The war now was for him a jumble of random images that haunted his sleeping self -- the Alps in the moonlight, a propeller blade flying through the air, a face pale in the water. Well, good luck to you then. Sometimes this overwhelming stench of lilacs, at other times a sweetly held dance tune. And always at the end of the nightmare there was the inescapable end itself, the fire and the sickening hurtle of the fall to earth. In the nightmare we wake ourselves before the awful end, before the fall, but Teddy had to be woken by Nancy's shushing, by her cradle hand soothing him, and he would stare into the darkness for a long time wondering what would happen to him if she failed to wake him one night.
He had been reconciled to death during the war and then suddenly the war was over and there was a next day and a next day and a next day. Part of him never adjusted to having a future.
Kate Atkinson, A God In Ruins (2015)
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