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“What was she doing in the library in the middle of the night?” “Oh, she wanders about the place at all hours,” Osborne said, in a tone dismissive of the ways of women in general, and of his wife in particular.
One of the chief pleasures of rural life is denigrating your neighbors and stabbing your betters in the back.”
Think no thought, he told himself, merely be, like an animal. His years as a policeman had taught him to be not fearless, only to disregard the fact of being afraid.
Any day now, if he hadn’t already done so, he would take to pipe smoking, and getting drunk with the chaps from the rugby club on Saturday nights. He would drive a two-seater, and talk disparagingly of girls, and shoot crows in the copse, wherever it was, and plight his halfhearted troth to some landed family’s horsey daughter. None of that would entirely convince, either. In Dominic Osborne, something, some undefinable finish, would always be lacking. There would always be something amiss.
There was always the danger, in his job, of seeing things that weren’t there, of making a pattern where there wasn’t one. The policeman insists that there be a plot. However, life itself is plotless.
Try as he might, he did not have it in him to care enough for her distress. Yet what of it? No one cared enough, not really, for all the kind words and the mournful smiles they lavished upon the bereaved. The living live, the dead are dead.
“It took a long time for Daddy to reconcile himself to the fact that someone had stood up to him and got away with it.”
Some people make it their life’s work, being unhappy. And making everyone around them unhappy, too, of course. It probably begins as a kind of game, in order not to be bored, or something, and then it just sort of hardens into a way of life, and you don’t notice anymore that you’re doing it to yourself.”
I still don’t believe I was doing harm. Oh, some of it was sinful, I don’t deny it. But as an old priest I knew years ago in the seminary used to say, that’s what God is there for, to forgive us our sins.
