5. Coda

"I never imagined I'd be coming to Europe a second time this year," Veronica said, leaning back against the headboard of the hotel bed, where she and Victoria lay beneath the warm duvet as though no time had passed since the days when sharing a room had been second nature to them.

"All the better that we're together again," Victoria replied. "Even if it takes gravestones to bring us back to one another."

They exchanged tired smiles. The day still clung to them like mist. It had been years since they had last shared a room. Veronica could still feel the weight of the time difference between the States and Europe. Victoria had left Birmingham the previous morning before dawn to catch an early flight from Stansted after an evening event at the Barber Institute. The late-night drive, the predawn departure, the visit to the cemetery—it was hardly surprising that exhaustion had overtaken them.

After a while Victoria asked quietly, "So? What did you make of Anika and René? And Valerie?"

Veronica shrugged.

"Closeness. Fractures. And something suspended between the two."

They finished their tea. Weariness settled into their limbs, yet sleep refused to come. Too much of the past lay between them; too many unspoken things rested beneath the covers.

Victoria asked after Ethan and the twins. Veronica answered briefly—Abby in cybersecurity, Emily studying Creative Writing—carefully avoiding the finer cracks in her marriage. Victoria spoke instead about Sarah's baby, about Liam—"my little sweetheart"—whose laughter rescued her heart on the right days.

Yet beneath every word lingered David's shadow.

The Dean of Christ Church, Oxford.

The man who had left her for one of his students.

Or perhaps only half left her.

The man Veronica had never truly understood.

"I couldn't have endured it," Veronica said at last. "I'd have thrown Ethan out within the hour."

Victoria remained silent for a long moment, as though searching for words that carried no accusation.

"I know," she finally answered. "You're different."

Veronica swallowed.

"I still don't understand how you can let him remain so close—to you, to the children—after everything..."

"Because I still love him," Victoria interrupted.

There was no drama in her voice, only fact.

"And because the children love him. And because..." She hesitated before continuing. "Because he is part of my life, whether I choose it or not."

Veronica let the silence remain between them. For the first time she sensed how deep the wound really was, how carefully her sister had concealed it through the years.

Victoria smiled faintly.

"I have to admit, your twins already live farther apart at university than we ever managed."

"Perhaps that's healthy," Veronica replied. "They're different people, each determined to become themselves. Very unlike us—or at least unlike the way we once experienced ourselves."

Victoria lay quietly before answering.

"That has always been our greatest difficulty. I often feel so close to you—or to Valerie—that I begin to lose sight of myself. Whatever happens to you, I live through it as well. Whatever burdens you somehow becomes mine."

She looked towards the ceiling.

"I've never forgotten the day you told us about Ethan. About the moment you realised you had chosen one another..."

She recalled one of those famous Cambridge wine tastings—Chardonnay, Port, cheeses laid out across long tables—where everything was sampled blind and, more often than not, the cheapest bottle won the competition. Ethan had shone that evening: charming, intelligent, astonishingly well read. No one had been surprised that Veronica had fallen in love with him.

But what Victoria remembered most was the impossible choice facing her sister.

Cambridge.

Or America.

A doctorate.

Or Ethan.

"It felt," Victoria said quietly, "as though I had to make the decision myself."

"You tell me that only now?" Veronica answered.

"I felt your expectations far more strongly than my own uncertainty. Inside me everything rebelled—not so much because I was torn between America and England, between Ethan and my doctorate. I simply wanted to free you from the burden of my decision."

She smiled gently.

"And yet today I know I chose rightly. I couldn't have imagined a happier life than the one I've got with Ethan and the children."

Victoria reached across and squeezed her hand before slipping an arm around her shoulders.

The gesture spoke of agreement—but also of the guilt she now recognised. Veronica had suffered for years because she had left her sisters, England, Cambridge, even her parents' world of scholarship behind.

Victoria's own life had proved no easier. She had returned to her parents' house. David had abandoned her.

The humiliation had been immense.

Her parents had stood by her, helping to raise the children, supporting her while she struggled to establish both her academic career and the financial stability her family required.

Veronica had always watched with divided feelings. To her, Victoria remained far too attached to David, too determined to preserve him for the children, too unwilling to let go.

Victoria saw it differently.

