Fifth Business (Deptford Trilogy)

Abruptly, and with unwelcome compassion for a woman he’d despised so cheerfully and for so long, he understood what loneliness had compelled Lorna to Bethesda’s door, and to all the church doors after it – recognised, in fact, her capacity to modify herself to please her company. Wasn’t he a different man to different men? It was among the least of

Mrs Cadwallader said, privately, ‘You will certainly go mad in that house alone, my dear. You will see visions. We have all got to exert ourselves a little to keep sane, and call things by the same names as other people call them by. To be sure, for younger sons and women who have no money, it is a sort of provision to go mad: they are taken care o

Was it possible that this—all of this that seemed so wasteful and so needless—this war, Scheveningen prison, this very cell, none of it was unforeseen or accidental? Could it be part of the pattern first revealed in the Gospels?

How strange, I thought, looking upon his sad, kind face, that this man had once been my entire world, and yet we could come to no final understanding of one another. He was a man who’d done far more than most to end the suffering of a people whose toil was the very source of his power; he had risked his own good comfort, the love of his family, his