Chapters (21)
That time is just a summary of time: everything’s forever, and nothing is lost
That somehow our souls remember, and they rise in our bodies to tell us
That here I am
This private place achieved against the public odds; achieved and in a sense guaranteed because of them
Intimacies, first used in printed English in 1641, along with catafalque, charism, eavesdropping; along with holy of holies, infinitude, intertwine; with jubilate, tantamount, tantivy, unfurl
I give you these words and all of the words 155
All the words you’ll live and the people you’ll love and the places you’ll go
Love being a holding-close and simultaneously a letting-go
All things, everything, at once
Now is always; and this a spell by which I’ve made it so.
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Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to the Society of Authors for the K Blundell Trust Award, which enabled me to begin this collection, and will ever be to the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University, Belfast, for the Fellowship during which the final stories were written.
My thanks to my first reader, Joe Thomas, and our book club (or valiant attempt thereat) of two plus occasional half. My agent, Peter Straus, of whose support I’m so profoundly glad, and my editor, Angus Cargill, with whom it’s a joy and a privilege to work and from whom I’ve learned so much.
Thank you to everyone else at Faber who has helped to make this collection, including Libby Marshall, Josephine Salverda, Josh Smith and Jack Smyth, and to Silvia Crompton for her dark arts of copyediting. Also to Sarah Cleave, Sinéad Gleeson, Ra Page, Michael Shannon, David Torrans and Emma Warnock for their contributions to individually published stories.
My constant gratitude to my parents and sisters, Maureen, Peter, Kim and Faye Caldwell. 158
And finally, my thanks to my Tom, and William, and our brilliant force-for-good girl Orla. This collection is dedicated to her, and it’s also especially for all London (particularly Northern) Irish.
164
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