Swimming Home

She told him she would have liked to feel his love fall upon her like rain. That was the kind of rain she most longed for in their unconventional marriage.

'It's always raining if you're feeling sad.'

The image of Kitty Finch in perpetual rain, walking in rain, sleeping in rain, shopping and swimming and collecting plants in rain, intrigued him.

Her determination not to love him seemed to have renewed her energy.

She had come to the conclusion that she was not satiated with love for Peter Sheridan and exchanged a respectable life of unhappiness for the unrespectable unhappiness of being a woman who had cut her ties with love.

And of the apricot jam he spooned into his mouth straight from the jar. He said the jam changed the weather inside him, but she didn't know what the weather was in the first place.

And then he took out his notebook and the black ink pen that had disappeared that morning, know that Isabel was defeated every time he appeared to be writing and every time he talked about their daughter. These were his weapons to silence his wife and keep her in his life, to keep his family intact, flawed and hostile but still a family.

'Why do you take pills?'

'Oh, I've decided not to for a while. You know... it's quite a relief to feel miserable again.'

Madeleine Sheridan, who believed human beings had to suffer real hardships before they agreed to lose their minds, told her in a steely voice to stop making that noise.