He liked her not knowing. I could tell. He liked her not knowing. Her ignorance woke a pleasure that melted on his tongue, like a lick of toffee.
WHEN I was five years old my parents all of a sudden produced a baby boy, which my mother said was what I had always wanted. Where she got this idea I did not know. She did quite a bit of elaborating on it, all fictitious but hard to counter.
Roly Grain, his name was, and he does not have any further part in what I’m writing now, in spite of his troll’s name, because this is not a story, only life.
There is a change coming I think in the lives of girls and women. Yes. But it is up to us to make it come. All women have had up till now has been their connection with men. All we have had. No more lives of our own, really, than domestic animals. He shall hold thee, when his passion shall have spent its novel force, a little closer than his dog, a little dearer than his horse. Tennyson wrote that. It’s true. Was true. You will want to have children, though.
I actually had a long career as a flirt ahead of me. It’s quite a natural behaviour, once the loss of love makes you give up your ideas of marriage.
Poverty in girls is not attractive unless combined with sweet sluttishness, stupidity.
This is the day of wonders. The land is covered with trees like a head with hair and behind the ship the sun rises tipping the top trees with light. The sky is clear and shining as a china plate and the water playfully ruffled with wind. Every wisp of fog is gone and the air is full of the resinous smell of the trees. Seabirds are flashing above the sails golden like creatures from Heaven, but the sailors raise a few shots to keep them from the rigging.
Sick people grew to resent well people, and sometimes that was true of husbands and wives, or even of mothers and their children. Both.
There ought to be one place you thought about and knew about and maybe longed for – but never did get to see.
Half my concern in love became how to disguise love, to make it harmless and merry.
I went on to say that no lies, after all, were as strong as the lies we tell ourselves and then unfortunately have to keep telling to make the whole puke stay down in our stomachs, eating us alive, as he would find out soon enough.
I had once heard somebody say, at a party, that one of the nice things about marriage was that you could have real affairs – an affair before marriage could always turn out to be nothing but courtship.
When you died, of course, these wrong opinions were all there was left.
That was her way. She carried not noticing to an extreme. Not noticing, not intruding, not suggesting.
The only choice I make is to write about what interests me in a way that interests me, that gives me pleasure. It may not look like pleasure, because the difficulties can make me morose and distracted, but that’s what it is – the pleasure of telling the story I mean to tell as wholly as I can tell it, of finding out in fact what that story is, by working around the different ways of telling it.
People doing something that seems to them natural and necessary. At least, one of them is doing what seems natural and necessary, and the other believes that the important thing is for that person to be free, to go ahead. They understand that other people might not think so. They do not care.
Her father was outraged. “Now you sell your stories, how soon before you will sell yourself?
In all my years in the town, I encountered no one who was divorced, and so it may be taken for granted that there were other couples living separate lives in one house, other men and women who had accepted the fact that there were differences never to be mended, a word or an act never to be forgiven, a barrier never to be washed away.
Lies of that nature could be waiting around in the corners of a person’s mind, hanging like bats in the corners, waiting to take advantage of any kind of darkness.
Something that could not easily bu put into words and indeed might never be.