The Little Friend

by Donna Tartt

Sometimes these vivid flashes of memory seemed like pieces of a bad dream, as if none of it had ever happened. Yet in many ways it seemed the only real thing that had happened in Charlotte’s life.

We were never meant to have him, darling. He wasn’t ours to keep. We were lucky he was with us for as long as he was.

Consequently their relationship with their dead brother was of the most intimate sort, his strong, bright, immutable character shining changelessly against the vagueness and vacillation of their own characters, and the characters of people that they knew; and they grew up believing that this was due to some rare, angelic incandescence of nature on Robin’s part, and not at all to the fact that he was dead.

The pictures enchanted Harriet. More than anything, she wanted to slip out of the world she knew into their cool blue-washed clarity, where her brother was alive and the beautiful house still stood and everyone was always happy.

You can leave here. In your mind. Just go away. What was it Peter Pan said to Wendy? “Just close your eyes and think lovely thoughts.”

“Just the other day I read something Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adams when he was an old man, that most of the things he’d worried about in his life never came to pass.

‘How much pain have cost us the evils that never happened.’

The view had captivated her: wash fluttering on lines, peaked roofs like a field of origami arks, roofs red and green and black and silver, roofs of shingle and copper and tar and tin, spread out below them in the airy dreamy distance. It was like seeing into another country. The vista had a whimsical, toy quality which reminded her of pictures she’d seen of the Orient—of China, of Japan. Beyond crawled the river, its yellow surface wrinkled and glinting, and the distances seemed so vast that it was easy to believe that a glittering clockwork Asia lay hammering and humming and clanging its million miniature bells just beyond the horizon, past the river’s muddy dragon-coils.