I was just taking off my sweater when the children got home. I wanted to cling to what was not strange, but it was not possible. I hugged them, asked about their days at school, but I wasn’t listening; I looked at them.

Where had they come from? What did I have to do with them, or they with me? I felt a moment’s rebellion against these people who had come to me, who took so much, who had taken something I didn’t even know I had. And then the rebellion faded, and they faded too. It wasn’t right to blame them; it was not them. They were like the dinner parties, where I had watched and nodded and smiled, but as if I were seeing it all through gauze, detached, slightly away from all of it. That was how they were to me, Elliott and Katie, excited, pink-faced, talking simultaneously, sharing their day with me, except that I wasn’t there, I watched them but I wasn’t there. I heard their sounds, I saw their faces, but they were remote, not objects of my caring. There was nothing. I knew that it was wrong, that something had happened to me that was making my vision of them wrong; and I hugged them both again, wanting touch to make them real, but it didn’t work.

And it didn’t work later, when Stephen came home and there was the same sense of displacement, and it stayed with me, while I watched them all, played with them and talked to them until, one at a time, they went to bed. I told Stephen I wasn’t tired; I sat up very late in front of the fireplace that was so different, more ornate, less functional, than the one I had sat before earlier in the day, and tried to understand.

Was it escape I saw? I did not think so. Or if it was, it was not so much escape from this life, although I was dead in it, as an escape to something. Filled now with life, a sense of purity and, at last, belief, I could no longer quite recall the emptiness of yesterday. I was a different person. But still there were the ties of past life, the remembrance of duty, the words that said that whatever I might want, I was responsible to these people I had created, and that duty must rank above desire.

But desire was not the right word. Can duty rank above love? For surely, if anything was, this was love. And can it overcome compulsion and obsession? Surely duty has no strength against that.