Parents are only good as parents at a certain stage of their children’s lives, she reflected.

One loses the capacity to grieve as a child grieves, or to rage as a child rages: hotly, despairingly, with tears of passion. One grows up, one becomes civilized, one learns one’s manners, and consequently can no longer manage these two functions – sorrow and anger – adequately.

Boundaries keep people out; mine served only to keep me in.

My idea of absolute happiness is to sit in a hot garden all day, reading, or writing, utterly safe in the knowledge that the person I love will come home to me in the evening. Every evening.

And I go to bed too early. I sometimes think I should never have married because I need too much sleep.

Had she been more active, less reclusive, she would have gone out into the streets to lose herself in some sort of company, have made the pretext of buying an evening paper an opportunity to chat to the newsagent, but she rejected such stratagems, seeing them for what they were. It had been decreed that she was to be solitary, and somehow she had always known this. Once she had left her parents’ house all friendships had seemed provisional; even marriage had not changed that.

I think that those few words were my greatest mistake.

You have no idea how promising the world begins to looks once you have decided to have it all for yourself. And how much healthier your decisions are once they become entirely selfish. It is the simplest thing in the world to decide what you want to do – or, rather, what you don’t want to do – and just to act on that.

It is always later than you think.

When you make a break for freedom you don’t necessarily find company on the way.