‘I wanted to let you and Mum know what’s going on.’

‘To be honest, Em, I never thought you and Michael would stay together. Said this to your mum a while back. Maybe it was a good marriage for a while, but it wasn’t forever. Sorry to say, I knew something like this would happen.’

‘You called it, Rick.’

6.

After high school, Emily left her parents’ home in Suffolk and spent her first year of university living alone in a Childs Hill studio apartment that belonged to a friend of the family. She believed Londoners could immediately tell that nothing of a permanent nature would come of her stay. To pay bills and cover expenses, Emily spent her savings and worked in pubs—anywhere that would hire her. She was poor. The apartment’s owner, who had moved to Dublin, left behind an elderly cat to care for and eventually put down. Above the bed she hung Ian Asquith’s painting. In the bathtub Emily tried to improve her French, reading Au Pays de la Magie by Henri Michaux. Then she picked up Duras’s La Vie Matérielle. The plumbing leaked in so many places you couldn’t get to them all. A family of squirrels appeared at the courtyard window, and a group of Goldsmiths students took her into their circle. Emily’s early Big City experiences were typical, and often she was aware of this fact. The good moments she stored up like gold. By October it seemed London had accepted her. And maybe she would stay for good.

Now Emily dreaded the idea of going home. Late that night she sent an email to Michael. I want you to move out today or tomorrow, she wrote. I don’t want to think another second about you and another person in my home.

Chapter 16: 1957

1957

1.

Valia left Lucky twice before she ended the marriage in 1957, declaring their problems unchanged and intolerable. The first instance she left him might serve as a sample of their final years together, the time they ground through as labour.