Kindle Notes & Highlights
a solitary rower glided downstream, her oar strokes a whisper like the rhythm of a sleeper’s breath.
Katharine tried out the word silently inside her mouth. It had the papery whisper of something that could not be told; it had the shifty sibilance of secrets and of shame.
Ah yes, fairness, thought Frank. That rare and quaint concept beloved by children and eroded by adults and experience.
She had forgotten about the sea, the sheer expanse of it, the sigh and hiss of it and the clamour of the gulls. She had forgotten how it never stayed still and how it changed with the light, how it was magic when the night drew in and bright spots of light like sequins on net pricked out the sky and the coast and the trawlers that stitched the land to the shore.
they had been well suited in many ways, having washed up on the shore of middle age together, both a little the worse for wear inevitably.
Purple mountains slumbered against a pale sky; the last of the sun bled crimson in bands to the west and Katharine struggled to contain a hope that wanted to fly from her mouth in a cry.
she arranged the perhapses in her mind and stacked them carefully into a fragile tower of possibility.
In the days after Daddy, she would bend and lower herself upside down through the rails, turn her feet out like a clown so that she wouldn’t roll in (although if she did, it thrilled her to know the skates would make her sink like a stone) and hold Teddy, Teddy who had lost his fuzz in patches here and there and who smelt of straw and sleep; hold him at the end of stretched-out arms over the roar and surge and dare herself to let him fall to the fishy deeps below. She never let Teddy drop exactly. She threw him into the air sometimes, to feel the loss and horror pitch in her belly.
