Family and Friends Author:Anita Brookner Captured eternally in a wedding photograph are elegant, refined Sokfa and her family: two girls, Mimi and Betty, and two boys, Alfred and Frederick. — How youthful they look. Betty has not yet run off to Paris and exiled herself from her exquisitely middle-class family. Mimi of course has not yet run after her to bring her home, nor met with th... more »e great disappointment that will dog her all her life. Frederick has not yet met Evie, the vivacious young woman who will take him off to Italy to run a hotel. Alfred, full of resentment at his inability to grasp freedom, runs the family business, brooding on the happiness he believes to be everyone's but his.
The years pass. Family and friends reunite, with some omissions, with some additions. Behind the smiles of those present are the triumphs and failures, the joys and the sorrows, that go to make up their lives.« less