He loves that look. He's missed it. It was what made him realise what had to happen, what he must do. After a while, he began to see Elina reminded him of nothing so much as one of those balloons children have -- the bright ones, filled with helium, that bob and tug at the end of their string. One moment of inattention and off they go, skywards, away, never to be seen again. He saw that Elina had lived everywhere, all over the world, that she arrived and left and moved on. That secret thing she had, what she did up there in the attic when no one was looking, with her paints and her turpentine and her canvases -- she only needed that, she didn't lack anything else, any anchor, any gravity. And he saw that if he didn't take hold of her, if he didn't tether her down, if he didn't bind her to him, she would be off again. And so he did it. He laid hold of her and he held on tight, he sometimes pictures this as him tying the string of a balloon to his writs and getting on with his life while it floats there, just above his head. He has been holding on tight ever since. (130)
2- When she leaves the house on these mornings, she senses a thread that runs between her and her son, and as she walks away through the streets she is aware of it unspooling, bit by bit. By the end of the day, she feels utterly unravelled, almost mad with desire to be back with him, and she urges the Tube train to rattle faster through the tunnels, to speed over the rails, to get her back to her child as quickly as possible. It takes her a while, once she's there again with him, to wind herself back to rightness, to get the thread back to where it ought to be-- a length of no more than a couple of feet or so feels best. (237)
3- The women we become after children
We change shape, we buy low-heeled shoes, we cut off our long hair. We begin to carry in our bags half-eaten rusks, a small tractor, a shred of beloved fabric, a plastic doll. We lose muscle tone, sleep, reason, perspective. Our hearts begin to live outside our bodies. They breathe, they tat, they crawl and -- look! -- they walk, they begin to speak to us. We learn that we must sometimes walk an inch at a time, to stop and examine every stick, every stone, every squashed tin along the way. We get used to not getting where we were going. We learn to darn, perhaps to cook, to patch the knees of dungarees. We get used to living with a love that suffuses us, suffocates us, blinds us, controls us. We live. We contemplate our bodies, our stretched skin, those threads of silver around our brows, our strangely enlarged feet. We learn to look less in the mirror. We put our dry-clean-only clothes in the back of the wardrobe. Eventually, we throw them away. We school ourselves to stop saying "shit" and "damn" and learn to say 'my goodness' and 'heavens above'. We give up smoking, we colour our hair, we search the vistas of parks, swimming pools, libraries, cafes for others of our kind. We know each other by our pushchairs, our sleepless gazes, the beakers we carry. We learn how to cool a fever, ease a cough, the four indicators of meningitis, that one must sometimes push a swing for two hours. We buy biscuit cutters, washable paints, aprons, plastic bowls. We no longer tolerate delayed buses, fighting in the street, smoking in restaurants, sex after midnight, inconsistency, laziness, being cold. We contemplate younger women as they pass us in the street, with their cigarettes, their makeup, their tight-seamed dresses, their tiny handbags, their smooth, washed hair, and we turn away, we put down our heads, we keep on pushing the pram up the hill. (241)
4- So here he was, on his hands and knees, saving her studio from being engulfed by the garden. He wants to give her a surprise. He wants her to be happy. He wants the baby to sleep for more than three hours at a stretch. He wants to have if not his old life then some kind of life, not this constant lurching from one day to the next. He wants Elina not to have huge dark circles under here eyes all the time, for her not to have that tense, bitten-lip look she's developed recently. He wants the house to stop smelling of sh*t. He wants there to be a time when he washing-machine isn't on. He wants her to stop getting upset with him when it slips his mind to take the laundry out of the machine, to hang the laundry, to fold the laundry, to buy more nappies, to make the dinner, to clear away the dinner. (244)
5- The shock of motherhood, for Lexie, is not the sleeplessness, the troughs of exhaustion, the shrinkage of life, how your existence becomes limited to the streets around where you live, but the onslaught of domestic tasks: the washing and the drying. Performing these makes her almost weep with furious boredom and she more than once hurls an armful of laundry at the wall. She eyes other mothers on the street and they look so poised, so together, with their handbags hooked over the pram handles and their neatly embroidered sheets tucked in around their babies with hospital corners. But what about the washing, she wants to say, don't you loath the drying and the folding? (236)
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3/5 Maggie O'Farrell takes my breath away with her painting of these strong female protagonists. It is masterful how she weaves the stories of each character together, and her descriptions almost transport you right to the very street or very moment she's describing in such an artful way. This one was a bit of a slower start for me, but I couldn't put it down during the second half of the book. I felt seen in motherhood. I did predict the ending, but it made the unraveling no less fun!
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