Housekeeping

Key Takeaways

Highlights imported 2026-09-13 from the Kindle notebook export (70 highlights, 1 notes). Key takeaways and synthesis to come.

Marilynne Robinson’s 1980 debut novel about two sisters raised by a drifting aunt in the lakeside town of Fingerbone. Confirmed finished in 2026.

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Highlights

• This boy was an ingenious liar, a lonely boy with a boundless desire to ingratiate himself. His story was neither believed nor disbelieved.
• And though she never spoke of it, and no doubt seldom thought of it, she was a religious woman. That is to say that she conceived of life as a road down which one traveled, an easy enough road through a broad country, and that one’s destination was there from the very beginning, a measured distance away, standing in the ordinary light like some plain house where one went in and was greeted by respectable people and was shown to a room where everything one had ever lost or put aside was gathered together, waiting. She accepted the idea that at some time she and my grandfather would meet and take up their lives again, without the worry of money, in a milder climate. She hoped that he would somehow have acquired a little more stability and common sense.
• Of course they pressed her and touched her as if she had just returned after an absence. Not because they were afraid she would vanish as their father had done, but because his sudden vanishing had made them aware of her.
• love was half a longing of a kind that possession did nothing to mitigate.
• The years between her husband’s death and her eldest daughter’s leaving home were, in fact, years of almost perfect serenity. My grandfather had sometimes spoken of disappointment. With him gone they were cut free from the troublesome possibility of success, recognition, advancement. They had no reason to look forward, nothing to regret. Their lives spun off the tilting world like thread off a spindle, breakfast time, suppertime, lilac time, apple time. If heaven was to be this world purged of disaster and nuisance, if immortality was to be this life held in poise and arrest, and if this world purged and this life unconsuming could be thought of as world and life restored to their proper natures, it is no wonder that five serene, eventless years lulled my grandmother into forgetting what she should never have forgotten.
• I have no reason to imagine that my mother and father were ever prosperous, and so I must assume that they went to some trouble to salve my grandmother’s feelings.
• He would peer at them as if he could read them, and pocket them as if he could own them. This is death in my hand, this is ruin in my breast pocket, where I keep my reading glasses.
• And every evening would bring its familiar strangeness, and crickets would sing the whole night long, under her windows and in every part of the black wilderness that stretched away from Fingerbone on every side. And she would feel that sharp loneliness she had felt every long evening since she was a child. It was the kind of loneliness that made clocks seem slow and loud and made voices sound like voices across water.
• If a friend was in the room her daughters would watch his face or her face intently and tease or soothe or banter, and any one of them could gauge and respond to the finest changes of expression or tone, even Sylvie, if she chose to. But it did not occur to them to suit their words and manners to her looks, and she did not want them to.
• Her love for them was utter and equal, her government of them generous and absolute. She was constant as daylight, and she would be unremarked as daylight, just to watch the calm inwardness of their faces.
• And she saw her daughters’ faces not as they always were, or as other people’s were, and she was quiet and aloof and watchful, not to startle the strangeness away. She had never taught them to be kind to her.
• He conserved syllables as if to conserve breath.
• For five years my grandmother cared for us very well. She cared for us like someone reliving a long day in a dream. Though she seemed abstracted, I think that, like one dreaming, she felt more than the urgency of present business, her attention heightened and at the same time baffled by an awareness that this present had passed already, and had had its consequence. Indeed, it must have seemed to her that she had returned to relive this day because it was here that something had been lost or forgotten.
• True, she was straight and brisk and bright when most of her friends had bobbling heads or blurred speech or had sunk into wheelchairs or beds. But in the last years she continued to settle and began to shrink. Her mouth bowed forward and her brow sloped back, and her skull shone pink and speckled within a mere haze of hair, which hovered about her head like the remembered shape of an altered thing.
• “Sell the orchards,” she would say, looking grave and wise, “but keep the house. So long as you look after your health, and own the roof above your head, you’re as safe as anyone can be,” she would say, “God willing.”
• Then they seemed at a loss. I heard Lily remark to Nona that it was still three hours till suppertime, and five till bedtime. They eyed us with nervous sorrow. They found some Reader’s Digests to read while we played go fish on the rug by the stove. A long hour passed and they gave us supper. Another hour and they put us to bed. We lay listening to their conversation, which was always perfectly audible, because they were both hard of hearing.
