Those moments, which were shiny, were not so very rare. They were like a window opening for an instant to show me what could be really there, what I really had if only I could see it all the time, without falling and failing into those lapses of inertia which were beginning to come, and against which I struggled.

And against which, finally, I ceased to struggle. But not yet. Not for a long time yet.

The children were changing. Elliott had already learned that there were unpleasant things, unpleasant people, teachers, other children, rules, an order to be obeyed that was not always the same as the order he was used to with us. We tried to help him, explained that other people might have different standards, and he should not think that they must share ours. We managed, I think, only to confuse him further. It wasn’t that he was having a bad time; it was just that things weren’t turning out the way he’d expected.

Now Katie was out in the same world, but she was a better survivor than Elliott. She learned to keep her impulses shut away, a secret, untouched, and on the outside did what she had to. She was scarcely unblemished, but she salvaged and balanced herself; she seemed to recognize instinctively the schizophrenia of her position as a child, and just as instinctively dealt with it, and if in the process she learned to deal in dishonesty, not outright dishonesty like stealing, but presenting a false face where she felt it necessary, in herself she did not change; she was a firmly rooted little girl, or so it seemed to us.

Stephen and I talked often about the children; we marvelled at their differences, astonished because we thought we had given the same of what we had, including love, to each. We liked to tell each other fantasies of what Elliott and Katie might become; we were determined, because they were both intelligent, to encourage them to go to school as long as they wanted. Education, then, was the answer to everything; I was beginning to think its lack in my own life must be the source of the rootling of unease that was already in me; I thought it was because I was essentially helpless.

“It really bothers you, doesn’t it,” Stephen said. And I grew inarticulate, unable to explain.

“It’s just that it makes me so dependent,” I told him. “There’s nothing I can do.”

For I did think, briefly, of getting a job as a means of filling the spaces of my life. I mentioned the idea to Stephen and immediately regretted it.

He did not take it personally, did not think I was rejecting him or that he had failed me in some way, or that I was failing him. He was, as always, cool and rational.