It is always the meaningless tasks that endure: the washing, the cooking, the clearing, the cleaning. Never anything majestic or significant, just the tiny rituals that hold together the seams of human life.
She turns another page with a flick of her fingers. He is gripping her tighter. ‘You know what it says here?’ she says. ‘That a man used to be able to admit his daughter or wife to an asylum with just a signature from a GP.’
We are all, Esme decides, just vessels through which identities pass: we are lent features, gestures, habits, then we hand them on. Nothing is our own. We begin in the world as anagrams of our antecedents.
And there would be no escape, no relief from these walls, from this room, from this family until she married, and the thought of that was as bad, if not worse.
