Her life was no more than a ghostly pageant of exhausted endurance, no more real than a television drama.

Had she ever really understood her husband’s true nature, bound up as it was with that seemingly impenetrable silence?

as an artist, yet didn’t contribute a single

He would have preferred it if she’d screamed and raged like other wives, nagged and heaped abuse on him. She became resigned so easily, and her habit of gloomily suppressing the dregs of this resignation suffocated him. He didn’t know if her desperate efforts to be understanding and considerate were a good or a bad thing.

perhaps it was simply that things were happening inside her, terrible things, which no one else could even guess at, and thus it was impossible for her to engage with everyday life at the same time. If so, she would naturally have no energy left, not just for curiosity or interest but indeed for any meaningful response to all the humdrum minutiae t

This was the body of a beautiful young woman, conventionally an object of desire, and yet it was a body from which all desire had been eliminated.

‘When did all of this begin?’ she sometimes asked herself, in such moments. ‘No – when did it all begin to fall apart?’