Sublime

Estelle told her the story of how she’d waited until Antony had gone away with his family to Palermo for a fortnight then took a jar of emergency cash she had literally buried in their back garden, went to a woman in Koreatown and had her tubes tied in secret.

‘Lyds,’ my mum said when I was leaving. She looked out of place in her new room, which was decorated with someone in their eighties or nineties in mind. Mum has for the last couple of centuries looked like she is in her early forties. She still has black hair, just with some streaks of grey here and there. Her eyes are still bright.

then the man she left it for kept her dependent on an allowance from him, and even though his death could have made her rich again, she had rejected

Would a family of her own be an enrichment or a duty?

Full of kindliness and sympathy, St Cyres persuaded June to give up her flat in town and to come with her small boy to live at Manor Thatch. June had acquiesced at first. She was lonely and frightened and in debt. June St Cyres was one of those young women who can never live within their incomes, but she was shrewd enough to know that she could liv

xenia?’