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Staring and staring into the mirror, it sees many faces within its face – the face of the child, the boy, the young man, the not-so-young man – all present still, preserved like fossils on superimposed layers, and, like fossils, dead.
Just suppose that the dead do revisit the living. That something approximately to be described as Jim can return to see how George is making out. Would this be at all satisfactory? Would it even be worth while? At best, surely, it would be like the brief visit of an observer from another country, who is permitted to peep in for a moment from the vast outdoors of his freedom and see, at a distance, through glass, this figure who sits solitary at the small table in the narrow room, eating his poached eggs humbly and dully, a prisoner for life?
(At the thought of Christmas, George feels a chill of desperation. Maybe he’ll do something drastic; take a plane to Mexico City and be drunk for a week and run wild around the bars. You won’t, and you never will, a voice says, coldly bored with him.)
But we most of us lose our sense of proportion in the presence of a nun; and George, thus exposed at short range to this bride of Christ in her uncompromising medieval habit, finds himself becoming flustered, defensive.
George suspects her of suspecting him of all kinds of subtle discrimination.
Oh dear, he is getting nasty! And the worst is, he never knows when he’s going to behave like this.
Alexander has fulfilled his function. He has put the case, charmingly, for the philistines. Now tongues are loosened and the inquest can proceed.
try. But they have prepared themselves for this job and now they have got to go through with it. They have wasted the time in which they should have been learning to cheat and grab and lie.
George rather loves him. He is small and thin, and has glasses and large teeth and the maddish smile of genuine intellectual passion.
On Grant’s face you often see such a smile – of embarrassment, almost, at having had to express his meaning so crudely. He is like a shy mumbler who suddenly in desperation speaks much too loud.
she tries to be patrician and is merely patronising.
‘Really, Cynthia my dear!’ he hears himself exclaim. ‘How can you talk such incredible nonsense?’ Grant giggles with astonishment. Cynthia looks surprised but rather pleased. She is the kind of bully who likes being challenged; it soothes the itch of her aggression.
He could have travelled hundreds of miles across nowhere, and then suddenly just pitched his tent and called it somewhere, and it would have been somewhere, simply because he said so.
‘Never in my born days have I heard such utter drooling masochism!’
Do you suppose masochism’s our way of being patriotic? Or do I mean that the other way round? What fun! Darling, shouldn’t we have another tiny drink? Let’s drink to the masochism of Old England!’
