Undue Influence

I blamed myself for imposing my own expectations on him, although those expectations were inalienably mine; presumably I was free to dispose of them as I thought fit. But the sad truth was that those expectations had not been met, and while Martin had remained in character I had somehow slipped out of mine, so that I was now wistful where I had onc

She had always struck me as a contented woman. She belonged to the era before women complained.

I vowed to resume those evening walks that I had previously kept short in deference to my mother’s anxiety. I was less lonely in the street than I was at home.

In her wedding dress she looked different, older, and for the first time in my life I became aware of separation. It affected me deeply. Cathy and her husband moved away, and the evenings were never the same again. It struck me at the time that in any event I would be excluded.

She would have told him repeatedly that he was working too hard, would have interrupted his reading with all manner of winsome requests, would have made much of tiredness, retiring to bed, but hailing him from the bedroom. By a process of erosion she would have divested him of many pleasant evening duties… Had her famous illness dated from here?

I also knew that an unsatisfactory or unfinished love affair can banish normality for some time, and that it was incumbent on me not to indulge in speculation but to dismiss the whole episode as one of those aberrations that unfortunately afflict one from time to time and for which one is hardly responsible, since the gods, or the fates, or the fur

life was simple only when one concurred with the wishes of others.

One thing was certain: I was not destined for the happiness of a settled life, whether or not I longed for it: I was not one of the elect.

Mostly I walked, speculating on the people I passed, on the conversations I overheard. These are the consolations of the solitary walker, and the habit has stayed with me. Misconceptions are inevitable, but as I am never put to the test they somehow fail to signify.