Rustication
by Charles Palliser
(London: W.W. Norton, 2014)
When I was young she had no hesitation in undressing in my presence down to her shift and even beyond that, but one day when I was about twelve she saw me looking at her and I don’t’ know what she saw on my face but she never did it again.
Page 6.
I saw an infinity of such dreary evenings stretching out ahead of me. Trapped in a dirty old house with a grieving old woman and an irritable young one. And with only the books I had brought with me, most of which were still in my trunk anyway.
Page 13.
Seeing the house in daylight, I realise that, standing on a promontory that jut into the marshland, it is virtually on an island.
Page 16.
She has the kind of features that would fall into a scowl if they were not held up by the invisible strings of property into a caricature of a smile. … And her small eyes nestle in the folds of her eye-sockets like sharpshooters searching out targets.
Page 18.
The word was delivered with the smoothness of a hired poniard sliding into a Renaissance neck.
Page 20.
A mere curate - the protozoa of the clerical phylum!
Page 21.
Finding mysteries everywhere. I don’t have to manufacture them. They are all around me.
Page 21.
You’re squabbling like Irish tinkers in a garret.
Page 37.
I can see how Mother lives through Euphemia. All her pleasures are experienced vicariously. She looks at her as a mister gazes at his gold.
Page 45.
I’m trapped in this house and in this body. I long to float away, to hover above the fields.
Page 46.
At last, at last. As I write I have it in front of me. The crack in the prison-wall of reality through which I can escape to the superreality of the Imagination! I can only hold back by an exercise of will. Tonight, when the house is asleep I will cast off the shackles of corporality and float free.
Page 47.
A woman without a husband has much to endure.
Page 48.
Now that we’ve rejected the friendship of the only person in the district who is worth knowing, we have to woo her persecutors!
Page 49.
I can hear my own blood coursing through my veins.
Page 53.
I’m not invited to people’s houses. I am considered a bore because I talk so much about old pottery and bones. And I am happy to accept that term. In my view, a bore is a man who is keener on amusing himself than on entertaining his neighbours.
Page 61.
What pleasure to steal from a slumbering house and roam the countryside unseen. I walked through the silent villages. All the windows were blank. Night and darkness belong to me. While my neighbours dream, I come and go around their houses. Peer through their windows if they have a candle still flickering.
Page 67.
Can a woman be paid money and still be a lady? Mama says not.
Page 70.
A lady is one who behaves as a lady should.
Page 70.
I don’t ever find people uninteresting. On the contrary, I find them so fascinating and so highly-flavoured that after small helpings, I have to go away and chew them slowly and analyse the taste of them.
Page 72.
I often hear raised voices but when I enter the room they fall silent.
Page 78.
What must it be like to be born poor in this backwater but afflicted with a keen wit, and to e denied education?
Page 78.
People talk of falling suddenly in love but little is said of how you can fall just as precipitately out of it.
Page 80.
My heart is hardened, the blossoms of love have withered. It will never love again.
Page 81.
Why are all you females so anxious to make me go? Is there some sort of conspiracy amongst you to get rid of me?
Page 87.
Am I being snubbed or am I too unimportant to be remembered? To be snubbed is at least a form of recognition.
Page 93.
I don’t know why I didn’t pass them by without speaking except that I am drawn to them as to something that both hurts and gives pleasure.
Page 115.
The world I had thought I knew began to metamorphose: the slumbering hills, clumps of trees, and dark shapes of houses that had seemed so safe and familiar, became the hidden lairs of some unknown and evil passion.
Page 116.
Seeing a creature blindly fighting for its life - resisting death by the same instinct that possesses us - awakened so many images in my mind.
Page 123.
So much has slipped away from us that we - I at least - had always assumed was permanent: civility, graciousness, and generosity.
Page 126.
I wonder why she cannot rake things more slowly but she does everything in that rapidly scrabbling manner as if she needs to clutch at everything she desires before it disappears.
Page 139.
Drowned in the deep brown. I don’t feel happy with that.
Page 143.
I was struck by how indifferent - even inimical - to humankind the dark landscape seemed.
Page 151.
During dinner I had such a strange fancy. I looked at my mother and sister and thought: These people are strangers. If I had met them for the first time today I would not wish to know them.
Page 162.
It would have been wounding to have given no reason at all, but what was even more hurtful and insulting was to give one that was transparently absurd.
Page 184.
While the congregation was singing, I stared at the mouths opening and shutting around me and they seemed to me to be so many dead bodies, yawning pits for mouths, worm-mouths drawing in food at one end and expelling excrement from the other, corpses in their Sunday best.
Page 202.
The town was like a dark pit, a miasma of foulness, streets strewn with ashes. The uncleanliness. I feel contaminated merely by having been there.
Page 208.
What shocks me is to learn of something evil in one who has been so near to me all my life my father was always secretive. Now I’m starting to uncover his nakedness.
Page 214.
He kept filling my glass. I guessed he wanted to tell me something that would cause pain. Why would he have spoken to me otherwise?
Page 249.
Our father made us love him because he was weak - not because he was strong. We all collaborated in the pretence that he was a good parent and a worthy cleric because none of us could face the truth: that he was a bully and a lazy drunken incompetent dishonest man driven by bestial desires who neglected the modest talents he possessed. He condemned others for small moral lapses in order to divert suspicion from himself. A man who judges others so harshly must be judged as harshly himself.
Page 270.
I … have contributed to my destruction: I have at the very least been guilty of wilful stupidity.
Page 274.
Events are unfolding with the strange logic of a dream where what should appear astonishing seems inevitable and normal.
Page 274.
I told her that I found her respect for the truth deeply moving.
Page 281.
I’m sorry that my innocence is causing so much inconvenience.
Page 288.
It’s as if I were sitting in a darkened theatre waiting for the curtain to rise on a play whose script I have already read.
Page 295.
I suspect she gets more pleasure from feeding her cat than herself.
Page 300.
So many other things that I had not wanted to notice fell only too neatly into place.
Page 305.
I understand what has been done to me but that helps me not at all.
Page 306.
I now see those values of honour and gentlemanliness for what they are : delusions.
Page 317.