He’d thought she was at least his age. She seemed it. But she was only just sixteen. She’d been born in Montreal, Quebec, in 1946, on an April night during which an unseasonably late snowfall muffled the city. Hers was a difficult birth. Afterward the senior obstetrician took her father aside and told him that it would be extremely unwise for his wife to have another child. Gerard took it badly. The Mortimer estates in England had been inherited by sons for countless generations. That he — or Nicole, rather — would break that continuous line troubled him enormously. He stood over his daughter’s hospital cot, gazing at her yellowish and clenched little face, and understood that he would have to be very careful about whom she would marry.One of her earliest memories was of her father and mother pulling her bumpily to the crèche on a sled. The cars parked on the silent suburban streets had fat white pillows on their roofs. She wore a coat with a fur-lined hood that teased her face.Almost effortlessly, she became bilingual, like her mother.
What do You think about Life: An Exploded Diagram?