• We stayed awake the whole night because Lucille was afraid of her dreams.
• All other versions of the message amounted to announcements of my grandmother’s death, and my aunts could not allow Sylvie to learn such a thing from the personal-ads section of a newspaper. They disliked newspapers, and were chagrined that anything touching themselves or their family should appear in them. It disturbed them enough that the actual obituary had already been bunched, no doubt, to cushion Christmas ornaments for storage, and spindled to start kitchen fires, though it was quite impressive and much admired.
• Lucille and I argued about whether her hair would be brown or red. Lucille would say, “I know it’ll be brown like Mother’s,” and I’d reply, “Hers wasn’t brown. It was red.”
• “Yes, you look very nice, my dear. Very well,” Nona said, rather loudly. She really intended this observation for her sister, just as Lily’s compliment had been intended for her. They shouted, for the sake of the other’s comprehension and because neither of them could gauge her voice very well, and each of them considered her sister’s hearing worse than her own, so each of them spoke a little louder than she had to. And they had lived all their lives together, and felt that they had a special language between them. So when Lily said, with a glance at Nona, “What a lovely dress,” it was as if to say, “She seems rather sane! She seems rather normal!” And when Nona said, “You look very well,” it was as if to say, “Perhaps she’ll do! Perhaps she can stay and we can go!”
• What did Sylvie see when she thought of my mother? A girl with braided hair, a girl with freckled arms, who liked to lie on the rug in the lamplight, flat on her belly with her heels in the air and her chin on her two fists, reading Kipling. Did she tell lies? Could she keep secrets? Did she tickle, or slap, or pinch, or punch, or grimace?
• Fingerbone was never an impressive town. It was chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere.
• Sylvie lit a candle. “Let’s play crazy eights.” “I don’t really want to,” Lucille said. “What do you want to do?” “I want to find some other people.” “Now?” “Well, tomorrow. We could just wade up to higher ground and walk around until we find someone. There must be a lot of people camping in the hills.” “But we’re fine here,” Sylvie said. “We can cook our own food and sleep in our own beds. What could be better?” She shuffled the cards and laid them out for solitaire.
• Sylvie picked up an ace and turned over the card beneath it. “It’s the loneliness,” Sylvie said. “Loneliness bothers lots of people. I knew a woman once who was so lonely she married an old man with a limp and had four children in five years, and none of it helped at all. Then she got the idea that she wanted to see her mother so she scraped up some money and drove all the way to Missouri with the children. She said her mother had changed so much that she wouldn’t have recognized her on the street. The old woman took a look at the children and said she didn’t see a trace of the family in them, and she said, ‘You’ve stored up sorrow for yourself, Marie.’ So she just turned around and went back home. But her husband would never believe it was her mother she had gone to see. He thought she had just left with the children and gotten scared of something and come back. He never really showed any of them much affection after that. But he didn’t live long, anyway.” “What happened to the children?” Lucille asked. Sylvie shrugged. “The usual things, I suppose. If there really were any children.” “I thought you said she had four.” “Well, I don’t really know that she did. I just met her on the bus. She talked about everything under the sun,
• Lucille and I still doubted that Sylvie would stay. She resembled our mother, and besides that, she seldom removed her coat, and every story she told had to do with a train or a bus station.
• Such a separation, I imagined, could indeed lead to loneliness intense enough to make one conspicuous in bus stations. It occurred to me that most people in bus stations would be conspicuous if it were not for the numbers of others there who would otherwise be conspicuous in the same way. Sylvie, at that moment, would hardly be noticed in a bus station.
• Sylvie had fallen silent again. Guessing that she must be listening to something, we were silent, too. The lake still thundered and groaned, the flood waters still brimmed and simmered. When we did not move or speak, there was no proof that we were there at all. The wind and the water brought sounds intact from any imaginable distance. Deprived of all perspective and horizon, I found myself reduced to an intuition, and my sister and my aunt to something less than that. I was afraid to put out my hand, for fear it would touch nothing, or to speak, for fear no one would answer. We all stood there silently for a long moment. Lucille said in a very loud voice, “I’m really tired of this.” Sylvie patted at my shoulder. “It’s all right, Lucille.” “I’m not Lucille,” I said.
