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“Do you still love me, after everything that has happened?” “Of course I do.” “Then you have not let me down.”
“Oh, Da.” Tears fell, and neither of us wiped our cheeks. “I have to think that I’ve made the right decisions. Please, please, just keep loving me. It’s what you do best.”
“Surely things could change if enough people wanted them to,”
“No graduation, of course. No degree. But it’s satisfying to know I would have achieved both if I wore trousers.”
roasting juices, and she was changing it for a clean one just as Mrs. Ballard used to do before she took a roast to table. As if evidence of their toil was offensive.
“But what’s the point?” she said, picking a slip out of the trunk and looking at it. “Half the people who say these words will never be able to read them.” “Maybe not,” I said, heaving the trunk onto her bed. “But their words are important.”
“Wouldn’t it be good if the words these women use were treated the same as any other?”
the words most often used to define us were words that described our function in relation to others.
Even the most benign words—maiden, wife, mother—told the world whether we were virgins or not.
militancy isn’t the only way,
You are not a coward, Esme. It pains me to think that any young woman would think such a thing because she is not being brutalised for her convictions.
“What are they so scared of?” Lizzie sighed. “All of them are scared of losing something;
SISTERHOOD “I’m glad you have joined the sisterhood and will be adding your voice to the cry.”
if you want opinion to define what something means then you should at least consider all sides. Not all sides have a newspaper to speak for them.”
but words are meaningless without action.” “And sometimes action can make a lie of good words,”
“Lily would like him very much,” Harry said in his last letter.
“Don’t know how I’ll get on without him.”
She might have been talking about God, or she might have been talking about Gareth. I hoped she was talking about both.
after all that you’ve told me, I think I love you more.”
I fell in love with you word by word. I’ve always loved the shape and feel of them, the infinite pairings. But you showed me their limitations, and their potential.”
“I had to choose,” he said. “Between a ring and the words.”
No more words passed between us. He didn’t ask, and I didn’t answer, but I felt those moments like the rhythm of a poem. They were the preface to everything that would come after, and already I was plotting it out.
I held his gaze, knowing the memory of Da was stronger when it was shared.
I cannot overstate the benefits of a busy day for an anxious mind or a lonely heart.
P.S. Ajit was not invincible.
I’ve been a bondmaid to you since you were small, Essymay, and I’ve been glad for every day of
“It is not for you to judge the importance of these words, simply to allow others to do so.”
BONDMAID Bonded for life by love, devotion or obligation. “I’ve been a bondmaid to you since you were small, Essymay, and I’ve been glad for every day of it.” Lizzie Lester, 1915
When my lids close, I will be spared the worst, and it will be an image of you that ushers me to sleep.
For me, Esme is like a favourite word that I understand in a particular way and have no desire to understand differently.
Was that what it meant to be a daughter? To have hair that smelled of your mother’s? To use the same soap? Or was it a shared passion, a shared frustration?
Were Meg’s longings akin to Esme’s, and was that what it meant to be a daughter?
I want to get up and pull the volume from the shelf, but I’m worried that the definition I read will not apply to Mum. So I sit a little longer and my memories of Mum erase all concern. But now, I fear that mother will not apply to Esme.
“Does it change anything?” he asked. “It changes everything,” Meg said. He bent his head to sip his tea; his hands shook very slightly. When Meg looked at his face she saw that every muscle was working to hold back an emotion he wanted to spare her from. “Almost everything,” she said. He looked up. “It doesn’t change what I feel for you, Dad. And it doesn’t change what I feel for Mum, or how I will remember her. I think perhaps I might even love her a little more.
“Words define us, they explain us, and, on occasion, they serve to control or isolate us. But what happens when words that are spoken are not recorded?
“Bondmaid,” she says. “For a while, this beautiful, troubling word belonged to my mother.”
Where, I wondered, are the women in this story, and does it matter that they are absent?
This novel is my attempt to understand how the way we define language might define us.
