After You'd Gone

by Maggie O'Farrell

Whether it was their idea or whether they were acting on the advice of another Elspeth never knew, but they decided that it would be best for the child if they didn’t tell her they were leaving. They dressed Elspeth in her best clothes and took her out for a walk on the beach, each holding one of her hands. While she was playing with the pebbles and seaweed on the blustery seashore, they slipped away and when she turned round they were gone and in their place was the upright figure of a housemistress for St. Cuthbert’s School for Girls, who took her by the elbow and led her up the beach and on to a train for Edinburgh and boarding-school. She didn’t see them or North Berwick again for seven years.

“People who send their children away to boarding-school should never have had them in the first place,” Ann says bitterly,

“Alice, how do you feel…about me?” She shakes her head. “I’m not telling you that when you’re about to tell me you’ve got a wife and twelve children, or that you’re about to emigrate to Australia, or that you’re a convicted criminal who’s starting a life sentence next week, or that you’ve recently decided you might be gay.”

she knows enough about love to be aware of its double bind—that there’s no love without pain, that you can’t ever love someone without that tinge of dread at how it might end.

I find myself suspended like Persephone between two states.