DISCLAIMER - RENÉE KNIGHT

Disclaimer - Pg 331

   She needs to forgive, but she cannot. She cannot forgive him because she has watched him over the last few weeks manage the idea of her being raped so much more easily than he had managed the idea of her having an affair... It seems to Catherine that the new truth he was offered was easier for him to swallow than adultery. When she is at her most brutal, she thinks that, given the choice, he would rather she had suffered than to have enjoyed a burst of illicit pleasure.

Disclaimer - Pg 312

   He will be fine. Catherine thanks God, well, she thanks someone, and she calls him God but she can't quite place him.

Disclaimer - Pg 264

   Catherine has told her mother that Nicholas is in hospital and her mother was distressed at first, but then neatened up the information, tucked in its corners and reassured Catherine that people rarely die from measles these days. Better that he has it now when he is little. She is almost envious of the way her mother's mind works now. It is deteriorating and yet with it comes a determination to put a positive spin on nasty intruders. Her mother seems content: she is creating, for now at least, a much nicer world for herself.

Disclaimer - Pg 219

   Her mother knows and doesn't know but it doesn't matter because she knows what Catherine needs. She needs to be cared for without being interrogated. She needs someone to trust that she isn't a terrible human being without having to tell them--without having to explain anything.

Disclaimer - Pg 217

   He was looking up towards the promenade and when he looked at Catherine she smiled, even though he hadn't smiled at her. She wasn't flirting, it was instinctive. She hadn't wanted to appear unfriendly. She was on holiday. So she'd smiled. He didn't smile back and that made him seem older. And it made her feel self-conscious, knowing that he knew she was alone.

Disclaimer - Pg 207

   She blinks [the tears] away so she can pull down the mask she must wear to get through the day. It fits her well, no one would know it was there, and she has even got used to the way it inhibits her breathing.

Disclaimer - Pg 176

   She told me she wasn't trying to kill herself, she just wanted to know what it had felt like for Johnathan. She wanted to know whether drowning had hurt. She wanted to find out for herself whether it was as painless as everyone said--whether you passed out before dying. She was angry with me for denying her this almost-shared experience but then she acknowledged the flaw in her experiment: that the fear and loneliness of being swallowed by a vast ocean cannot be replicated by submersion in an avocado-coloured ceramic tub in the safety of your own home.

Disclaimer - Pg 161

   They passed each other, these lovers, and no one would have known they had ever met. His stomach slid with excitement, and hers with desire at the sight of his sleepy eyes and bedded hair. They almost touched they were so close, they could smell each other and she breathed him in and then smiled, but not at John.

Disclaimer - Pg 146

   I cried, as quietly as I could, but I did cry. Nancy shook. Tremors ran through her whole body, not just her shoulders. She was not shaking with sobs. This was prolonged, lengthy. Something had ruptured inside her, sending wave after wave of shock through her. It was as if she had been plugged in and couldn't be switched off.

Disclaimer - Pg 145

   They might have assumed fear of flying. But it was fear of landing which afflicted Nancy and me--the fear of it all becoming real. So far all we had been able to do was imagine. Now we must look at the body of our son who had gone ahead and experienced something which he should have waited for us to do first.

Disclaimer - Pg 110

   I finish my sandwich, enjoying being part of this alfresco lunching club. I feel a comradely spirit between myself and the other diners, a few of us on benches, others lying on the grass or sitting on jackets. None of us knowing one another, but relaxed nevertheless in one another's company, privileged to be sharing this luscious green space along with the ancient plane trees, the only living things older than I, in this London square.

Disclaimer - Pg 95

   She's twitchy. I like that. But her fingernails are painted. I don't like that. They make me want to weep. They are a sign that she doesn't care. That she is carrying on as if nothing has happened. I don't want to see that. She must not be allowed the comfort of amnesia. That cannot happen. She should not be able to paint her nails, do her hair. She should not care about herself. She knows what she has done and yet she still thinks she is worth preserving. I want to see her nails chewed and bleeding. I want to see a sign that she feels something.

Disclaimer - Pg 82

   I have sucked up every word in them; I have tasted the ink on their pages; I take them to bed with me and sleep with them under my pillow, dreaming the words swim off the page into my head and Nancy's most private thoughts are absorbed into mine. I have eaten those pages and swallowed them down. She is in me now, my darling girl. Now we are one. She has given me strength: the outside world can't touch me, but I can touch it whenever I choose.

Disclaimer - Pg 43

   It's so bloody complicated. She wants him to be a grown-up but she also wants him to remember how much he loved her once. How much he needed her. But she is nervous too that he still needs her more than is good for him and it makes her tougher and it makes her relieved, in the end, that he is leaving Sandy behind.

Disclaimer - Pg 40

   A book, written in secret and locked away from my prying eyes.
   Sticks and stones, I told myself, but I feared the words on those pages might actually break me.

Disclaimer - Pg 34

   Robert shrugs at the book, wondering why she's so interested in it, thinking it's just a diversion from the thing that is really worrying her. He is convinced that she is trying to make conversation and this worries him. They're not that that kind of couple. They don't need to "make conversation."

Disclaimer - Pg 20

   I could hear her voice quite clearly: Nancy as a young woman, not yet a mother. There was energy in it, fearlessness, and it threw me back to a time when the future had excited us, when things that hadn't happened yet thrilled rather than frightened.

Disclaimer - Pg 17

   I couldn't bear to let everything go at once and so I staggered my trips to the charity shop. I got to know the two women at All Aboard quite well. I told them the clothes had belonged to my wife, and after that, when I dropped by, they would stop what they were doing and make time for me. If I happened to turn up when they were having coffee, then they'd make me a cup too. It became strangely comforting, that shop full of dead people's clothes.