Tatevik’s Reviews > Free Love > Status Update

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.

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.