She had never accepted the separation.

She had survived it.

She had suffered through it.

Yet every day she encountered David again in their children.

His voice.

His gestures.

His smile.

She still loved him.

Against every argument of reason. More deeply than she had ever loved anyone else. She had even come to understand why another woman loved him more than she did—and why he had chosen that other life.

As the years passed, Victoria became increasingly aware that love did not diminish merely because time had passed.

Time might heal wounds. It did not lessen love. If anything, the opposite was true. The misunderstandings faded. Even the deepest injuries lost their sharp edges. The rare days they were still allowed to spend together with the children became all the more precious.

Her parents, however, regarded David as the very embodiment of self-absorption. The more Victoria defended him, the more fiercely they rejected him.

They despised the Anglican clergyman.

The scholar.

The Dean.

To them he remained a man who continued to bind their daughter to himself while leaving them—the grandparents—to shoulder the everyday burdens of family life. It was one reason why Cedric condemned not only the Anglican Church but defended, with almost stubborn passion, the Catholic Church and the celibacy of its priests.

For Victoria, however, David had become something altogether different.

He was the invisible wall that allowed her and the children to establish a life distinct from her parents'.

They sensed it. And they hated him all the more. Ever since the day he had left Victoria and the children, they preferred seeing him walk out of the house rather than through its door.

That, more than anything else, strengthened Victoria's determination to leave as soon as she received her professorship in Classical and Medieval Art History at the University of Birmingham. There she finally built a life of her own.

A professorship.

A house in Moseley.

Parks.

Cafés.

The distant rumble of trains.

Tolkien country for the children.

A house with rather too much space—and too much silence. She transformed it into both gallery and seminar house, even installing a small swimming pool. A kingdom of her own, constructed out of hurt, defiance, and the determination to show her children that breaking apart need not be the end.

On one excursion into the Black Country they visited the open-air industrial museum, where at weekends an entire nineteenth-century town came back to life. The children sampled old-fashioned sweets, sat at wooden school desks, wrote the alphabet in chalk. Street games filled the lanes as though celebrating the opening of the Worcester Canal two centuries earlier. Later they rode behind a steam locomotive, soot drifting through the air while waiters in white livery passed through the carriages.

For Victoria it became a quiet consolation.

The past could also become play.

Not only burden.

And the future was built less through victories than through noise, sticky little hands searching for their mother's, and the stubborn decision to keep walking.

The tea had long since been finished. The lights were dimmed.

Their hair touched upon the pillow. They were tired. Yet stronger than fatigue remained that old feeling of closeness—and caution. Two sisters, awake in the same darkness, each enclosed within her own uncertainty.

"You don't need to pity me," Victoria said softly. "I'm well. Very well."

She loved her oversized house. She had restored the decorative inlaid walls of the drawing room and reconstructed the great entrance hall with its rectangular skylight. The dining table could still be transformed into a full-sized billiard table simply by removing its leaves, while the cues hung neatly in their rack beside the chalk, waiting for another game.

Though Victoria spoke warmly of Birmingham, Veronica would not let the conversation rest there. For the first time she spoke with complete honesty herself. She wanted to encourage her sister to speak equally openly about fear, hurt, and disappointment. She spoke of Ethan. Of the tensions between them.

Of America.

Politics.

Bodies.

Intimacy.

She admitted how deeply she longed for tenderness—for challenge—and how strangely unfamiliar Ethan's gentleness had gradually become.

"I need a partner who actively engages me," she said. "Someone who challenges me. Someone who doesn't always want to walk ahead of me, clearing every obstacle from my path."

"That would suffocate me too," Victoria admitted.

"Does it surprise you that he's a Democrat?" Veronica smiled ironically. "The name itself gives him away. Back home they'd be regarded as the extreme left of Labour—or outright communists."

"So he's another one of those incurable world-improvers," Victoria laughed. "Not unlike David in his Church."

"A world-improver, certainly. But when it comes to ordinary life—to the children, to our marriage—he notices neither obstacles nor responsibilities."

"And yet our television news always portrays Republicans, not Democrats, as enemies of women."

"My own experience has been different," Veronica answered. "At least they're real men. And they aren't afraid of strong women. Things happen. Anyone who truly understands America's social problems knows they can only be addressed if people recover their own initiative instead of being permanently supported, as they often are in Britain or elsewhere in Europe. Only then can society really change."