• I brushed the canvassy folds of her coat. She was leaning against the window, I could see her barely silhouetted. I could feel the chill of the glass. “Sylvie?” She stood still as an effigy. I reached into her pocket and brought out a cold hand. I opened it and closed it and rubbed it between my hands, but she did not move or speak. I reached up and touched her cheek and her nose. A nerve jumped in the lid of her eye, but she did not move. Then I drew back my arm and hit her across the middle. The blow landed among the folds of her coat with a dull whump. She laughed. “Why did you do that?” “Well, why won’t you talk?” I began pulling her by her coat in the direction of the door.
• So Fingerbone, or such relics of it as showed above the mirroring waters, seemed fragments of the quotidian held up to our wondering attention, offered somehow as proof of their own significance. But then suddenly the lake and the river broke open and the water slid away from the land, and Fingerbone was left stripped and blackened and warped and awash in mud.
• My grandmother had been rather isolated because she had no interest in people younger than herself. We and the paperboy were the only people under sixty to whom she was consistently polite.
• We had been assured by our elders that intelligence was a family trait. All my kin and forebears were people of substantial or remarkable intellect, though somehow none of them had prospered in the world. Too bookish, my grandmother said with tart pride, and Lucille and I read constantly to forestall criticism, anticipating failure. If my family were not as intelligent as we were pleased to pretend, this was an innocent deception, for it was a matter of indifference to everybody whether we were intelligent or not. People always interpreted our slightly formal manner and our quiet tastes as a sign that we wished to stay a little apart. This was a matter of indifference, also, and we had our wish.
• Lucille said, “You just did it to see what it was like?” “I suppose so.” “What if you fell in?” “Oh,” Sylvie said. “I was pretty careful.” “If you fell in, everyone would think you did it on purpose,” Lucille said. “Even us.” Sylvie reflected a moment. “I suppose that’s true.” She glanced down at Lucille’s face. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”
• Such currents pull one’s dreams after them, and one’s own dread is always mirrored upon the dread that inheres in things.
• “You never know when you might be seeing someone for the last time,” Sylvie said. When she remembered that we were there and that we were children she sometimes tried to make her stories useful.
• Lucille ground her teeth when Sylvie set out shopping. So did I, because I found, as Lucille changed, advantage in conforming my attitudes to hers. She was of the common persuasion. Time that had not come yet—an anomaly in itself—had the fiercest reality for her. It was a hard wind in her face; if she had made the world, every tree would be bent, every stone weathered, every bough stripped by that steady and contrary wind. Lucille saw in everything its potential for invidious change.
• We—in recollection I feel no reluctance to speak of Lucille and myself almost as a single consciousness even through the course of that summer, though often enough she was restless and morose—we always stayed in the woods until it was evening, and when it was not bitterly cold we stayed on the shore throwing rocks into the water until it was dark. Sometimes we left when we smelled the hoboes’ supper—a little like fish, a little like rubber, a little like rust—but it was not the pleasures of home at suppertime that lured us back to Sylvie’s house. Say rather that the cold forced me home, and that the dark allowed Lucille to pass through the tattered peripheries of Fingerbone unobserved. It is accurate to say that Lucille went to the woods with me to escape observation. I myself felt the gaze of the world as a distorting mirror that squashed her plump and stretched me narrow. I, too, thought it was just as well to walk away from a joke so rudely persisted in. But I went to the woods for the woods’ own sake, while, increasingly, Lucille seemed to be enduring a banishment there.
• Such habits (she always slept clothed, at first with her shoes on, and then, after a month or two, with her shoes under her pillow) were clearly the habits of a transient. They offended Lucille’s sense of propriety.
• Sylvie suffered in such comparisons, it was true, and yet I was reassured by her sleeping on the lawn, and now and then in the car, and by her interest in all newspapers, irrespective of their dates, and by her pork-and-bean sandwiches. It seemed to me that if she could remain transient here, she would not have to leave. Lucille hated everything that had to do with transience.
• “Well, that’s fine,” Sylvie said. “I’m glad to have a chance to talk to you. You’re so quiet, it’s hard to know what you think.” Sylvie had stood up, and we began to walk toward home. “I suppose I don’t know what I think.” This confession embarrassed me. It was a source of both terror and comfort to me then that I often seemed invisible—incompletely and minimally existent, in fact. It seemed to me that I made no impact on the world, and that in exchange I was privileged to watch it unawares. But my allusion to this feeling of ghostliness sounded peculiar, and sweat started all over my body, convicting me on the spot of gross corporeality.
