Was it a miracle? It was as if they had dreamt of a pot of gold and woken to find it on their pillow. As if they had told a tale of a fairy princess and finished it only to find her sitting in a corne...
Time was of the essence. For at eight o’clock the world came to an end. It was reading time.
They stood in silence, looking at floorboards and corners of cornices and other such insignificances, their curiosity and compassion at the ready. They were waiting so hard that when the door cracked...
They sat on the bank. It was better to tell such stories close to the river than in a drawing room. Words accumulate indoors, trapped by walls and ceilings. The weight of what has been said can lie he...
There are few things that cannot be put right by love, and there is no shortage of that here.
Then he looked beyond the ever-shifting alteration to study the stillness of her expression. He knew his camera could not capture this - that some things were only truly seen by the human eye. This wa...
The hours between eight in the evening and one or two in the morning have always been my magic hours.
The doctor is an intelligent, cultivated man. He has a sincere desire to see the twins improve and has been the prime mover in bringing me to Angelfield. He explained to me at great length the difficu...
She made her resolution. In for a penny, in for a pound.
Peasants and princes, bailiffs and bakers' boys, merchants and mermaids, the figures were all immediately familiar. I had read these stories a hundred, a thousand, times before. They were stories ever...
All evidence of the house ghost reasserting herself.
A single lupine exhalation could reduce it to rubble.
Rare, and as the household descended from eccentricity into chaos,
In time-wasting loops and diversions. Its changes of direction are frequently teasing: on its journey it heads at different times north, south, and west, as though it has forgotten its easterly destin...
Fields and land to one side and the other. It finds its way into wells and is drawn up to launder petticoats and be boiled for tea. It is sucked into root membranes, travels up cell by cell to the sur...
Endings that are muted, but which echo longer in the memory than louder, more explosive denouements.
When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled. And during th...
What is it that allows human beings to see through each other’s pretendings? For I understood quite clearly in that moment that she was anxious. Perhaps emotions have a smell or a taste; perhaps we tr...
What better place to kill time than a library? And for me, what better way to get to know someone than through her choice and treatment of books?
We live like latecomers to the theater; we must catch up as best we can, divining the begging from the shape of later events.