Tatevik’s Reviews > The Past > Status Update

After sleeping together for so many years, they hardly had to go through the rigmarole of a rapprochement or a truce before they touched, even if they'd been at odds while they were talking. Their bodies, more prosaic than their souls, were intimate at a level deeper than their argument.

Of course their reading matter was quite different: her novels from the library, his serious books. As was fitting, it was usually Sophy who slipped away first, putting her novel opened face down on the floor - breaking its spine, he complained - and relinquishing her involvement in its otherness with a sigh that was close to sensuous.

But part of the oddity of marriage, she thought, was in how unwise it was to attend too intently to the other per-son. This was the opposite to what she had naively imagined, as a girl. To the unmarried, it seemed that a couple must be intimately, perpetually exposed to each other - but actually, that wasn't bear-able. In order for love to survive, you had to close yourself off to a certain extent.

What a compromised generation theirs was, she thought. Materially they had so much, and yet they were haunted by this sensation of existing in an aftermath, after the best had passed.

They knew one another so well, all too well, and yet they were all continually surprised by the forgotten difficult twists and turns of one another's personalities, so familiar as soon as they appeared.

All the siblings felt sometimes, as the days of their holiday passed, the sheer irritation and perplexity of family coexistence: how it fretted away at the love and attachment which were nonetheless intense and enduring when they were apart.

Feeling so understood when I find a character so typical me - craving that alone time.

“Harriet stepped into her room later, closed the door behind her, and stood in the dark in the relief of her own space at last, feeling the evening's sociability drain out of her.”

Entering into that high-pitched sociability would be like breaking through a skin, all eyes would turn on her and see how she was hot and dishevelled from her walk. […] a stranger was a fearful and impregnable unknown country. Even this luggage intimidated her, with its aura of life lived according to a high, intolerant code that she would never master.

At last, curling on her side with her knees up, she descended the ceremonial staircase of her sleep, shedding a heavy cloak on the steps behind her, unpinning the dark rivers of her hair, which fell in her dream all the way down her back to the floor.

Magic in simplicity
“…electric light was too brutal, it would spoil the magic. And when the washing up was done and the beds were made up and the children were quiet upstairs, the adults sat around the table again, with the windows open because the night was so warm. Poetic moths, significant in a thin soup of lesser insects, blundered about the candle flames.”