• If appearance is only a trick of the nerves, and apparition is only a lesser trick of the nerves, a less perfect illusion, then this expectation, this sense of a presence unperceived, was not particularly illusory as things in this world go. The thought comforted me. By so much was my dream less false than Lucille’s. And it is probably as well to be undeceived, though perhaps it is not.
• And I was left alone, in the gentle afternoon, indifferent to my clothes and comfortable in my skin, unimproved and without the prospect of improvement.
• it seemed that something I had lost might be found in Sylvie’s house. As I walked toward it, and the street became more and more familiar, till the dogs that slept on the porches only lifted their heads as I passed (since Sylvie was not with me), each particular tree, and its season, and its shadow, were utterly known to me, likewise the small desolations of forgotten lilies and irises, likewise the silence of the railroad tracks in the sunlight. I had seen two of the apple trees in my grandmother’s orchard die where they stood.
• You’re no help, anyway. All you ever do is just stand around like some stupid zombie!” There was a good deal of truth in all this. I considered my uselessness exculpatory,
• So Lucille and I noticed things that seemed familiar to us, and possibly meaningful, and sometimes we talked about them and often we did not. But that day she leaned across the table and said, “I can’t wait till I’m old enough to leave this place!” “This house?” “This town! I think I’ll go to Boston.” “No, you won’t.” “You’ll see.” “Why Boston?” “Because it isn’t Fingerbone, that’s why!”
• He would watch the chalk in his hands and look up at us from under his eyebrows. This mannerism of his was intended, I think, to suggest a temperate yet mysterious authority, though he softened this effect somewhat by wearing loud socks.
• I was relieved and even happy. Mr. French, after a month or two, called me to his office to tell me he was glad to hear that my attitude had in fact changed. He had a thick stack of my neat and perfect papers lying on the corner of his desk. I knew nothing then, and I know nothing now, of the mechanics of such things as attitudes, and if it pleased him to say that I had one, and that it had changed, I would not argue.
• Miss Royce was a solitary woman, too high-strung to be capable of friendships with children. She fluttered around her students with frightened devotion. Now and then she made a small inroad into their indifference—they would laugh at some little joke, or address some casual remark to her.
• I crouched on the covers, hoarding warmth and sleep, while they passed off me like a mist. “Wake up, wake up, wake up,” Sylvie said.
• We pushed it into the water. “Get in,” Sylvie said. “Hurry.” I climbed in and sat down on a narrow, splintery plank, facing the shore. “There’s a man yelling at us,” I said. “Oh, I know!” Sylvie pushed the boat out in two long strides, and then, with a hand on each gunwale, half leaped and half pulled herself into it. The boat wallowed alarmingly. “I have to sit in that seat,” she said. She stood up and turned around and stooped to hold the gunwales, and I crawled under her body and out between her legs. A stone splashed the water inches from my face, and another rattled into the bottom of the boat. Sylvie swung an oar over my head, settled it into the lock, crouched, and pulled us strongly away from the shore. A stone flew past my arm. I looked back and saw a burly man in knee boots and black pants and a red plaid jacket. I could see that he was wearing one of those shapeless felt hats that fishermen there decorate with preposterous small gleams and plumes and violent hooks. His voice was full of rage. “Just ignore him,” Sylvie said. She pulled again, and we were beyond reach. The man had followed us into the water until he was up to his boot tops in it. “Lady!” he bawled. “Ignore him,” Sylvie said. “He always acts like that. If he thinks someone’s watching him, he just carries on more.” I turned around and watched Sylvie. Her handling of the boat was strong and easy. When we were about one hundred yards from the shore she turned the boat toward the north. The man, now back on the beach, was still yelling and dancing his wrath and pitching stones after us. “It’s pitiful,” Sylvie said. “He’s going to have a heart attack someday.” “It must be his boat,” I suggested. Sylvie shrugged. “Or he might just be some sort of lunatic,” she said. “I’m certainly not going to go back and find out.” She was unperturbed by our bare escape and by her drenched loafers and the soggy skirts of her coat. I found myself wondering if this was why she came home with fish in her pockets.
