"A Month in the Country" [.]

The country and its people:

• its bit of front garden sulking behind a rusting .. fence.
• It was an off-the-peg job. Evidently there had been no medieval wool boom in these parts. This has been starveling country, every stone an extortion.
• Even between the buttresses it had been beautifully cut with only a hint of mortar.
• She had  him weighed up and, right from the start, gave him no change.
• That rose, Sara van Fleet... I still have it. Pressed in a book. My Bannister-Fletcher, as a matter of fact.
• "I come in useful at baptisms, weddings, funerals. Chiefly funerals - they employ me as a removal contractor to see them safely flitted into their next house."
• Mossop, remarking that us southerners were fair cautions,
• "The commonality were launched in a shroud," he said. "Pure wool by Act of Parliament to bolster trade. But my man would rate a stone box." <> Then he climbed out (of the coffin), handed down a steel tape and had me call out measurements like a tailor's boy.

The hidden keyword: Battle of Passchendaele

• Are you here to try to crawl back into the skin you had before they pushed you through the mincer?
• Our jobs are our private fantasies, our disguises, the cloak we can creep inside to hide.
• Life had flooded back, tingling to my finger-tips.
• Oxgodby's just about ironed you out.

Simon Magus, Tallis, Nunc dimittis

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