Victoria, whose own instincts lay closer to her sister's than she usually admitted, nodded encouragingly.

Veronica continued, becoming more animated.

"Take Ethan. He campaigned for Biden, for Harris—for every one of those social idealists. He thinks I'm some blind, right-wing patriot undermining everything America stands for."

She gave a weary smile.

"Every day he bombards me with stories from work about misinformation supposedly flooding the country, about attempts to weaken democratic institutions in favour of the Republicans."

"He genuinely believes that?" Victoria asked. "So do your friends?"

"Completely. Ethan lives inside that world. Most of his colleagues think the same. Personally I believe much of it is simply left-wing propaganda."

"Or perhaps it's the consequence of the work he does."

"Perhaps. He only ever sees one battlefield—the cyber war inside the Pentagon."

Victoria squeezed her hand.

"I'm glad you've remained true to yourself—and to what our parents taught us. It's surprisingly easy to lose that."

"The older I become," Veronica replied quietly, "the more I realise how much of them still lives within us."

Victoria slipped her arm around her sister once more.

"Perhaps life simply consists in learning to live with circumstances because we refuse to betray ourselves."

She moved a little closer. Their hair mingled across the pillow. Her father's judgments still echoed through Victoria's mind.

David doesn't take you seriously.

He has rejected you.

He's hopelessly self-absorbed.

Self-absorbed.

Self-absorbed.

She hated her father. Even if he happened to be right. David was still her David. Not entirely hers—yet, somehow, still hers.

Almost casually, Victoria finally said,

"May I tell you something... before my courage disappears again?"

She did not wait for an answer.

"It happened in Cambridge. With Claudia Capella."

An image flickered before her mind's eye: pints at the Eagle, voices, the faint scent of old books.

Victoria spoke of that night.

“She looked at me. Her gaze pierced straight through me. I didn't look away. I knew something had begun. Her hand rested on mine—firm, impatient. ‘Stop playing roles. Be yourself.’ I never went back to college. I followed her to her flat—books, glasses, disorder everywhere. And I surrendered. I felt both seen and dissolved. History was suddenly no longer only paper; it had become skin. Hers. Mine.”

She hesitated.

“For years I believed David had been the first to break faith. But it was I. And even now I cannot decide whether it was guilt—or freedom.”

Veronica felt both pain and consolation. Everything within her wanted to protect her sister. Yet for the first time she understood something she had never fully grasped, something she had never even wished to see: Victoria's love for David had never been weakness. It had been an attempt to mend an older fracture.

“Now let me tell you something about myself,” Veronica said quietly. “If you still have the strength to listen.”

Victoria raised herself slightly on one elbow.

Veronica drew a long breath.

“I never entirely abandoned our discipline after moving to America. I still wrote, not only the occasional review or article, but even registered for a PhD program and did my degree. During the years I attended the annual conference of the Association of Art Historians in London. At one of those, I remember vividly the moment I passed through the neo-Gothic gateway of St Mary's, beyond the old Jewish cemetery, I felt I was entering another age—not America, not family life, simply myself again, as I had once been. Standing opposite me was the chairman, Professor Gabriel Lenoir—attentive, gracious, almost unsettling in the intensity of his gaze.

‘Dr Ashcroft?’ he said, and I started.

‘Your review of my latest book—thank you. It was generous, precise, more careful than I myself had been during proof-reading. You helped me sharpen the argument.’

I scarcely knew where to look. Could he really remember something I had written?

Only when one of his assistants placed the key to my room in my hand did I dare look at him properly. He was barely into his forties—several years older than I was then—with unruly dark hair, alert, serious eyes, skin browned by the Italian sun. An open-necked shirt beneath a casually cut jacket.

The assistant, dressed in a blue suit that seemed to belong to the old college tradition, lifted my suitcase as naturally as though he were the porter.

‘I'm helping with the logistics,’ he said quietly. ‘But my own work lies elsewhere. I'm writing about iconic empty spaces in Late Antiquity.’

I looked at him questioningly.

‘What fascinates me,’ he continued, ‘is the point at which the image fails. Where the artist shows nothing although something is there to be shown. I believe absence often speaks more loudly than visibility.’

