Margaret Leigh

Anton watched his efforts and lit up a cigarette. He inhaled deeply. ‘OK, spill.’ ‘You going to give up the fags, too?’ He exhaled a plume of smoke in Caleb’s face. ‘You going to stop avoiding questions?’ Impressive that he could sign and smoke at the same time. Not too many people could achieve that level of dickishness.

‘What was Hobbs like?’ he asked. ‘I didn’t know him.’ Like pulling teeth. Big, stone teeth from an Easter Island head. ‘What was his service record like?’ ‘Exemplary.’ Tedesco drank his coffee and waited silently for the next question. Frankie squinted at him. ‘You’re a chatty bastard, aren’t you?’ A glint in Tedesco’s eye. ‘That hasn’t been

‘Because I’ve reviewed the interview tapes from last night and I don’t think you quite got everything, did you, Caleb? Don’t get me wrong, you did well. Really well. But maybe we should get an interpreter in here now, make sure you can keep up?’ His pale eyebrows lifted. It was just an interview technique, the three Ds: distract, disarm, dismay. He

A layer of grey scum had formed across the soup. He should eat it: not eating was the first sign. Then not sleeping, then not functioning. If you were lucky, it ended with a friend helping you start again in a tiny apartment with pink walls and striped orange furniture.

They wouldn’t live together now except during the last year: the one when, following customs handed down unrevised, the mother, rather than die under the eyes of the old servant who had always been with her—and who in fact was her only friend—would have to confront that tremendous, ultimate human experience before a young stranger who knew nothing

Marriage was a way of leaving; she had only to be patient for two more months. But the life that Andrea promised her was another prison. He at the store, she at home with the maid, the mother-in-law who would come to visit, bringing her knitting. Christmas and Easter in the Lanziani house with the tolling of the pendulum. After dinner, father and

Nowhere does one read better than in the English countryside. In Sweden, perhaps: there the days are shorter and even more boring …

At the Grimaldi she had been betrayed by the illusion of a rebirth. She had felt young in a way that she never had been, as the only daughter of old parents who lived like old people. Andrea couldn’t understand that she herself, pretending to be something else, believed she was that; she wanted to experience an age that her parents, because of

“No longer will any woman fear the advancing years. It’s terrible to see our body wither little by little, the once slender figure become a graceless mass, the skin sag, lose its youthful glow. And yet going forward we improve ourselves: we are born female and become women, over time. Time frightens us because of men. When each of us has her own