fauna and flora. Not for her the "obvious" choices like koalas and kangaroos; her favorite animals were monotremes. And while she loved the smells and sights of gums and banksias and wattles, it was the primeval expanse of the forest floor that excited her. Evie was mystified when her classmates spoke of magic and make-believe, and by the stories Reverend Lawson told in church on Sundays of water turning to wine and angels appearing to men. Why, she puzzled, did people seek refuge in such fantasies, when the natural world offered endless wonder? She delighted in entering the cool, dark realm of the bush after rain, searching through sopping leaf muck to discover that a whole new variety of fungi had sprouted overnight, an array of unimaginable shapes and sizes and colors waiting to be explored and catalogued.

But Isabel was like no one Nora had met before. She was beautiful, of course---the otherworldly clarity of her English skin!---and possessed of the sort of poise Nora could only dream about. Beyond that, she was magnetic. Try as Nora might, she couldn't resist her brother's new wife. First, there was her voice when she spoke, that crisp accent and authoritative diction that made Miss Perry (strictest in a long line of governesses) seem like a drover's wife by comparison; next, there was her laugh, which rose like bubbles in a glass of champagne. And then there were her stories. True tales of adventure and daring, rivaling anything Nora had read in her Girls' Crystal Annuals: during the Blitz, Isabel had handled secret papers in Whitehall and later worked in some sort of capacity that she wasn't able to speak of at length (at least not then and there). Even more excitingly, she was an orphan---a real one, just like a girl in a book, whose parents had died in tragic circumstances when she was only young, casting her out of the nest and into a childhood of boarding schools and midnight feasts and hockey sticks and daring japes. Nora couldn't think of anything more romantic.

It's an ancient Anglo-Saxon tradition," Polly began, "the mixing of two ideas---one from earliest Christian times, the other from long before. The first Christians used to follow the custom of 'waking' a new church by singing, feasting, and praying in it." Jess, disappointed: "But that's not got nothing to do with a dead body." "I'm not finished yet." Jess mimed zipping her lips. "The other tradition I mentioned is much older. Long before the Christians came to Britain, an all-night vigil would be held over the body of the recently dead. Loved ones would mourn and chant and share stories of the person's life. It was called 'waking the dead'." Jess felt her eyes widen involuntarily as he thoughts went to Dr. Frankenstein and his monster, to Cathy's ghost haunting Withering Heights. "You mean they brought them back to life?" "Well, no." "But you said---" "Back then, the word 'wake' didn't mean to become alert; it meant 'to watch' or 'to guard'." "But what were they guarding against?" "There were those who believed the newly dead soul was at risk of theft by evil spirits." Soul theft at the hands of evil spirits had been almost as exciting as bringing the dead back to life.

That necklace," he said. Polly looked down to where her silver cat was hanging on the long chain. It needed a polish, she realized. She told him the story about the Victorian rattle, but when she'd finished he said, "I meant the little bird. Where did you find it?" Polly smiled. "Actually," she said, "I really did find it. Today, just before I met Kurt. I spotted it on the ground while I was walking. The sunlight caught on a piece of silver ribbon that must once have been tied to it and drew my eye." He was nodding. "Near the water hole?" She wondered how he knew, and then realized that of course Kurt must have told him where they'd met. "I like to collect things from nature. I'm always on the lookout. It's a hobby; my daughter and I used to beachcomb when she was small... I thought it was a stone at first, or a smooth seedpod. But it wasn't. It was this most perfect little bird. A wren, I think." "A fairy wren. We have a lot of them around here." "A fairy wren," said Polly, liking the name very much. "There was something almost magical about it. It was just lying there, as if it had been waiting for me to find it. I suppose that sounds silly." "Not at all." "I can be a bit of a romantic." "A fine trait. We'd have no books or music or paintings if not for the romantics among us.

As she stepped through the front door onto the verandah, a warm breeze brushed her face and she felt a heavy wave of deep familiarity: the smell of eucalyptus and sunbaked dirt, the light so bright it put creases around her eyes just to look at it. The slender blue gums on the ridge, ancient and watchful. This was the landscape of her childhood and she would never be able to escape its influence. But just as Daniel Miller had brought her to Halcyon, the books that she'd read as a child, lying beneath the ferns at Darling House, had taken her to lands where trees with names like oak and chestnut and elm grew in great, ancient forests, and the soil was moist and the sun was gentle, where there were magical words like "hedgerow" and "conker," and snow kissed the glass of windows in winter, and children went sledding at Christmas and ate "pudding" and "blancmange." And so, she had come to know another landscape, not just intellectually, but viscerally: a landscape of the imagination as real to her as the geographical landscape in which she moved. When she first arrived in England as a twenty-year-old graduate, she had stepped off the plane and known it already. Standing here now, looking across the valley toward the facing hill, Jess could imagine how homesick Isabel must have felt at times. She herself had been thinking about "home" a lot. Home, she'd realized, wasn't a place or a time or a person, though it could be any and all of those things: home was a feeling, a sense of being complete. The opposite of "home" wasn't "away", it was "lonely." When someone said, "I want to go home," what they really meant was that they didn't want to feel lonely anymore.