There was something reassuring about his voice. It made the unfamiliar surroundings seem almost welcoming. Despite his formal appearance he possessed none of the ambition one so often encountered. Rather, he carried the uncertainty of someone who still wondered whether his ideas would find an echo. For some reason, I felt understood. He disappeared upstairs with my luggage.

Professor Lenoir resumed the conversation. Leaving the circle gathered around him, he walked directly towards me.

‘And you?’ he asked with the informality that belongs to a second conversation. ‘I know your title from the programme. But what is it you're really trying to discover?’

My heart seemed to sink one floor lower. Still, I gathered what courage I possessed.

‘I am asking how art makes the invisible present. How it directs our gaze towards what is absent in order to open another kind of presence.’

He listened to every word, weighing it carefully. As we talked he accompanied me upstairs. The staircase creaked beneath our feet; wax and furniture polish scented the air. We stopped outside my room.

‘Then, for your approach,’ he said, ‘space—and even time—do not exist beforehand. Art itself brings them into being. Have I understood you correctly?’

His words struck home. He had reached the very centre of my paper. Yet there was something more in his voice—an inward resonance, a hint of playfulness. He saw me, not merely as a fellow scholar.”

Victoria broke off, allowing Veronica to interrupt.

"You take my breath away. Didn't you know, at that very moment, that he wanted more from you—that he was trying to draw you towards something you had never imagined, never wanted?"

"At the door Gabriel said to me, 'Shall we talk later? Once the conference begins tomorrow, conversations will be rather tightly scheduled.'

I was relieved. Gabriel had no intention of entering my room. I understood more than he had actually said. Flattered, emboldened, and just a little mischievous, I replied, 'Shall we say... nine o'clock?' And as I spoke, I caught myself offering him precisely what, only a second earlier, I had feared and recoiled from. But you see—it wasn't he who pressed me. I was the one who lit the fuse, who placed the fire in his hands, who offered the explosion. I wanted to be seen—not as a mother, not as a wife—but simply as myself.

I found myself alone in my room. Plain enough: a desk, a bookshelf, a narrow bed. I lay down for a while, stared at the ceiling, and tried to understand what had just happened. Before I had even taken off my coat, I knew I would have to rewrite my paper. I had thought about space, yes—but time had never entered my calculations."

"Didn't Ethan come to mind? Or the children?"

"Hardly. Not then. I was looking for closeness. A different kind. Challenge. Intensity. Resistance. Ethan was good. Too much goodness can suffocate. Gabriel was not much older than Ethan, yet there was something in his manner, in the way he spoke, that awakened something I had been missing all my life: being challenged. Urgency. Insistence. Someone who thought with me and entered into what I was thinking. What I had once seen in our father—and at the same time despised—I now experienced with Ethan. Even though it was precisely the opposite of our father that I had sought in Ethan's gentleness.

Ethan is lovable—too lovable. I miss clarity. Provocation. Our parents liked him. You all think him the perfect brother-in-law, the one who remembers birthdays, who never forgets your children. But I—I gradually began to feel that he was no longer truly interested. I no longer sensed in him any willingness to struggle with me, even against me, and therefore for me; to immerse himself in what held me captive, and to offer me something in return.

Gabriel's idea of emerging empty spaces, capable of speaking about what remains unspoken on the surface, what only then allows the hidden to come into being. Was it that provocation which drew me to him? That the invisible is not something to fear, but something to live—and to love?

That evening, at the reception, I saw him again. A waiter approached with a white tray and handed each of us a glass of wine. Suddenly we found ourselves standing opposite one another and raised our glasses.

'Thank you,' he said, quietly, almost conspiratorially.

'Thank you,' I replied, 'also for the inspiration. I've revised my paper once more.'

His eyes sparkled with curiosity, almost mischievously.

'Nine o'clock,' I confirmed.

He gave the slightest nod.

And I knew: this was no accident, no ordinary evening at a conference. It was a cut. A fissure. An empty space that spoke more loudly than any image."

"What did that night come to mean—for everything that followed?"

"And yours?"

Victoria merely nodded, rested her head against her sister, and closed her eyes.

But sleep would not come.

Not for Victoria.

Not for Veronica.

