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

Late that night Kate, on her way to bed, looked into Lou's bedroom. Milky moonlight fell through the open window across the bed. Lou lay on her back with one braceleted arm outside the covers, her upturned toes, her breast, lifted the bedclothes to make a shallow trough between. She looked as touching as Juliet on her tomb. The moonlit drapery was like a drawning by Blake. 'There should be angels', thought Kate.

She refilled the glass and handed it to him, holding it carefully turned one way. He put his hands over hers and twisted the glass round so that he drank from the place her lips had touched.She hoped that he would not sense through her tingling fingers the embarrassment she was feeling, and raked her mind desperately for someting casual to say. Only the weather came to her rescue, as it always does to English people.

'What do we get out of it, I wonder - being parents?' 'It was great fun when they were little'.It was a memory of a memory by now - the hallmark of happiness, that scene.The sun had shone through the dazzling aigrettes of water and made rainbows, the breeze caught the the children and fanned them out. 'It's a pity about love', she said. 'The pain one pays for it with - children, or one's friends. It can't be helped.'

I hate self-made men. They think everyone else should slave as they have done. 'You missed the lot", I'll say to him one day."Grubbing about like that from morning to night, you never lived.What have you got?A great stack of money,a knighthood,the respect of your competitors,and that's about the lot.Not a moment's fun have you had.No one's ever been really pleased to see you and no one will give a damn when you die."

“We're all of us just passing time, she thought, feeling irritated by the sound. A lack of purpose was an imperfection Dermot may have introduced. 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.”

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."