I'm always so glad,' Sylvie murmured, 'that I don't have to take a turn at being other people.' 'You're very good at being yourself,' Ursula said, aw… - Kate Atkinson

Her true hope was that something would happen in the course of her time abroad that would mean she need never take the place. What that 'something' was she had no idea.

There were other war veterans in the neighborhood, visible thanks to their limps or missing limbs. All those unclaimed arms and legs lost in the fields of Flanders - Ursula imagined them pushing roots down into the mud and shoots up to the sky and growing once again into men. An army of men marching back for revenge.

The purpose of Art,” his mother, Sylvie, said — instructed even — “is to convey the truth of a thing, not to be the truth itself.