The Shifting Fog by Kate Morton

debut novel, Purgatorio , is a fictionalised history of Mahler’s unfinished tenth symphony, and was short-listed for the 1996 Orange Prize for Literature. Marcus and Rebecca McCourt had recently separated.

Saffron High Street
    The rain is on its way. The bones in my lower back, more sensitive than any meteorologist’s equipment, have begun to throb. Last night I lay awake, my body aching: bone moaning to bone, whispered tales of long ago litheness. I arched and bowed my stiff old frame, hopelessly pursuing sleep. Nuisance became frustration, frustration became boredom, and boredom became terror. Terror that the night would never end and I would be trapped forever in its long, lonely tunnel.
    I must eventually have slept, for this morning I woke, and as far as I can tell the one cannot be done without the other. I was still in bed, my nightie twisted about my middle, skin grimy with the night’s labour, when a girl with rolled-up shirt sleeves and a long thin plait that brushed her jeans bustled into my room and threw open the curtains, letting the light stream in. The girl was not Sylvia and thus I knew it must be Sunday. The girl—Helen, read her name badge—bundled me into the shower, gripping my arm to steady me, mulberry fingernails burrowing into flaccid white skin. She flicked her plait over one shoulder and set about soaping my torso and limbs, scrubbing away the lingering film of night, humming a tune I do not know. When I was suitably sanitary she lowered me onto the plastic bath seat and left me alone to soak beneath the shower’s warm course. I clutched the lower rail with both hands and eased forward, sighing as the water rained relief over my knotted back.
    With Helen’s assistance I was dried and dressed, powdered and processed, seated in the morning room by seven-thirty. I managed a piece of rubbery toast and a cup of tea before Ruth arrived to take me to church.
    I am not overly religious. Indeed there have been times when all faith has deserted me, when I railed against a benevolent father who could allow such earthly horrors to beset his children. But I made my peace with God a long time ago. Age is the great mellower. Our relationship is easy now: we don’t speak often, but I know where to find him.
    It is Lent, the period of soul-searching and repentance that always precedes Easter, and this morning the church pulpit was draped in purple. The sermon was pleasant enough, its subject guilt and forgiveness. (Fitting when one considers the endeavour I have decided to undertake.) The minister read from John 14, beseeching the congregation to resist the scaremongers who preach Millennial doom and to find instead an inner peace through Christ. ‘I am the way, the truth and the life,’ he read, ‘no man cometh unto the Father but by me.’ And then he bid us take our example from the faith of Christ’s Apostles at the dawn of the first millennium. With the exception of Judas, of course: there is not much to recommend itself in the traitor who betrayed Christ for thirty pieces of silver then hanged himself.
    It is our habit, after church, to walk the short distance to the High Street for morning tea at Maggie’s. We always go to Maggie’s, though Maggie herself left town with a suitcase and her best friend’s husband many years ago. This morning, as we ambled down the gentle slope of Church Street, Ruth’s hand on my arm, I noticed the first eager buds emerging on the brambly hedgerows that line the path. The wheel has turned again and spring is on its way. We rested for a moment on the timber seat beneath the hundredyear Elm whose mammoth trunk forms the junction of Church and Saffron High streets. The wintry sun flickered through the lacework of naked branches, thawing my back. Strange these clear, bright days in winter’s tail, when one can be hot and cold all at once.
    When I was a girl, horses and carriages and hansom cabs rolled along these streets. Motor cars too, after the war: Austens and