I have a husband and have produced an offspring—our father’s grandson—and you’re a frigid, sterile bitch.

Peter lowered his paper, showing a face too old for his haircut. Puffy cheeks and tired eyes under ridiculous curls. “What’s keeping the Great Man anyway? It’s a small country—how long can it take to suppress every trace of artistic originality?”

And not only are you frigid, but your life’s work is absolute crap.

Sophia tucked her silver spoon between cup and saucer. She smiled thinly, her pale eyes lidded, her smooth features serene. Because that was her role in the scenario: to look lofty, to be unassailable, to be the elegant, living proof of her father’s ascension to the gentry. Her own subtitle, she supposed, might read: No matter how many grandchildren you produce, Laura—no matter how bold and independent you pretend to be, Peter—I run the gallery; I’m the one.

Because for all of them, it was always about Daddy. Novelists make such a mystery of these things, Sophia thought, psychiatrists make a living out of them. But it was amazing to her, as she sat there, how obvious it was, how stupidly plain and inescapable. That chair of his—a Gothic cathedra, practically, carved beechwood with crocketed pinnacles flanking a traceried arch: it stood in the dying sunshine at the center of their circle, and he stood at the center of their lives, and that was that. Why not just come out and say it, she thought, print it plain beneath the picture? Here they are, they revolve around him. They cover the same old traces yearly. Laura cowers and offers the fruit of her womb and knows she’s pathetic but can’t change. Peter proclaims his leftist politics more and more bitterly, a moral sop to his self-esteem as one after another of his professional ventures fail. And Sophia guards her place at the right hand of power by the simple expedient of being ceaselessly perfect, and frequently depressed. And that’s this week’s episode of The Enderings. Come back next week, and it’ll be exactly the same.

“Watch out, Clawface!” said little Simon, under the tea table. “Here comes Batman!”

And then, all at once, he was among them. Sir Michael himself. Charging into the wedge of light, striding from the doorway to his chair. Six-foot-two, ruddy-faced, big-featured, barrel-chested, broad-shouldered in his green country gentleman’s tweed jacket and waistcoat. Silver hair in a knife-sharp widow’s peak, pointing like an arrow. Chin like a prow. Sophia smiled to see him. The size and power of him made her smile. Sixty-four years old, with the vigor of a bull, with the headway of a ship at sea.

“Morning, all”