Diane Williams

So what about the mother and daughter’s shared jealousy, guilt, strain or pain – those?

Oh, must everybody have to deal with those?

Don’t imagine.

The mother is a slightly brave, a slightly unembarrassed person who can be quite social and today she has just written this letter.

Dear Teresa,

Well, I don’t know how to say I am wretched. It is terribly sad that I am living at...

My brother’s words when I hear them these days seem not to go into my ears – but down some other deeper artery.

He said, ‘It’s mother’s house and I just think of it as home.’

‘I would never ever go there today,’ I said. And we were in the middle of a paved two-way drive in the park, having left it up to the pack of people we were in among to...

Oh, I had my worm’s eye view of him when I was down on the carpet to pick up my ink pen that had slipped off of my lap when I stood. I saw the canopy of his jaw, his jawbones.

God … will I never know if I make things better for Victor?

I would need to go along with him and there was no denying he was piqued, and I was putting up resistance. He wanted to show me...

He is a figure I once engaged with for years, amid scenes with nearly religious significance attached to them.

And by chance, this Saturday, I had witnessed him stepping away from a park path and stooping beneath the leaf cover – only to put his hand against the tree trunk.

He smiled when he saw me, but when I reached him he was speechless and sour, and then he proceeded on his way...

I was able to get Harriet Mounce to shriek and I think I must have thought any shriek would do.

When she first stood there naked, I remember she was solemn or she looked annoyed or was she really pained? But she did seem to like me. The cues – she had really focused her eyes on me and she had smiled while on her haunches by the hearth a bit earlier.

Because she is a brunette, the sight of...