more difficult to get over someone who no longer loves you than over someone who still does really.
‘You must only have been infatuated with him if you’ve got over him so quickly,’ remarked Betty repressively.
This is a distinction that agony aunts commonly make, and is of doubtful validity.
‘All falling in love is infatuation,’ said Lydia. ‘Then if he marries you they say it’s love. Then when you divorce him they say it’s a tragedy because love has failed, when really it’s all due to an eventual recovery from infatuation, which is a sort of brain disease.’
Besides, she thought, if Finn came back and she found him not repellent he would have been rendered kinder by his infidelity. It is only the virtuous who can be truly cruel. Guilt and a sense of common humanity make people less harsh. It was the utterly excellent Yahweh who told the malefactors to go to hell. Satan welcomed them.
Lydia shifted uneasily in her chair. It was strange how good and bad could run into each other, could appear as interchangeable: not the good of succouring the sick, nor the bad of shooting the helpless, but in the subtler regions of morality where things blended together and seemed to make the business of living easier.
‘Goodness is very aggressive,’ muttered Lydia into her coffee cup. It was plainly much easier to join the legions of the wicked who weren’t fussy and were rather more eager for recruits than the exclusive godfearing. Satan ran the sort of club which anyone could join. Realising this, Lydia decided that she would have to aspire to the other. This conclusion made her bad tempered, since being good necessitated much thought and hard work, whereas any fool could be bad. Thinking of badness gave her one of her ideas. ‘You know how the mental hospitals send people’s lunatics home to them now – even the ones who think they’re Napoleon or a poached egg. It’s because they can’t afford to keep them in, but they say it’s the latest therapy technique. Well, what if the prisons did the same? The government could issue each family with a cage for their own felon, and depending on how they felt about him they’d treat him accordingly. If he was normally quite a kind person who’d taken up robbing banks because he was short of cash they could put jam on his bread and vodka in his water, and if he was a horror they could empty the potato peelings over him whenever they felt like it.’
‘I never heard anything so ridiculous in my life,’ said Betty.
‘Self-sufficiency,’ said Lydia. ‘Free enterprise. Personal responsibility. Maybe you’re right.’ She spiked the idea, together with many others.
I am hiding. I am in the graveyard where nothing lives but the slow-worm, motionless on the short grass by the path, and the little birds who search among the yews like Elizabeth in the wardrobe. She is looking for a dress for me and she is waiting to comb my hair, and she has the look on her face that she has when she guts the chickens. I will not go to the Fair. I shall hide until nightfall and eat the raspberries that grow by the stream. Hywel will go to the Fair with the cleverest dogs, but Elizabeth will not go. She will cry and say that she cannot leave the house with Angharad out on the hills alone, for anything might happen to her, anything. And Hywel will go without a word, and when he is gone and the house is silent Elizabeth will creep to the telephone and she will pick it up and it will ring in another empty house because Dr Wyn has gone to the Fair. They have the Fair in a great field where the sun beats down and the people look at me, and they see me very clearly, and they look away, and some of the children laugh and some of them cry, but they are all afraid. I would like to take each tent by the corner and pull it down, and I would untether all the neat horses and the sleek, brushed bulls and send them with a huge cry into all the hills. And the dogs would run, wailing, with their
‘You must only have been infatuated with him if you’ve got over him so quickly,’ remarked Betty repressively.
This is a distinction that agony aunts commonly make, and is of doubtful validity.
‘All falling in love is infatuation,’ said Lydia. ‘Then if he marries you they say it’s love. Then when you divorce him they say it’s a tragedy because love has failed, when really it’s all due to an eventual recovery from infatuation, which is a sort of brain disease.’
Besides, she thought, if Finn came back and she found him not repellent he would have been rendered kinder by his infidelity. It is only the virtuous who can be truly cruel. Guilt and a sense of common humanity make people less harsh. It was the utterly excellent Yahweh who told the malefactors to go to hell. Satan welcomed them.
Lydia shifted uneasily in her chair. It was strange how good and bad could run into each other, could appear as interchangeable: not the good of succouring the sick, nor the bad of shooting the helpless, but in the subtler regions of morality where things blended together and seemed to make the business of living easier.
‘Goodness is very aggressive,’ muttered Lydia into her coffee cup. It was plainly much easier to join the legions of the wicked who weren’t fussy and were rather more eager for recruits than the exclusive godfearing. Satan ran the sort of club which anyone could join. Realising this, Lydia decided that she would have to aspire to the other. This conclusion made her bad tempered, since being good necessitated much thought and hard work, whereas any fool could be bad. Thinking of badness gave her one of her ideas. ‘You know how the mental hospitals send people’s lunatics home to them now – even the ones who think they’re Napoleon or a poached egg. It’s because they can’t afford to keep them in, but they say it’s the latest therapy technique. Well, what if the prisons did the same? The government could issue each family with a cage for their own felon, and depending on how they felt about him they’d treat him accordingly. If he was normally quite a kind person who’d taken up robbing banks because he was short of cash they could put jam on his bread and vodka in his water, and if he was a horror they could empty the potato peelings over him whenever they felt like it.’
‘I never heard anything so ridiculous in my life,’ said Betty.
‘Self-sufficiency,’ said Lydia. ‘Free enterprise. Personal responsibility. Maybe you’re right.’ She spiked the idea, together with many others.
I am hiding. I am in the graveyard where nothing lives but the slow-worm, motionless on the short grass by the path, and the little birds who search among the yews like Elizabeth in the wardrobe. She is looking for a dress for me and she is waiting to comb my hair, and she has the look on her face that she has when she guts the chickens. I will not go to the Fair. I shall hide until nightfall and eat the raspberries that grow by the stream. Hywel will go to the Fair with the cleverest dogs, but Elizabeth will not go. She will cry and say that she cannot leave the house with Angharad out on the hills alone, for anything might happen to her, anything. And Hywel will go without a word, and when he is gone and the house is silent Elizabeth will creep to the telephone and she will pick it up and it will ring in another empty house because Dr Wyn has gone to the Fair. They have the Fair in a great field where the sun beats down and the people look at me, and they see me very clearly, and they look away, and some of the children laugh and some of them cry, but they are all afraid. I would like to take each tent by the corner and pull it down, and I would untether all the neat horses and the sleek, brushed bulls and send them with a huge cry into all the hills. And the dogs would run, wailing, with their
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