Sublime

paramour.”

‘You’re on another planet!’ Mrs Baker would cry as she turned off the gas or saved the bath from overflowing. ‘God only knows what you did before I came.’ ‘Well,’ Astrid would say, ‘I had Charlie, and before Charlie I lived in squalor.’

Along with the joy of parenthood, with every child comes a piercing vulnerability. It is at once sublime and terrifying.

duplicitous

Given who had dumped her, almost in fact, jilted her, given too, my blood association with this person, my mind in that moment just couldn’t go there.

She draws in her breath: a husband who groomed her as a fourteen-year-old child; a narcissistic mother; two problematic children; and brushes with social services. But the compelling things feel precious somehow, half-formed and delicate, not yet ready for the judgment of her husband.

The previous year, she had read about magnetic fields in one of Graham’s schoolbooks, and it seemed to Violet that Frederick had his own such field; that it pulled at her like a tide.

She’d persisted herself into a narcotic, and though I hate to admit it, I became as attached to her as I was to Hadley.”