The secret of contentment, George felt, lay in ignoring many things completely. How anyone could work in the same office for ten years or bring up children without putting certain things to the back of their mind was beyond him.
That kind of party had always scared Daisy, the smell on your clothes the next day and something else that couldn’t be washed off.
Everything in the garden became suddenly vivid as if some general membrane had been peeled away.
Then he said, “Christopher, you.
I used to have dreams that everything would get better. Do you remember, you used to say that you wanted to be an astranaut? Well, I used to have dreams where you were an astranaut and you were on the television and I thought that’s my son.
Strange to discover that describing his fears out loud was less frightening than trying not to think about them. Something about seeing your enemy out in the open. The.
Most men wanted to tell you what they knew. The route to Wisbech. How to get a log fire going. David made her feel she was the one who knew things. He.
To be honest, I’m trying to maintain a Buddhist detachment about the whole thing to stop it taking ten years off my life.
And then, after a while, she said, ‘Christopher, let me hold your hand. Just for once. Just for me. Will you? I won’t hold it hard.
Sweet mother if God thought George, surely this was not going to involve him? “George”? It was.
Perhaps the best you could hope for was not to do the same thing to your own children.
Lord alone knows.” George stood up and dropped his empty mug into the sink. “The mystery of one’s children is never-ending.
His mother had hated him for looking after her, then hated him for leaving. Five years living with an alcoholic woman and no one had thanked him. If there was such a thing as the moral high ground it was surely he who occupied it.
He is the only man she has ever loved, and he has dumped her like ballast. She needs to find an explanation that does not make her a fool and him an animal, but every thought of him is a knife turning in the wound love made.
She is off the heart’s map and her compass is spinning.
And also, a thing is interesting because of thinking about it and not because of being new.
Perhaps this is what all prayer is, when the ceremony and the theology are peeled away, a serious stillness in which one talks quietly to one’s own best self.
Depending on yet more men seems to her like part of the problem. Better to rely on their own invisibility. A memory of that deer standing on the path then sprinting away. The sisterhood of idiot creatures, the wisdom that comes with knowing you could be prey.
The Hound of the Baskervilles because it is a detective story which means that there are clues and Red Herrings.
Poetry scares her, with its glimpses of the abyss between the slats of the swaying bridge.
What would your mother think about that?” which is stupid because Mother is dead and you can’t say anything to people who are dead and dead people can’t think.