Harriett

Harriett and her brother Joey inhabit a dainty, grown-up tea-time world of preserves and cress sandwiches, their strange untroubled faces masking a kind of prison. She has known nothing else for twelve years — breakfast in bed, cantering the commons, waiting — and her musings are tranquil, her conversations silent. To Miriam, fresh from the straining, secretly ambitious children at Banbury Park, Harriett's dreamy talk of bays and strawberry roans is a relief, a glimpse of childhood shaped entirely by privilege and its quiet limitations.