Innocent Blood

Time didn't heal, but it anesthetized. The human mind could only feel so much.

Absolute nakedness was intrusive, confusing to the senses. Paradoxically, it both revealed and diminished identity.

People were excited by violence. What, after all, was the sexual act but a voluntarily endured assault, a momentary death?

The television image sanctified, conferred identity. The more familiar the face, the more to be trusted.

She came to know a different London and she saw it through different eyes. The city was all things to all men. It reflected and deepened mood; it did not create it. Here the miserable were more miserable, the lonely more bereft, while the prosperous and happy saw reflected in its river and glittering life the confirmation of their deserved success. In her week of seeking, unsuccessfully, for a flat in which she could bear, even temporarily, to live, Philippa felt increasingly depressed and rejected.

Number 68 looked just as it did when she returned from school

A thin fog writhed round the street lamps and crept into the front gardens truncating the trees so that they seemed to move uprooted in majestic inconsequence, surpliced in white mist.

It was paradoxical that the truth could sound so false, could be so much less than the truth.

Facts are sacred, if you can discover them, and as long as you don’t confuse them with values.