Sublime

Alice tried to imagine her mother as a little girl, sharing a bedroom with another little girl. Julia had just spoken more about her childhood in ninety seconds than she had in the entirety of Alice’s life.

Mrs Lemon’s school, the chief school in the county, where the teaching included all that was demanded in the accomplished female – even to extras, such as the getting in and out of a carriage.

But Alice had been an idiot. She’d always known her mother was hiding something; that was why she’d gone through Julia’s drawers while she was in middle school. She’d thought the secret was Julia’s, though, and had nothing to do with her.

She then taught English at Fakenham Grammar School for five happy years, where she also thoroughly enjoyed producing plays. Through a bitter twist of fate, in 1978 she was diagnosed with and very quickly died of liver cancer.

Alice, like their grandmother, had a strong distaste for life’s inevitable gray areas.

Alice could see these pockets of heavy quiet scattered back through her childhood, whenever she brought up topics her mother didn’t want to discuss. Alice’s father and his death, Julia’s childhood, her sisters.

Alice chewed her lower lip,