‘The house is an A.’

‘The house is an A.’ - P114

‘Because the floor is floating in mid-air, like the cross stroke of the A. There is no ground underneath it. Just empty space and more empty space.’ - P114

It seems strange to Agnes, during this time, that she has, in the space of a month, exchanged country for town, a farm for an apartment, a stepmother for a mother-in-law, one family for another. - P116

Agnes believes her position, as new daughter-in-law, to be ambiguous, somewhere between apprentice and hen. - P116

So she can withdraw into her own place but also mix and mingle with the others. She is at once observer and participant. - P116

Agnes glances at the face of her father-in-law and that of her mother-in-law and then her husband. He catches her eye and gives a barely perceptible nod towards the bread, raising his eyebrows. - P118

Agnes sees this but doesn’t say it. - P120

She sees, too, that all six children flinch if John gets suddenly to his feet, like animals sensing the approach of a predator. She sees Mary blink slowly, as if closing her eyes to what might occur. - P120

‘No. That you see the world as no one else does.’ - P114

She thinks of the private cruelty behind something as beautiful and perfect as a glove. - P122

In their apartment, he lets her take his hand, lets her lead him from the fire to a chair, lets his eyes lose focus, lets her rub her fingers through his hair, and she can feel him switch from one character to another; she can sense that other, big-house, self melt off him, like wax sliding from a lit candle, revealing the man within. - P122

She wished she could say to him, You must not fret. You and I are to have two children and they will live long lives. But she remained silent: people do not like to hear such things. - P129

But she knows enough to be able to record an approximation of this sentence: The branches of the forest are so dense you cannot feel the rain. - P129

She says the word to herself – rowan, rowan – pulling out the two syllables. Reddened berries in autumn, used for stomach pains, if boiled, and wheezing chests; if planted by the door of a house, it will repel evil spirits from the inhabitants. People say the first woman was made from its branches. It was her mother’s name, although her father never let it past his lips; the shepherd had told her, when she’d asked him. The branches of the forest. Agnes plants her hands in front of her, on all fours, like a wolf, and submits to another pain. - P132

His mind is traversed, for a moment, by an image of her body in its current astonishing shape, as he saw it last night: limbs, neat ribcage, the spine a long indent down the back, a cart-track through snow, and then this perfectly rounded sphere at the front. Like a woman who had swallowed the moon. - P133

Something has changed. He pauses. The quill rests in the inkwell, point down, fronded feathers up. He frowns. This is something he never does: to leave a quill like that, overnight, in the damp dark of a well. What a waste, what profligacy. It will be quite spoilt. - P133

Who would ever think it could be so thick, so strong, still pulsing like a long, striped heart? The colours of birth assail Agnes: the red, the blue, the white. - P135

‘That you had more hidden away inside you than anyone else she’d ever met.’ - P137

The first is a glassmaker on the island of Murano in the principality of Venice; the second is a cabin boy on a merchant ship sailing for Alexandria on an unseasonably warm morning with an easterly wind. - P140

She hands the girl the box of millefiori beads and Judith takes it, her hands eager and quick, her face lit with a smile. - P151

There is nothing more exquisite to her than her child: the world could not possibly contain a more perfect being, anywhere, ever. - P152

He is like the picture of a man, canvas thin, with nothing behind it; he is like a person whose soul has been sucked out of him or stolen away in the night. - P155

‘May I . . .’ she begins, spe...

‘May I . . .’ she begins, speaking into the icy air of the room ‘. . . I wondered if you would like it if I . . . made your flower crown? For tomorrow?’ - P94

Eliza looks down at her hand. There is a dent in her skin, from the press of Agnes’s thumbnail, a rose-red bloom all around it. She rubs at it with her opposite hand, surprised at its heat, as if it has been held near a candle. - P96

The words exist, if you know how to listen. - P96

The crown Eliza makes is of fern, larch and Michaelmas daisies. - P96

She feels a corresponding motion within herself, in time with the plants, a flow or current or tide, the passage of blood from her to the child within. She is leaving one life; she is beginning another. Anything may happen. - P99

The priest dips the ring in holy water, murmuring a blessing, and then the groom takes it. In nomine Patris, he says, in a clear voice, audible to all, even those at the back, sliding the ring on to her thumb and then off again, in nomine Filii, the ring is pushed on to her first finger, in nomine Spiritus Sancti, her middle finger. At Amen, the ring encircles her third finger where, the groom told her the other day, as they were hiding in the orchard, runs a vein that travels straight to her heart. It feels cold, for a moment, against her skin, and damp with holy water, but then the blood, flowing straight from her heart, warms it, brings it up to the temperature of her body. - P101

She steps into the church, conscious of the three things she is holding. The ring on her finger, the spray of rowan berries, curled into her palm, the hand of her husband. - P101

She jumps, her hand travelling to her heart. ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘You frightened me! Whatever are you doing, boy? You look like a ghost, standing there like that.’ - P107

The two women look at one another and Agnes sees that Mary is thinking of her daughter, Anne, who died of the pestilence, aged eight, covered with swellings and hot with fever, her fingers black and odorous and rotting off her hands. - P108

Agnes makes herself form the thought, Anne, we know you are there, you are not forgotten. How frail, to Agnes, is the veil between their world and hers. For her, the worlds are indistinct from each other, rubbing up against each other, allowing passage between them. She will not let Judith cross over. - P108

The letter manifesting itself from under the blackened point, hardened to charcoal in the kitchen fire: ‘A’. Her letter, always hers. - P113

The farmer shifts his cudgel ...

The farmer shifts his cudgel to his opposite hand, spits emphatically on the ground, and takes John’s fingers, giving them a painfully strong squeeze. John hears himself give a high, almost girlish cry. - P87

A pain enters the back of his head and crouches there, snarling, like a cornered rat. - P89

She gives him an odd, wide-ey...

She gives him an odd, wide-eyed, teeth-gritted smile. - P78

What is immediately clear to him is that his life has taken a new turn. - P79

Part of him wants to turn and run. The other part wants to burst into laughter: the idea of a falcon, of Agnes, in his mother’s parlour, surrounded by the curlicued and painted wall hangings of which she is so proud. - P80

He feels his face curling into a smile. A child. Made by him and Agnes, among the apples in the storehouse. How can they not be married now? Nothing can be done to stop it, in such circumstances. It will be, just as she said it would. They will be married. - P81

This child, in Agnes’s belly, will change everything for him, will free him from the life he hates, from the father he cannot live with, from the house he can no longer bear. He and Agnes will take flight: to another house, another town, another life. - P82

[오늘의 한문장] 인생여전

명휴라는 말이 있습니다. 비가 오거나 태풍이 불어서 작업을 중단하고 하루 휴일을 명령한다고 해서 명휴라고합니다. 저는 이 말을 매우 좋아합니다. 그 휴일들은 대개 인위적인 사유가 아니라 하늘의 뜻에 따라 생겨난 것이니, 어떤 신성함이 느껴지기도 합니다.
삶에 지친 많은 이들에게 오늘 하루 명휴가 있었으면 합니다. - P7