I devoured this story in an afternoon, drawn in by the beauty of the writing and by the beguiling sense of uncertainty it creates. It begins with a father driving his young daughter to a farm and leaving her there with relatives she doesn’t know, without telling her when he’ll come back for her. She knows that her mother is about to have a new baby and hears her father say that it’s difficult to feed all his children, but the rest is a vacuum.
The first pages are uneasy; the story is narrated by the girl, and we follow her through the unfamiliar house, taking in the details – the “big mahogany clock”, the “hard, clean tiles”, the black and white cat crossing the window ledge – without quite knowing what the people are like, or what will happen to her there. Like her, we start to build a fragile trust in the couple she’s been left with, but there’s something ambiguous about the writing that makes that trust falter at certain moments, for example when the woman insists that the girl gets into a bath that she’s sure is much too hot, but which turns out just to be more luxurious than she’s used to. As readers, our sense of stability is constantly shaken and it takes time to be certain that our initial assessment of the couple is correct and to witness the small kindnesses and acts of instinctive sensitivity that gradually build into the certain knowledge that the couple are exceptionally loving and that the girl will be happier and better cared for there than she’s been before. A sense of foreboding shadows the narrative, even so, undercutting even her happiest, most secure moments and a secret is eventually revealed that changes our understanding of everything that’s gone before.
Faber and Faber, 2010, published in revised form by Faber and Faber, 2022
