Empress of Little Things

Like every other couple who start off in marriage, Pauline and Michael are just amateurs doing the best they can; but their marriage meets with more than the usual share of ups and downs. A moment of weakness on Pauline’s side; stubbornness on Michael’s side; and so it goes on, until one day, the biggest tragedy occurs: their first daughter disappears.

After Lindy’s disappearance it is not just Pauline and Michael who have to deal with the loss, but also their two other children, who now grow up wondering where their elder sister disappeared. Even many years later, when Lindy is located in a drug rehabilitation centre in California, things don’t return to the way they were before. Pauline and Michael fly across to California, a first in their lives, to bring back Lindy’s little son Pagan who will live with them from then on: but even the entry of yet another child in their lives doesn’t promise to repair their marriage. They drift apart, unable to pinpoint exactly what has failed. In that familiar way that Tyler’s characters tend to have, they never really come back to where they began, but remain changed, choosing to follow their separate paths. Michael eventually moves on and marries another woman, while Pauline learns to live on her own: “It was thinking that made her nights so long. All the bad old thoughts came crowding to the front of her mind. She had lived her life wrong; she’d made a big mess of it. She had married the wrong man just because that was the track she’d been traveling on and she hadn’t known how to get off… She had let the people she loved slip through her fingers — even Michael, whom she did love, it had turned out, wrong man or not.”

Rather than settle into their marriage as they grow older, Pauline and Michael remain amateurs, and Michael wonders why this is so. “He believed that all of them, all those young marrieds of the war years, had started out in equal ignorance. He pictured them marching down a city street, as people had on the day he enlisted. Then two by two they fell away, having grown wise and seasoned and comfortable in their roles, until only he and Pauline remained, as inexperienced as ever – the last couple left in the amateurs’ parade.” A sweet, melancholy tale.