Sublime

grinning at the pleasure of having found one another, at the stupid and endlessly affirming joy of being in love.

Of being a mortal creature who was essentially alone but needed the myth of togetherness with others. Friends, children, lovers. It was an attractive myth. It was a myth you could easily inhabit.

‘Sometimes,’ said Thomas, wiping his eyes, ‘I have the strangest feeling that things happen not one after the other, but all at once. I felt it years ago, in Lowlands House, and here it is again. I can’t explain it, only tell you that this afternoon I’m a young man in winter and someone’s handed me a baby at a funeral – but also that I’m fifty, and

Every life she had tried so far since entering the library had really been someone else’s dream.

I daresay I must call this my home – though truly there never was so dank and drear a place – though Essex being flat and featureless at least has in its favour the kind of skies which all my life I have sought – I confess to having been surprised by affection for my husband – this dreadful emotion roused by discovering that he has commissioned a

smart, pretty girl of nineteen, with a tidy, dumpy figure,

(Although even in her twenties, Charlie wasn’t what you’d call eye candy: her looks had always been sharp edged and intense, more like eye tequila.)