Sublime

‘Did you dunk your head in the dirty bathwater?’ Evelyn says, laughing, and I clasp my sides with laughing too. I haven’t always the confidence to be kind to Maeve in Evelyn’s presence. ‘And did Tom and Mary have the bath before you as well? I’d say they did.’ ‘They did not. I had a fresh bath,’ says Maeve with a shaking voice. We sit there hooting

Grace Macaulay, then: seventeen, small and plump, with skin that went brown by the end of May. Her hair was black and oily, and had the hot consoling scent of an animal in summer. She disliked books, and was by nature a thief if she found a thing to be beautiful, but not hers. She didn’t know she couldn’t sing. She was inclined to be cross.

bucolic

Cécile Simone Andonyle Grindel, a sweet little girl who took after her father, was born prematurely at home on the evening of May 10, 1918, after an excruciating, prolonged, and life-threatening labor.1 Jeanne, conscious of her daughter-in-law’s postpartum fragility, swooped in to care for the infant. Thus Cécile, whose health was supervised

She had been picturing a village of mice living their lives under the bath, playing violins, going to school, having