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'And I thought-Anna I wish I could explain it. It was really a revelation. I thought: I've been married to him for years and years, and all that time I've been-wrapped up in him. Well women are, aren't they? I've thought of nothing else. I've cried myself to sleep night after night for years. And I…

[...] She said quickly: 'I think you're making your father out to be much more simple than he is. I don't think he has an undivided mind: he once said being a big businessman these days was like being a rather superior office boy. And you forget that in the 'thirties he had a spell of being a commu…

Yet for every conceivable holiday--from Easter lamb to Christmas ham--our tin-car car crunches up the drive to the Whitbread estate, which lures me in some ways and yet always saps me dry. This isn't meant to sound peevish, for the Whitbreads are never not nice. But from the second I haul my bag up…

The Polish philosopher, on the phone: ‘Let’s say you decided to leave V. What would be holding you back?’

Long pause. I walk through our life, as it were room by room. It is very bare.

‘In my heart I know I have to leave. But I’m hanging on. Because I’ve got this terrible need for him to tell…

I don’t know what she would make of this but here’s what I think happened: I wanted so much to be loved that I tried to turn myself into the sort of woman I thought I would have to be, in order to be lovable. In the process I falsified myself, lost part of my soul, made myself sick with swallowed r…