Free Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson

all mixed up in that Da Vinci Code piffle.’
    Julia might have been instinctively attracted to all kinds of nonsense but at heart she was a classicist. She was also very wordy and Jackson had stopped listening to her long before she finished explaining. Nonetheless, he had been struck by the poignancy of the inscription.
    And now he was looking for his own Arcadian bower. What had begun as a rather vague search for Tessa had morphed into a quite different purpose. He was a man on a real-estate mission. He was looking for a peg to hang his hat on, an old dog looking for a new kennel, one untainted by the past. A fresh start. Somewhere there was a place for him. All he had to do was find it.
    He had saved the best to last. North Yorkshire, God’s own county, the gyre he had been circling around all this time. None of his other stops on his peregrinations could exert the same pull on the lodestone of his heart as North Yorkshire did. Of course, Jackson was a West Riding man himself, made from soot and rugby league and beef dripping, but that didn’t mean he was about to go and live there. The last place he intended to end up in was the place he had started from, the place where his entire family lay restlessly in the earth.
    He set the SatNav for the heart of the sun, or, to be more accurate, York. The voice on Jackson’s SatNav was ‘Jane’, with whom he had been in a contentious relationship for a long time now. ‘Why not just mute her?’ Julia said reasonably. ‘In fact, why do you need her at all, you’re always going on about what a good sense of direction you’ve got.’ He did have a good sense of direction, he said defensively. He just liked the company.
    ‘Get a life, sweetie.’
    ‘Go east, old man,’ he had muttered to himself as he tapped his coordinates into Jane and prepared to cross the spine of the Pennines again and return to the cradle of civilization.
    Slightly south-east, Jane corrected him silently.
    He had been trying to visit all of the Betty’s Tea Rooms – Ilkley, Northallerton, two in Harrogate, two in York. A genteel itinerary that would have done a coachload of elderly ladies proud. Jackson was a big fan of Betty’s. You could guarantee a decent cup of coffee in Betty’s, but it went beyond the decent coffee and the respectable food and the fact that the waitresses all looked as if they were nice girls (and women) who had been parcelled up some time in the 1930s and freshly unwrapped this morning. It was the way that everything was exactly right and fitting. And clean.
    ‘The older you get, the more like a woman you become,’ Julia said.
    ‘Really?’
    ‘No.’ Long after their relationship had ended, after Julia had herself married and had the child which for a long time she had denied was Jackson’s, she was still chattering away in his brain.
    If Britain had been run by Betty’s it would never have succumbed to economic Armageddon. Over a pot of house blend and a plate of scrambled eggs and smoked salmon in the café in St Helen’s Square in York, Jackson fantasized about being governed by a Betty’s oligarchy – Cabinet ministers in spotless white aprons and cinnamon toast all round. Even Jackson in his most aggrandizingly masculine moments would have to agree that the world would be a better place if it was run by women. ‘God created Man,’ his daughter Marlee said to him a few weeks ago, and for a moment Jackson thought that her adolescent pessimism had made her turn to some kind of fundamentalist Christian religion. She registered the look of alarm on his face and laughed. ‘God created Man,’ she repeated. ‘And then he had a better idea.’
    Ha, ha. Or LOL, as his daughter would have said.
    In York he had spent many hours in the great cathedral train shed of the National Railway Museum where he paid tribute to the Mallard , Yorkshire-built and the fastest steam train in the world, a record that could never be taken away from her. Jackson’s heart had swelled