Maggie O'Farrell

He has a tendency to slip the bounds of the real, tangible world around him and enter another place.

hemp-woven skeps

house, she is learning, runs very differently from another. Instead of the sprawl of generations, all working together to look after animals and land, the house in Henley Street has a distinct structure: there are the parents, then the sons, then the daughter, then the pigs in the pig-pen and the hens in the henhouse, then the apprentice and then, right at the bottom, the serving maids. Agnes believes her position, as new daughter-in-law, to be ambiguous, somewhere between apprentice and hen.

‘I won’t watch you walk away.’

‘I’ll walk backwards,’ he says, backing away, ‘so I can keep you in my sights.’

‘All the way to London?’

‘If I have to.’

She laughs. ‘You’ll fall into a ditch. You’ll crash into a cart.’

‘So be it.’

She walks back, more slowly, the way she came. How odd it feels, to move along the same streets, the route in reverse, like inking over old words, her feet the quill, going back over work, rewriting, erasing. Partings are strange. It

seems so simple: one minute ago, four, five, he was here, at her side; now, he is gone. She was with him; she is alone. She feels exposed, chill, peeled like an onion.