Caro was coming round to the fact of unhappiness: to a realization that Dora created unhappiness and the she was bound to Dora.
Shirley HazzardDora sat on a corner of the spread rug, longing to be assigned some task so she could resent it.
Shirley HazzardDark had meant Dora, had meant words and events sordid with self. Struggling to the light from Dora's darkness, Caro had acquired conscience and equilibrium like a profound, laborious education. Exercise of principle would always require more from her than from persons nurtured in it, for she had learned it by application of will. Caro would never do the right thing without knowing it, as some could.
Shirley HazzardEven Grace still imagined there might be words, the words that could reach Dora and that had so far, unaccountably, not been hit upon. Only Caro recognized that Dora's condition was exactly that: a condition, an irrational state requiring professional, or divine, intervention.
Shirley HazzardI wasn't convinced a shop girl would know the word 'Oedipal.
Shirley HazzardPaul said, 'You always had some contempt for me.'
'Yes.'
'And love too.'
'Yes.' A flicker over her stare was the facial equivalent of a shrug. 'Now you have a wife to give you both.
Caro sat without speaking, turning toward him her look that was neither sullen nor expectant but soberly attentive; and, once, a glance in which tenderness and apprehension were great and indivisible, giving unbearable, excessive immediacy to the living of these moments. Paul had seen that look before, when they first lay down together at the inn beyond Avebury Circle.
Shirley HazzardI never had, or wished for, power over you. That isn't true, of course. I wanted the greatest power of all. but not advantage, or authority.
Shirley HazzardShe was coming to look on men and women as fellow-survivors: well-dissemblers of their woes, who, with few signals of grief, had contained, assimilated, or put to use their own destruction. Of those who had endured the worst, not all behaved nobly or consistently. but all, involuntarily, became part of some deeper assertion of life.
Shirley HazzardI see that you are highly defensive." . . .
Caro said, "I withhold my analysis of your own attitude.
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