Tatevik > Recent Status Updates

People are like houses. We all have public spaces. Well-lit façades; neat gardens. Pictures of loved ones on the walls. A mirror over the mantelpiece. These are the carefully chosen things that other people are meant to see. But, most of the time, we're inside the house, and what happens there is private. Not all of it, not always.

More adventures awaited her, she was still alive.

He had been mesmerised then by her expensive perfume and husky worldly laugh, her bourgeois good manners and values. Their love affair had been the entrance, for Nicky, into his adulthood; he was piqued now by how ordinary their parting felt.

In the aftermath of their arranging to part for ever, they shared this odd interlude of married calm, half an hour or so, sitting together over their pottery mugs at the table.

…and if you weren’t afraid, you weren’t alive.

Phyllis remembered her loneliness and fear in her first two pregnancies, in the comfort and privileged quiet of a private nursing home. In those early weeks of her pregnancy in Ladbroke Grove she felt a genuine deep satisfaction in belonging, in the rightness and justice of muddling in - queuing patiently and waiting her turn, like all the other women.

Honestly, if I try to imagine going back inside the way I used to live, I'd feel as if someone tied a sack over my head. I couldn't bear to go back to that. Sending your children off to school, to be trained to conform and be part of the system, make money and get on in the world. And you don't need a fancy layette to have a baby. It's just more advertising. You can put him to sleep in a drawer, bath him in the sink.

And when it was over Colette was stricken suddenly with the Loss of their old family life, and of their mother. An image came to her, dense with emotion as if it were a dream, of the four of them seated in their proper order in the old Morris Traveller:

[Anne about Collette’s age] It's a horrible age. I remember it: everyone treats you like a dunce and expects you to cope like an adult.

Colette was trying to develop a new way of looking at life, with more lightness, as if everything that seemed so substantial, like a school, or a home, or a marriage, was in fact only disposable and breakable. It was frightening, but also a relief.

The room was full of his childhood, broken off abruptly, left as if he meant to resume just where he'd left it, when he came back from school.

… all this weight of the happy family past, shut up inside their photographs.

She was filled up with the music's beauty and its emotion, with her new full life and her own deep, interesting story. It didn't matter if this had come to her too late, when she was already forty. There was only this moment, this joy now.

Now the intimacy of this new music pierced and enveloped her. She might never have found out, if she hadn't met Nicky - if she hadn't sought him out, and followed him here, leaving everything behind - that this new shape of being existed: the glamour of it and its seductive invitation, careless and mocking and free.

…she mustn't spoil her new happiness, she thought, by falling back into these patterns, cleaning up and organising things, arranging the furniture more attractively. In her old life she'd been only half alive: too busy perfecting the appearance of her self and her home for others to admire. Now she was taking her first faltering steps away from that falsehood.

His heart was not broken, without Phyllis; she had not been the companion of his heart. He would miss how pleasantly she had kept his home, that was all, he thought, with his new coldness. And he felt the humiliation of her leaving him, and the deep inconvenience; he loathed the idea of explaining his situation to anyone.

It wasn't a possibility for her, she seemed to see, to be merely like other girls, or to fit in. All that time she was getting ready, she'd felt that she was preparing and adorning a grotesque figure quite outside herself, like a fetish doll or a pantomime dame. Certainly she wasn't trying to make herself attractive - her mother's all-important word.

Walking down to the Queens Head, Colette didn't care about the transgression against parents or teachers, or the law for that matter - only dreaded exposure to the superior sophistication of her peers. The trick, she knew, was to imagine yourself doing the audacious, courageous thing and then follow through in external reality, without even thinking, the picture you'd created:

A muffling blanket of desolation descended on the house, wrapping up all of them separately with their own thoughts - even while Colette and Hugh sat side by side on the sofa, both laughing at the same jokes on the television.

There was a lot to be said for these companionable married exchanges: low-voiced and sensible, friendly, worn into their groove, each partner attuned through long familiarity to the needs of the other.

Yet when they were naked they couldn't quite look at each other without compromise: their glances skidded away obliquely. They were always polite, even when they quarrelled. There was no point in picnicking under the night sky with Roger because it could go nowhere new, could only be a pretence of romance.

seemed to watch herself undressing, in that room of Nicky's with no accretions of furniture or domesticity, dropping the pieces of her clothing one by one onto the bare floorboards, leaving her old self behind, climbing into his bed, weightless and transparent as a naked soul in an old painting.

Morality she pictured as an inexorable mill grinding out its judgements, irrefutable but ugly, like the machinery in a factory, alien to the subtlety of her inner life. She knew that her betrayal of her husband and children was wrong, but in the same impersonal dulled way that she knew from school about the Treaty of Vienna, or the abolition of the Corn Laws.

I'd be mad to believe in you. You're clearly a fantasy projection of my desires.

It hadn't seriously occurred to her, in her deeper awareness, that anything had changed or must ever change; she'd taken for granted that at her core her sexual self would continue for ever, a nugget of radioactive material charged with its power, irreducible.

She'd begun joking recently about becoming an old woman: she'd pictured herself sliding across serenely into middle age, fulfilled and busy with her house and her hob-bies. But all this cheerful resignation, she recognised now, had been a sham, mere self-deception.

When he returned her loans she was rueful over swollen pages and broken spines, trying with her competent treckled hands to press them back into shape. — You're not supposed to actually devour them, Nicky, you know, she protested mildly. — It's only a metaphor.

Was love then like a bag of assorted sweets passed around from which one might choose more than once? Some might sting the tongue, some invoke night perfume. Some had centers as bitter as gall, some blended honey and poison, some were quickly swal-lowed. And among the common bull's-eyes and peppermints a few rare ones; one or two with deadly needles at the heart, another that brought calm and gentle pleasure.