This Must Be the Place

by Maggie O'Farrell

It was a pure, animal avalanche of feeling, this. Look at him, she wanted to say, just look at this child. Was there ever a more perfect boy? She seized him, his hot body, the birdcage of his ribs, and pressed kisses into his hair, as if the scent and sense of him might save her from all that was uncertain and dangerous in the world.

my mother, the one person – until Claudette – who loved me with a ferocity so unquestioning, so complete, that after it had gone I felt unmoored, insubstantial, as if I myself had ceased to exist.

What redemption there is in being loved: we are always our best selves when loved by another. Nothing can replace this.

It is possible, I think, as I sit there on the cold wood of the bandstand bench, to see ailing marriages as brains that have undergone a stroke. Certain connections short-circuit, abilities are lost, cognition suffers, a thousand neural pathways close down for ever. Some strokes are massive, seminal, unignorable; others imperceptible. I’m told it’s perfectly possible to suffer one and not realise it until much later.

marriages end not because of something you did say but because of something you didn’t.

But the over-tens, now, that’s a whole other matter. They hang around. They refuse to be compliant about bathing.

They wolf down their dinner, then require further sustenance. They want entertainment, conversation, help with suddenly remembered projects, debates over pocket money, holiday destinations, choice of available beverages. You might try to slope off somewhere, to some armchair in a quiet corner of a house, to open a book, when in bursts a teenager, incandescent with rage because the laces have broken on a particular pair of sneakers.

We must pursue what’s in front of us, not what we can’t have or what we have lost. We must grasp what we can reach and hold on, fast.