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HILARY MANTEL
Vacant Possession
Harper Perennial
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 77–85 Fulham Palace Road Hammersmith London W6 8JB
First published by Chatto & Windus Ltd 1986
Copyright © Hilary Mantel 1986
PS Section copyright © Louise Tucker 2006 except ‘Having a Home to Go to’ by Hilary Mantel © Hilary Mantel 2006
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Hilary Mantel asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9781841153407
Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2010 ISBN: 9780007354870 Version: 2014-12-08
To Gerald
‘… and that is what one does, one does not get better but different and older and that is always a pleasure.’
GERTRUDE STEIN
EZEKIEL 37:3
‘Can these bones live?’
Contents
Excerpt from Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
P.S. Ideas, interviews & features …
It was ten o’clock in the evening; raining and very dark. A man was walking along the road whistling ‘Santa Lucia’.
Muriel Axon stood alone at the window of her room; a square plain woman, forty-four years old. She was wrapped in an eiderdown, and in the palm of her hand she held the boiled egg she was eating for supper. The glow of the streetlamps showed her wet slate roofs, the long lit curve of the motorway outside the town, and a bristling cat in the shadow of a wall; beyond these, the spines of black hills.
Cradling the warm egg, Muriel dug in her fingernails to crush the shell. She did not go in for table manners; they wasted time. She began to peel the skin, wincing a little as she did so. She put her tongue into the salted gelid hollow and probed gently. The room behind her was dark, and full of the minute crackling her fingers made. She sucked, thought. Most of Muriel’s thoughts
