The Translation of the Bones by Francesca Kay Page B

duty. But Stella’s own was pale, she felt, flimsy as the roots of wild violets and as like to shrivel in harsh light. And anyway, her own table was not the proper place for declaration, if it might discomfort the invited guests. She turned her attention to her eldest child, this amazing person who had a man’s full height but not yet a man’s full breadth; who was impossibly narrow, filthy, travel-stained and beautiful, casually pleased to see her, eager to be off again with friends almost as soon as he was home. He dropped his backpack in the hall. His sandaled feet were dark with dust and he had grown a beard. When Stella reached to touch it he shied away. In his bag he had a present for her, a small wooden figure, cracked and worn but still recognizably the figure of an angel, one wing missing, the other broken toa stub. I bought it in the market, Barney said. The man swore that it was very old but you can’t really tell. Anyway, I thought you’d like it.
    I do, she said. It’s beautiful. Thank you so much, darling. Would you like a bath?
    Barney was to stay two nights in London before leaving for Shropshire, where his girlfriend lived. Stella and Rufus were to drive down then to the constituency, where she would remain until Thursday, Felix’s end of term. Rufus had marked off a whole day in his diary for time alone with Stella. Afterward he was going to New York. The family would gather again in London on Easter Sunday, when Stella’s mother and stepfather would join them, with Rufus’s brothers and their wives. Two branches of a family entwined, a day of feasting and celebration. Stella was looking forward to it. She knew she would feel the absence of Camilla more acutely for the presence of the others, but she loved the thought of three generations round one table, her sons together, the strength of kinship, the solidity it meant, if only for a while. She would roast the Easter lamb in the Italian style, as her mother had done and her grandmother before her, and Felix would paint Easter eggs, even if he did so now only to please her.
    Felix, that Friday evening, crossed another day off his chart and contemplated time. Six whole days. Two of these days elongated by the collapse of normal structure—on Saturday mornings there were lessons, but Sundays were an interminable wasteland to cross and Wednesday, being the final day of term, would be given over to house competitions.It was a mystery to Felix why there was so much battling for place. House rugger, house swimming, house drama, house singing; what was it supposed to teach? Of late he had become interested in entomology, especially in ants. The cleverness of these scuttling things had impressed him. He had observed their teamwork and the way they tackled the challenge of transporting creatures so much bigger than themselves to the hungry companions back home in their nests. A beetle to an ant? Like a blue whale to a minnow, Felix thought. It would be absolutely no use if the ants held competitions to see which team got to carry off the dinner; they ate because they worked together, like prehistoric hunters killing mammoths. If their hunts had been arranged by prep schools, they would all have starved.
    Felix smiled grimly at the picture in his mind of a house mammoth-hunting competition. But it didn’t help. There was still this eon to get through. Eon. He said the word out loud. It sounded as it should do, like a howl. A yawning chasm of six days. Adults would think that was no time at all, a mere blink, but it was time enough for God to have made the whole entire world. The light and the darkness, the fish of the sea, the fowl of the air, and every creeping thing that creepeth on the earth. Ants. Except, of course, he didn’t. As everybody knows, from the fossil record.
    An eon. Infinity. A thought to make you dizzy. Lying on the ground, looking up into the sky, imagining an endless space, an endless time, gave you the same feeling that you got on the