A Murder of Quality

by John Le Carré

It was from us they learnt the secret of life: that we grow old without growing wise.

he wondered whether he was supposed to take part in the performance, but Fielding seemed so dazzled by the footlights that he was indifferent to the audience behind them.

Her very ugliness, her size and voice, coupled with the sophisticated malice of her conversation, gave her the dangerous quality of command.

it was impossible to know. You had to be ill, you had to be sick to understand, you had to be there in the sanatorium, not for weeks, but for years, had to be one in the line of white beds, to know the smell of their food and the greed in their eyes. You had to hear it and see it, to be part of it, to know their rules and recognise their transgressions. This world was compressed into a mould of anomalous conventions: blind, pharisaical but real.

what is important is seldom urgent. Urgent equals ephemeral, and ephemeral equals unimportant.”

I read a story once about a poet who bathed himself in cold fountains so that he could recognise his own existence in the contrast. He had to reassure himself, you see, like a child being hateful to its parents. You might say he had to make the sun shine on him so that he could see his shadow and feel alive.”

“The people who are like that—there really are some, Fielding—do you know their secret? They can’t feel anything inside them, no pleasure or pain, no love or hate; they’re ashamed and frightened that they can’t feel. And their shame, this shame, Fielding, drives them to extravagance and colour; they must make themselves feel that cold water, and without that they’re nothing. The world sees them as showmen, fantasists, liars, as sensualists perhaps, not for what they are: the living dead.”