Bokelskere.no

«When you get old,» she had said on the occasion of her brother Tom dying, «you don’t have much emotion. It goes. At about seventy, I’d say. All those things and people you were passionate about, angry or adoring or longing, they all go, and a kind of dull calm takes over. I used to worship Tom. Now he’s dead I don’t much care. That is how it is with me.»

Alan said it was nothing to do with her, and she should mind her own business. He had never spoken to a granddaughter like this before, and he rather enjoyed it.

How we grow away from our children, he thought. He cared very little what his children thought of him now. They probably loved him in a remote kind of way. What he wanted was what most men wanted, and it came to him as a devastating truth. They didn't want trouble, that was it, for life to be without trouble, to have peace, and that was odd in the far more warlike of the sexes.