The Stranger's Child

There was the noise itself, which he thought of vaguely as the noise of classical music, sameish and rhetorical, full of feelings people surely never had

she kept sliding down, in small half-willing surrenders, till she was a heap, with the book held tiringly above her face.

She felt something similar, but worse in a way, about hundreds and hundreds of books she’d read, novels, biographies, occasional books, about music and art—she could remember nothing about them at all, so that it seemed rather pointless even to say that she had read them; such claims were things people set great store by but she hardly supposed they recalled any more than she did. Sometimes a book persisted as a coloured shadow at the edge of sight, as vague and unrecapturable as something seen in the rain from a passing vehicle; looked at directly it vanished altogether. Sometimes there were atmospheres, even the rudiments of a scene; a man in an office looking over Regent’s Park, rain in the street outside—a little blurred etching of a situation she would never, could never, trace back to its source in a novel she had read some time, she thought, in the past thirty years.

He somehow saw that to her being drunk had its whole long sentimental history, whereas to him it was a freakish novelty.

On the stairs he was crying so much he hardly saw where he was going - not a mad boo-hoo but wailing sheets of tears, shaken into funny groans by the bump of each step as he hurried down.

Paul was blandness itself, just tinged with pink.

She felt that at some point she must finally and formally talk to Louisa about Hubert, and ask her to acknowledge that the worst possible thing had happened to her as well.

He was asking for memories, too young himself to know that memories were only memories of memories.

He thought other resourceful people would have come, over the years, to look at it, and that the house would wear its own mild frown of self-regard, a certain half-friendly awareness of being admired. It would live up to its fame. But really there was nothing to see. The upstairs windows seemed to ponder blankly on the reflections of clouds.

but in the minute that followed she found that her hand held the memory of his hand, and half-wanted to reach out through the shadows and touch it again.

The peculiar things a singer did with words, the vowels that turned into other vowels under the strain of a high note, made it all harder and weirder. Picturing

As often with older people he was both bored and unaccountably involved at the same time.

in a house where he knew all the carpets as territories, castles, jumping squares, there was this other room with a carpet he had never jumped on.

The birdsong was so loud that after it had woken you it drove you back to sleep.

It had come down in the storms several winters ago and he had watched it sink over time on the shattered branches beneath it, like a great gnarled monster protractedly lying down, bedding down in its own rot and wreckage.

She didn’t know what Senta was saying, beyond the recurrent sounding of the word Mann, but she sensed the presence of passionate love, and felt the air of legend, which had a natural hold on her.

When Senta started singing it was spellbinding—Daphne said this word to herself with a further shiver of pleasure.

Then he stood up straight, sprang the catches, and released the heady and authentic gentleman’s smell: toilet water, starch, and the slowly fading reek of leather.

It was a refinement of teasing, where you were never told why your answer was wrong.

Peter was that magic person we all meet, if we’re lucky, who shows us how to live our lives, and be ourselves.