It might be most dramatically effective to begin the tale at the moment when Arnold Baffin rang me up and said, “Bradley, could you come round here please, I think I have just killed my wife.
A really malicious letter should be read once only and destroyed, or best of all not read at all. These things lodge in the mind.
Of course you don’t know yourself, lucky old you. I just know myself too bloody well.
It’s much better that I should read the letter. Otherwise I shall be endlessly wondering what was in it.
His peace depends on seeing me as unattainable, as an angel. It will hurt terribly when it turns out that I am only a woman after all.
Little pictures out of hell.
I have never been more sane, coldly sane, self-interestedly sane. I am a woman.
Bereavement is my occupation and it absorbs me completely. You want me to touch you, to look at you with sympathy. I cannot.
A versatile Bohemianism had rendered him classless.
She had made some sort of life-mistake which meant that everything would grow worse and never better.
He was conscious of his body as a heavy cold horrible container. He had the feeling, coming to him as the memory of a dream, of being a prisoner waiting to be tortured. The extremity of pain was yet to come. And even now he was denied to comfort of self-pitying misery and warm tears.
Marriage is brainwashing. Not necessarily a bad thing. Your brain could do with a wash.
Today we will read love poetry. You shall read aloud to me and we will weep together.
Anyway, as you say, what the hell. I know, I’ve been to hell, I’ve seen it, I’ve been shown round. I’ll kill myself. You’ll see, you’ll be sorry.
I’m sorry I was awful. I’m so full of terrors.
It’s all someone else’s secret.
But suicides are mysterious, and one must respect their mystery.
Life is horrible, horrible, horrible, said the philosopher.
He is crammed full of rage and hate and desire for revenge.
He was capable of hurting Ludens even to the point sometimes of deliberate malice.
There’s only one thing the matter and that’s everything.