At some point Victoria drifted into a dream in which Roman vases, broken fragments, and a removal lorry appeared, swallowing one container after another—the night her family had been forced to leave their old house. Her father, bent, taciturn, obstinate. Her mother, packing away memories instead of books. And herself, still a girl, convinced that the ground beneath her feet was giving way.

A few days later, after her father had lost his "secondary occupation" at the auction house, an enormous removal van drew up outside. The evening before, workmen had placed seven containers in the driveway. Now her mother and father emptied the attic, the annexes, the back house, and the garage. Box after box they carried outside, as though they were burying their lives piece by piece.

Her mother looked sad; her father grimly determined as he emptied his study, taking down the heavy bookcase behind his desk chair, the one he had once bought in Bremen. She asked him how he could possibly live without his books. With characteristic phlegm he replied that the important ones were in the university library. The new house, into which they would shortly move, had only two bedrooms instead of five, but those would be entirely sufficient: one for the parents and one for the girls. Between the two university salaries, they would easily be able to afford it.

As far back as she could remember, they had lived just around the corner from Abbey Road in central London. Their new home would be much farther north, in a residential area of Watford beyond the city. Her father maintained that it was more affordable and better suited to children, with its canals and expanses of green. Yet money had never before been a topic at their table.

So she helped fill the containers—the graves of her past. Only a very few things found their way into the removal van.

She woke with a start.

Why had that scene returned to her now? Why this moment? Was her parents' rejection of David calling forth these dark images from the past? Because before that she had already experienced her father as the one who had endangered the life of the family?

Her mother had rejected David. So had both her sisters. Yet of them all, it was her father who had found the fewest kind words for him.

Until this very night no one in the family had truly understood her—or perhaps they had been unable to.

Her father possessed a fixed vision of life; at least, that was how he appeared to the world. There had been moments when she doubted his convictions—his patriotism, his conservatism, his religious rigidity. Then again she saw his steadiness, the foundation that had prevented him from despairing despite professional ruin and the loss of their home.

Every book he removed from the shelves he weighed in his hands. He opened one, now and again. Sometimes he even inhaled the scent of its pages. From the movements of his head one could almost tell with what reluctance he consigned most of the books to those coffin-like containers. Then he lowered a particularly precious volume into the small crate reserved for the new house, carefully, as though nestling a raw egg into soft straw. Everything weighed heavily upon him.

Ever since the sale of the house had brought about such a fundamental upheaval in their lives, she had noticed other changes. Whether doubts had already stirred in her beforehand she could no longer say. But she had become aware that her father invariably travelled alone on academic excursions, without her mother, although she too, as a Byzantinist, specialised in the Christian East.

His research journeys, workshops, and conferences took him mostly south: to Italy, Spain, Croatia, Greece; also to Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Ukraine, and Russia. He spent weeks every summer in Georgia, and later in Armenia, studying ancient manuscripts in the celebrated Matenadaran Library in Yerevan.

When he spoke about those journeys—and he was never a man of many words—he usually spoke of the colleagues with whom he had travelled. Her mother never belonged to that circle.

As both daughter and wife, Victoria had the impression that her father moved within a world of men in which he felt entirely at ease. The older she became, the more conscious she grew of that other world he inhabited. Yet the less she understood why he should have been so deeply hostile towards David, her former husband.

Was it because his own wife had rejected him and wanted nothing more to do with him? Was she disappointed by his failure, by the loss of their home?

For all the support her father had shown her and the children, his rejection of David remained profoundly unsettling.

She buried her face deep in the pillow.

The darkness of the room was dense.

Veronica slept heavily.

Then a thought pierced her like a shaft of light.

It was not her father's downfall that had wounded her.

It was that she had been unable to hold on to him.

And that the same fear had bound her to David.

She pressed her forehead into the pillow and breathed.

Slowly.

Painfully.

Suddenly her father stood before her again—unyielding, conservative, enigmatic.

And the realisation she had avoided for years finally took shape.

She had never learned how to let go of someone who had disappointed her.

Nor how to hold on to someone without losing herself.

She turned towards her sister. A sleeping figure, closer to her than anyone else in the world.

And she knew.

This night had not been a confession.

It was the beginning of a new—and more dangerous—chapter.

A chapter that only sisters could bear.