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She took no pleasure in seeing Patrick frozen in a kind of autumnal adolescence: dogmatic and sarcastic, resentful of his mother’s actions,
She remembered a phrase Johnny once quoted about the infant being ‘alone in the presence of its mother’.
It was time to go.
purgatory is a place where suffering refines you rather than degrades you, I see no sign of it.’
‘All this chattering that takes place in between is nothing compared to the crying and groaning that takes place at either end of life. It drives me crazy: we’re controlled by one wordless tyrant after another.’
Eventually, the Airbags dented themselves into their seats.
In the Oak Bar, Robert saw a row of men as pale and spongy as mushrooms, all standing on the broad stalks of their khaki trousers in front of the cigar cabinet. They seemed to be playing at being men.
He felt he had been trapped all day in an argument with his body: confined on the plane when he was ready to run around, and running around now when he should have been in bed.
‘You’re exaggerating.’ ‘It’s the only extravagance I can still afford.’
The image of Eleanor rowing out to the middle of the lake and refusing to talk to anyone fused in Patrick’s imagination with her present condition, bedridden and cut off from the rest of the world.
The day after she had settled into her thickly carpeted, over-heated, nursing tomb in Kensington,
Eleanor had been given morphine for breakfast,
even now, reach for the bar on the side of her Evans Nesbit Jubilee bed and try to pull herself up with those flabby white arms bruised by fresh puncture marks Patrick could not help envying.
She ran her hands down her face in exasperation, looking as if she wanted to cry but was being let down by her body in that respect as well.
The afterglow of plutocracy was no more alluring to him than a pile of dirty dishes after a dinner party. Something had died, and its death was tied in with the tenderness he had felt for Eleanor when he helped her drink that glass of pineapple juice in hospital.
Nobody ever died of a feeling, he would say to himself, not believing a word of it, as he sweated his way through the feeling that he was dying of fear. People died of feelings all the time, once they had gone through the formality of materializing them into bullets and bottles and tumours.
His fundamental sense of being was a kind of free fall, a limitless dread, a claustrophobic agoraphobia.
His sons, despite their lavish treatment from Mary, had moments of fear, but these were temporary afflictions, whereas Patrick felt that fear was the ground he stood on, or the groundlessness he fell into,
She could only communicate with people who presented themselves as the portals to some bombastic generalization, like ‘humanity’ or ‘salvation’, something the mewling, puking Patrick must have been unable to do.
One of the troubles with being an infant was the difficulty of distinguishing incompetence from malice, and this difficulty sometimes returned to him in the drunken middle of the night.
At his age he either had to join the resistance or become a collaborator with death. There was no room to play with self-destruction once the juvenile illusion of indestructibility had evaporated.
