Frustrated by the detached language of her dissertation, Elisabeth dismisses her own writing as “blah” and imagines a visceral, alternative history for lost art. This section contrasts the sterility of formal analysis with more immediate, emotional ways of understanding the past, revealing how Art as a Subversive Record operates on a personal as well as public level. Elisabeth’s academic sentence, “[A]rt like this examines and makes possible a reassessment of the outer appearances of things” (226), feels hollow to her. She finds more truth in her own vivid, violent fantasy of Anthony Blunt burying Stephen Ward’s portraits in a mass grave, an imagined scene that captures the political brutality of the Profumo Affair more effectively than her academic prose. This is paralleled by the childhood school project in Chapter 32, where a young Elisabeth’s direct, inquisitive questions about Daniel are stifled by her mother in favor of a fabricated report. Both the child’s curiosity and the adult’s imaginative reconstruction represent attempts to access a more authentic truth than the one permitted by conventional forms. Elisabeth’s final, rebellious revision of her dissertation note to read “Arty art” is a small act of defiance, rejecting academic pretense in favor of a language that acknowledges art’s artifice and its lively, subjective impact.

The narrative’s jump into Pauline Boty’s perspective in 1963 demonstrates The Fluidity of Time and Memory, collapsing the historical distance between Boty’s life and Elisabeth’s research. By inhabiting Boty’s consciousness as she works on Scandal 63, the novel transforms her from an object of study into a living character in the text, occupying the same narrative space that Elisabeth and Daniel do. Boty’s reflections reveal an artist keenly aware of the power dynamics shaping her world and her art. Her decision to repaint Christine Keeler as “Keeler the Thinker” challenges the media’s simplistic narrative (242). This is paralleled by her own personal and political pressures: the misogyny of her brothers who tell her, “Shut up, you’re only a girl” (249); the stifling conservatism of her father; and the joy she finds in her own intellectual and physical presence. This chapter provides a feminist counter-history of Boty and Keeler, mirroring Boty’s own artistic method of collage even as the text reckons with the fact that Boty’s story was absent from the history of art for many years. The chapter’s foreshadowing of her art being lost for decades emphasizes the precarity of such histories and the essential importance of their recovery.

The novel moves toward a resolution by showing Elisabeth and her mother engaging in their own forms of protest against contemporary political hostility, employing creativity and historical objects as weapons. Wendy’s act of protest against the fence, along with her resolution to keep resisting it, is a direct confrontation with The Alienation Caused by Political Division. The fence is a symbol of the new, hostile borders being erected in post-Brexit Britain. Her plan to continue the protest by “bombarding that fence with people’s histories and with the artefacts of less cruel and more philanthropic times” frames her act as a defense of cultural memory against a cruel present (255). Elisabeth’s protest is more subtle but equally subversive. By posing as an agent to claim copyright royalties for Daniel’s old song, she uses the language of corporate bureaucracy to challenge a system that consumes and discards culture without acknowledging its creators. Her phone call, full of assertive jargon like “infringement” and “alacrity,” is a performance that reclaims value for Daniel, an old man who the corporation likely assumed was dead. Both actions suggest that resisting a politically grim reality requires imagination and a re-purposing of the past.

The section culminates by juxtaposing images of decay and unexpected vitality, suggesting that hope persists even in the bleakest of seasons. The final chapter paints a picture of a grim late autumn, with “rotting” leaves, “rusting” garden furniture, and fog obscuring the landscape. This imagery reflects the national mood of division and despair. Yet, in the midst of this decay, there is a singular, vivid point of focus: “a wide-open rose, still” (260). The closing command, “Look at the colour of it” (260), is a directive for both the characters and the reader, advocating for an attentive focus on moments of beauty and life that defy the surrounding gloom. This rose echoes other instances of resilience in these chapters: Daniel’s sudden lucidity after a long silence, Zoe and Wendy finding love “at this late stage” (238), and the rediscovery of Boty’s legacy as an artist after decades of neglect. These moments suggest that life, creativity, and human connection can reemerge from harsh seasons with surprising force. Daniel waking up to greet Elisabeth brings the novel’s central relationship back to the present, a personal reunion that is a quiet counterpoint to the country’s public fragmentation.