The Collected Stories of Shirley Hazzard

That circumstances might oblige him to withdraw from her she perfectly understood; that he actually felt himself to be less committed appalled her. It confounded all her assumptions, that something so deeply attested should prove totally unpredictable.

He knew it would make no sense to his wife, and having the pages out of his hands made him feel like he’d lost part of himself. Days went by without Julia mentioning the book, and she seemed to go to great effort not to meet his eyes. The fog that had arrived with William’s injury returned to his peripheral vision, like cloud cover circling a mount

Her husband’s defence, that he wanted a last chance at happiness, casually wrote their marriage off as unhappy, when Susie felt sure that wasn’t how he had experienced it. Her hunch that this was some kind of mid-life crisis seemed borne out by the fact that, a year after leaving, her husband had got back in touch, saying that he thought he had mad

She’d become worried that it was her father’s attention that kept her intact, kept her Sylvie, and she felt great sympathy now for her brother-in-law. Sylvie had been feeling this way for only a month, and it was terrible. The size of this manuscript, and the effort in its pages, showed that William had been in this place for a long time.