Status Updates From In a Summer Season (Virago ...

Hilariously, the mothers joked and teased, ecstatically their daughters recounted escapades and outings, parties, holidays abroad. 'Poor Lou, I did nothing for her,' Kate suddenly thought. It is a most severe pain--the realisation that one has failed one's child, done less than one might have done.

"You wouldn't care to be old, would you? And lonely? And knowing that everything has already happened and hasn't been any great shakes either?"

"We're all of us just passing time," she thought, feeling irritated. . . It seemed to her that it was worse for herself, without religion, to be squandering her life, expecting no other and chilled by the passage of time.

"What do we get out of it, I wonder--being parents?"

"I always think one can get through such a lot of work while one's having a good old chatter."

"Your mother must know that one day, not so far away, you'll want to leave her. . .She won't decide when that will be, and she goes on caring for you both and trying at the same time to be ready for her life to become suddenly empty."

Tom was reading the back page of a newspaper and Lou leant across the table to peer at the headlines on the front.
"What a horrible world," she said. "It's like the Middle Ages, all dark and smelling of blood. I wonder if I shall be lucky enough to see thirty."