• But that is a part of the world where people tend to boast of discomfort and hardship, having little else worthy of mention.
• Because, once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever have been otherwise. Loneliness is an absolute discovery.
• Perhaps all unsheltered people are angry in their hearts, and would like to break the roof, spine, and ribs, and smash the windows and flood the floor and spindle the curtains and bloat the couch.
• It is better to have nothing, for at last even our bones will fall. It is better to have nothing.
• Let them come unhouse me of this flesh, and pry this house apart. It was no shelter now, it only kept me here alone, and I would rather be with them, if only to see them, even if they turned away from me.
• But there are difficulties. For one, the wreck of my grandfather’s train is more vivid in my mind than it would have been if I had seen it (for the mind’s eye is not utterly baffled by darkness),
• The people of Fingerbone and its environs were very much given to murder. And it seemed that for every pitiable crime there was an appalling accident. What with the lake and the railroads, and what with blizzards and floods and barn fires and forest fires and the general availability of shotguns and bear traps and homemade liquor and dynamite, what with the prevalence of loneliness and religion and the rages and ecstasies they induce, and the closeness of families, violence was inevitable. There were any number of fierce old stories, one like another, varying only in the details of avalanche and explosion, too sad to be told to anyone except to strangers one was fairly certain not to meet again. For decades this same sheriff had been summoned like a midwife to preside over the beginnings of these stories, their births in ditches and dark places, out of the bloody loins of circumstance. So one must imagine he was hardened. Yet clearly he was embarrassed to knock at our door—so inarticulate with abashment and regret that Sylvie could pretend the reasons for his coming were obscure.
• The visitors glanced at the cans and papers as if they thought Sylvie must consider such things appropriate to a parlor. That was ridiculous. We had simply ceased to consider that room a parlor, since, until we had attracted the attention of these ladies, no one ever came to call. Who would think of dusting or sweeping the cobwebs down in a room used for the storage of cans and newspapers—things utterly without value? Sylvie only kept them, I think, because she considered accumulation to be the essence of housekeeping, and because she considered the hoarding of worthless things to be proof of a particularly scrupulous thrift.
• One of the ladies asked Sylvie if she was not lonely in Fingerbone, or if she had found a few friends her own age. Sylvie said yes, she was lonely, and yes, it was difficult to find friends, but she was used to being lonely and did not mind it. “But you and Ruthie are together a lot.” “Oh, all the time now. She’s like another sister to me. She’s her mother all over again.” There was a long silence.
• The ladies who came to speak to Sylvie had a clear intention, a settled purpose, yet they were timid about threading the labyrinths of our privacy. They had some general notions of tact but very little practice in the use of it, and so they tended to err on the side of caution, to deal in indirection, and to succumb to embarrassment.
• And the obligation to perform these works rested squarely with the women, since salvation was universally considered to be much more becoming in women than in men.
• “Really, she’s all right,” Sylvie answered. Murmurs. One of them said. “She looks so sad.” And Sylvie replied, “Well, she is sad.” Silence. Sylvie said, “She should be sad.” She laughed. “I don’t mean she should be, but, you know, who wouldn’t be?” Again, silence. “That’s how it is with family,” Sylvie said. “You feel them the most when they’re gone. I knew a woman once who had four children, and she didn’t seem to care for them at all. She’d give them string beans for breakfast, and she never even cared if their shoes matched. That’s what people told me. But I knew her when she was old, and she had nine little beds in her house, all made up, and every night she’d go from one to another, tucking the children in, over and over again. She just had four, but after they were all gone she had nine! Well, she was probably crazy. But you know what I mean. Helen and Papa were never close.” Silence. “Now I look at Ruthie and I see Helen, too. That’s why families are so important. Other people walk out the door and they’re gone!” Silence. A shifting of the couch. “Families should stay together. Otherwise things get out of control. My father, you know. I can’t even remember what he was like, I mean when he was alive. But ever since, it’s Papa here and Papa there, and dreams … Like the poor woman with nine children. She was walking the floor the whole night!”
• Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it. God Himself was pulled after us into the vortex we made when we fell, or so the story goes. And while He was on earth He mended families. He gave Lazarus back to his mother, and to the centurion he gave his daughter again. He even restored the severed ear of the soldier who came to arrest Him—a fact that allows us to hope the resurrection will reflect a considerable attention to detail. Yet this was no more than tinkering. Being man He felt the pull of death, and being God He must have wondered more than we do what it would be like. He is known to have walked upon water, but He was not born to drown. And when He did die it was sad—such a young man, so full of promise, and His mother wept and His friends could not believe the loss, and the story spread everywhere and the mourning would not be comforted, until He was so sharply lacked and so powerfully remembered that his friends felt Him beside them as they walked along the road, and saw someone cooking fish on the shore and knew it to be Him, and sat down to supper with Him, all wounded as He was. There is so little to remember of anyone—an anecdote, a conversation at table. But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming, habitual fondness, not having meant to keep us waiting long.
• Sylvie did not want to lose me. She did not want me to grow gigantic and multiple, so that I seemed to fill the whole house, and she did not wish me to turn subtle and miscible, so that I could pass through the membranes that separate dream and dream. She did not wish to remember me. She much preferred my simple, ordinary presence, silent and ungainly though I might be. For she could regard me without strong emotion—a familiar shape, a familiar face, a familiar silence. She could forget I was in the room. She could speak to herself, or to someone in her thoughts, with pleasure and animation, even while I sat beside her—this was the measure of our intimacy, that she gave almost no thought to me at all. But if she lost me, I would become extraordinary by my vanishing.
• But if she had simply brought us home again to the high frame apartment building with the scaffolding of stairs, I would not remember her that way. Her eccentricities might have irked and embarrassed us when we grew older. We might have forgotten her birthday, and teased her to buy a car or to change her hair. We would have left her finally. We would have laughed together with bitterness and satisfaction at our strangely solitary childhood, in light of which our failings would seem inevitable, and all our attainments miraculous. Then we would telephone her out of guilt and nostalgia, and laugh bitterly afterward because she asked us nothing, and told us nothing, and fell silent from time to time, and was glad to get off the phone. We would take her to a restaurant and a movie on Thanksgiving and buy her best-sellers for Christmas. We would try to give her outings and make her find some interests, but she would soften and shrink in our hands, and become infirm. She would bear her infirmities with the same taut patience with which she bore our solicitude, and with which she had borne every other aspect of life, and her silence would make us more and more furious. Lucille and I would see each other often, and almost never talk of other things. Nothing would be more familiar to us than her silence, and her sad, abstracted calm. I know how it would have been, because I have observed that, in the way people are strange, they grow stranger. We would have laughed and felt abandoned and aggrieved, never knowing that she had gone all the way to the edge of the lake to rest her head and close her eyes, and had come back again for our sakes. She would have remained untransfigured. We would never have known that her calm was as slight as the skin on water, and that her calm sustained her as a coin can float on still water. We would have known nothing of the nature and reach of her sorrow if she had come back. But she left us and broke the family and the sorrow was released and we saw its wings and saw it fly a thousand ways into the hills, and sometimes I think sorrow is a predatory thing because birds scream at dawn with a marvelous terror, and there is, as I have said before, a deathly bitterness in the smell of ponds and ditches.
• When we were children and frightened of the dark, my grandmother used to say if we kept our eyes closed we would not see it. That was when I noticed the correspondence between the space within the circle of my skull and the space around me. I saw just the same figure against the lid of my eye or the wall of my room, or in the trees beyond my window. Even the illusion of perimeters fails when families are separated.
• If I had the choice, I would work in a truck stop. I like to overhear the stories strangers tell each other, and I like the fastidious pleasure solitary people take in the smallest details of their small comforts.

  Kyle: Like granddaddy caring so much about how his clothes were ironed

• When did I become so unlike other people? Either it was when I followed Sylvie across the bridge, and the lake claimed us, or it was when my mother left me waiting for her, and established in me the habit of waiting and expectation which makes any present moment most significant for what it does not contain. Or it was at my conception.
• Of my conception I know only what you know of yours. It occurred in darkness and I was unconsenting.
• All this is fact. Fact explains nothing. On the contrary, it is fact that requires explanation.
• No one watching this woman smear her initials in the steam on her water glass with her first finger, or slip cellophane packets of oyster crackers into her handbag for the sea gulls, could know how her thoughts are thronged by our absence, or know how she does not watch, does not listen, does not wait, does not hope, and always for me and Sylvie.