Kate can never decide whether she is a special case, and as such of little general relevance, or whether she is on the contrary an almost abnormally normal woman, a typical woman of our time, and as such of little particular interest. Sometimes she thinks one thing, sometimes the other. There is plenty of evidence on both sides. She doesn’t even know which she would like to be. At times she feels a sense of womanly solidarity, for the things that have happened to her—marriage, children, love, divorce, illness, ageing parents, lost love, rejection—are the things that happen to many, if not most, people. At other times she feels a giddy solitude, and a sense of strength from this solitude. She used not to worry about this uncertainty, but worry has been forced upon her by what Hugo has not entirely seriously labelled her midlife crisis. She doesn’t even know whether or not to welcome this label, with its suggestion of inevitability. And if it is a mid-life crisis, such as everyone suffers, what on earth is on the other side of it? She has no idea. For the first time, she feels, she has no idea of what will happen next. She has run through what she now recognizes were the expected phases of life, though some of them seemed surprising, not to say miraculous, at the time, and she doesn’t know what will happen next, nor how to make it happen, and, being an energetic and active person, she strongly dislikes the feeling of helplessness, the lack of direction, that this uncertainty generates. She looks at the component parts of her life—her children, her ex-husband, her ex-lover, her work, her parents—and doesn’t know what to do or to think about any of them. Her implacable progress has been halted, a link has been broken, and the past no longer seems to make sense, for if it did, how would it have left her here, in this peculiar draughty open space?

Here is an account of Kate’s past history, some if not all of which must have led her to wherever she now is.