Robin’s Reviews > A Private View > Status Update

These days he was relieved that there was no one to witness his own physical changes: the spreading calloused feet, the slightly bent shoulders, the irrelevant penis. He could no more think of undressing in front of her than he could of exhibiting his gracelessness in public. For she would not be kind.

His life, in retrospect, seemed very long and quite uneventful. Yet it had been occupied with struggle, with the no doubt modest but nevertheless taxing struggle of finding a place for himself in the world.

He approved all the more of Mrs Lydiard inasmuch as she appeared to live alone, like himself, and did not seem to have been driven mad by it.
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Mrs Lydiard, for all her careful glamour, had something resolute about her, as if there were no one to share in the mighty task she faced in keeping herself afloat.