"Dorothy Miller lived in a block of flats next to Madame Tussaud's....The waxworks stood, mute in their celebrity. Dorothy hadn't been in there in years but she sensed their presence, keeping watch with her through the night. Queens and murderers, mistresses and presidents, their selves had long since died but their replicas remained, forever poised - a hand raised, eyes gazing nowhere. During the war they had been stored in an adjacent building. One night, in a bombing raid, the roof was blown off; when the rescue teams arrived they had stared, appalled, at the heap of limbs."
*******
"Increasing years, of course, render us invisible as if in preparation for our eventual disappearance."
******
"Life was full of incomprehensible instructions. The manual for her video recorder was twenty pages long, in tiny print that only an ant could read."
*****
"It had been a day packed with incident - a pedicure, new red sandals, a monkey bite, a handsome doctor. There had been many more images, however, that crowded Evelyn's head - a man washing his ox beside the petrol pump; a boy, balancing a tray of tea glasses, weaving through the traffic...more than this, much more. The street outside teemed with life; she didn't really have to go anywhere at all."
*****
"Evelyn thanked him, though she couldn't imagine ever wearing a sari, nor an occasion special enough to warrant such a thing. Widows in India wore white ones, as if they were already ghosts. She was glad Christopher hadn't got her one of those."
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