Ordinary Human Failings

She loved the feeling of doing something on her own, and doing it in a routine. It felt thrillingly adult and affirmed her most cherished hope, the hope that she might have an actual inner life of substance and note.

She had promised to stop denying the truth, to strive always to confront things as they were no matter how much it hurt, but she felt that this was one area an exception could be made. To stand in these rooms and believe however briefly that death was a thing which happened only in a foreign country, and could not follow you home.

Really, who would care about a family like theirs? Theirs were ordinary human failings, tragedies too routine to be of note.

But still, they tried. The trying would be the life's work, they both understood this, and there would be no day when they would celebrate a resolution.

There is no secret, Tom, or else there are hundreds of them, and none of them interesting enough for you. The secret is that we’re a family, we’re just an ordinary family, with ordinary unhappiness like yours.

And it was so absurd - this father whose silence, for their whole lives, his silence had been a wound Richie thought he might never recover from - it was so absurd for him to be speaking in this way, for him to ask to be spoken to in this way, like they were in some play where fathers and sons said such things to one another.

She had experienced in her early forties a sense of relief when age became visible. The nearness of beauty she had previously been acutely aware of - how it bobbed just below the surface of her face where she couldn't access it, and how it shone from her sister - stopped tormenting her. Formerly it felt akin to a personal failing, one she could overcome with an unidentified act of will or resistance never mustered. Age was something different and alien. It was separate from herself and unstoppable. it did not make her happy to see the heaviness which grew around her mouth or the slight droop of one eyelid but it was calming in its way, freeing to be looked at less as she went out in the world. When it hurt her pride she comforted herself by imagining that the varying roles of her life had been simplified, and that this was a good thing.

There were other things than beauty which could be undeniable, solid gifts of service, and they helped to temper her embarrassment for existing.

Always, Rose had fixated on her own usefulness. It was a part of the urge she had to apologise for not being fully beautiful.

The grief was so bitter and consuming that it left no space to consider anything else, an extended version of the way in which a terrible hangover gives you permission to ignore the day’s responsibilities, because they have become functionally impossible.

Oh, he would so love to go home, he would love to be anywhere, he could be in the flat taking a bath or in town having a glass of wine, he could be talking to a woman who had herself together. He dreaded the banal misery he was sure he was about to encounter but he’d started something now and he would go on with it.

Carmel was impatient, the story not to her liking. She did not enjoy to hear about anything Rose had done before she met her father. (Nor did she like to hear about Richie's mother Louise or anything of John's life with her. It was uncomfortable to think she might so nearly not have existed.

When I think of her now I feel so sorry for her. Not because she was miserable because I really don't think she was. I feel sorry for her because she had no personality. She wasn't allowed one, because she had to be good, good, good, to make up for the rest of us.

Rose's death had created another condition in which it was possible and even reasonable to ignore Lucy's life. The grief was so bitter and consuming that it left no space to consider anything else, an extended version of the way in which a terrible hangover gives you permission to ignore the day's responsibilities, because they have become functionally impossible.

He had dressed that way when his life had frozen in its place without him being aware that it was happening, so that he still dressed, now, at thirty-two, like he had been waylaid en route to a gig in a filthy basement.

Well this has always been your problem, Fiona said, cutting her off. You think if you can be loved, if everyone loves you, then nothing else matters. When has that ever worked out for you?

She kept the secret from them not out of loyalty to Derek, but because she wanted a private thought of her own. Her life was over now, she knew that. Wasn't she owed one little thing nobody else could see?

With the thought came a brief, surprised calibration - this was the worst day now, and that was new. The former worst day had seemed permanent and irrevocable, but it wasn't. It had been replaced, and maybe she would never even think of it again. It occurred to her, not for the first time in her life, that the only surefire way to reduce a problem's importance was to replace it with a new and more urgent problem.

She had never fully lost this terror of the private suffering of other people, nor the shame of wanting not to see it.

And how, now, as she died, everything was poisoned with quantities of obligation which could never be apologised for adequately and so could never be voiced at all.

I’m telling you – you are hungover, aren’t you? I mean at the end of the day she’s a little kid so if it was an accident they aren’t going to want to do a show trial and throw away the key, are they? And nor would we frankly, doesn’t sit right unless it’s totally clear-cut.

He had the sort of bland, agreeable, rosy face which could disappear into whatever context he wished it to. He was blond but not provocatively so. The naturally dull Kent accent could be clipped and made horsey if he was trying to get to a society party, and his father’s East End adopted with relative ease when he wanted to be taken as working class.

Carmel nodded fervently, not knowing exactly what this would mean in practice, but knowing there was something crucial in his impulse, some gift of experience he needed to bestow.

She had compelled his casual barbarism to her family, to wish that a child had murdered another child. Maybe it was true and maybe it wasn't, but he had wished for its truth anyway and he would always know that about himself now.

He asked her why she didn't drink so much. She told him that growing up around Richie had been something of a deterrent but that there had been one time in her life when she drank a lot, every day, and the notion of drinking had become stitched into the misery of that time.

He had a strange, secret inclination that the injury was inevitable and revealed him to have been deserving of pain and punishment for his entire life in a way which had only now come to be satisfied, but had been obvious to everyone but him all along.

He had only just left the house he shared with his mother, and while her sturdy self-sufficiency could never be misconstrued as needy, he had nevertheless felt all of his life the burden of giving her joy, of being a good boy to and for her.

It was impossible to imagine a life which did not involve drinking except for if the Richie in it was an entirely other, new sort of person with traits he had never shared.

To stand out was so abhorrent and insane that someone who did it fully on purpose was accepted as a mad genius. Richie, who had always despaired of his every variance, could see that it almost didn't matter what you were - so long as you swore yourself to it with total arrogant pride there was little anyone could do to use it against you.