Little Vivien
Vivien’s life was filled with happiness till the moment when she had lost all her family to the car accident. Her aunt gave her up, as had many her own children, and Vivien was just out of the picture of her family. She departed for London, and her future was a vague canvas for her. The scene of her departure is brightly depicted by the author: “as the train whistled its imminent departure, a small girl wearing neat plaits and someone else's shoes climbed its iron stairs…nobody noticed as the little girl stepped over the shadowed threshold; so, when the essence of light and life that had been Vivien Longmeyer contracted itself for safekeeping and disappeared deep inside her, the world kept moving and nobody saw it happen.” Such details as “people waved and hollered, a stray dog ran barking through the crowds” fill the story with atmosphere of complete loneliness. Nobody cared for this little girl, but no matter what, she needed love and care.
The event
When Laurel was sixteen years old, she witnessed her mother killing a man. This scene follows Laurel all her life, and this event even reached materialistic level in Laurel’s head: “The event itself played over in her mind, and the role she'd taken in the police investigation, the things she'd told them - worse, the thing she hadn't - made the panic so bad sometimes that she could hardly breathe… she felt trapped by what she'd seen and done. The memories where everywhere, they were inescapable; made worse because the event that caused them was utterly inexplicable.” The image of the murder is with Laurel all her life, as well as with the reader throughout the novel. This image is the biggest secret.
War
The most awful and dreadful things happen during the wartime era. The story lines during the Second World war are impressive and terrifying. Constant bombing of London and panic have become commonplace and ordinary. The war took possession of minds and as the author states “left no space for individual grief and memorial”. War is an awful thing, and can’t have any justifications, but what can give hope is love. The image of war shows how it can destroy people’s destinies.
