...of confidences

Jones pushed the fragment of paper towards Captain Nasir. The muscular black man popped another date into his mouth as if he were a baby.
The wizened skipper took the paper and laid it reverently beside him. He pulled out a bundle from against the ribs of the vessel by the tool-box and unwound it slowly. He took out a pair of spectacles which he fitted in an exact manner on to his nose. Then he stood so that the light from the hatch fell on the tiny paper, the movement of his lips telling the pace of his reading. He read it twice, and in the course of the second reading his head began to nod with slow vigour. When he had finished he passed the paper back to Jones with both hands like the most destructible of palimpsests, shut his spectacles, ceremoniously wound them up in the old head-cloth and replaced them in their corner against the ship's ribs. Then put out his hard, narrow hand and took Jones's right hand, swollen with prickly heat, and lightly held it for several seconds. When his hand was released, Jones raised his fingers to his lips. Even now, news of the paper in his possession reaching the wrong ears on the quayside might cheat his poor heart of the privilege of ending him.

[The Man Who Knew Everything, Stacey, T.]

...of a coup

The BBC's broadcast followed by a brief comment from the Diplomatic Correspondent to the effect that if an abrupt change of political direction had indeed taken place in the island, the economic, political, and strategic consequences for the Free World could be profound.
Jones sorting through the massive typescript in the majlis, heard none of this.

When his servant failed to make his customary appearance at 9 a.m., he was not surprised. Aziz was sickly and often too sorry for himself to fulfil his tasks. In any case, Jones had no wish to be disturbed. He boiled himself a cup of coffee and worked all through the morning getting into the correct page order the many interpolations he had made to his original draft. It was still something of a mess - the gaps unexplained, the parallel versions likewise. But it had a rough coherence now, and when he had decided he had done enough he was profoundly relieved, for his health was not good today. It seemed that every movement he made was ill-judged as if he had wrenched his whole body unawares.
It was already midday before he flip-flopped through to his outer door to bring in the local English-language daily. It was not there. Normally it would be lying on his desktop. He looked up and down the empty alley. He supposed it had been pilfered by a passer-by. At about 1p.m. he picked up the telephone in the bedroom to ask the head porter at the Darwish if he had a playback wire from London. His line was dead.

[The Man Who Knew Everything, Stacey, T.]

...of onus

About an hour later he got up and pottered through to the majlis. It was a stifling night. He switched on the air conditioning and it shuddered into life with a terrible effort. Still in his sarong, he sat down at the table laden with the disordered typescripts of his book. He took a plain sheet of foolscap and fitted it into his old portable. In the top right-hand corner he typed the Post Box number of the Darwish and the date. Of his sons, he chose Paul to write to because Gavin was intolerant of him and always had been. He could tell that was still so from the tone of Gavin's occasional letters, and particularly from the letters of Gavin's wife (another scientist: Gavin had met her at university) when he wrote enquiring about the grandchildren: neither she nor Gavin ever asked anything about his life - never a query, never a speculation. Their rare letters fulfilled a dry duty.

[The Man Who Knew Everything, Stacey, T.]

...of impassivity

When he thought of her, it rather amazed him, that he had let that girl with her violin go. Now, of course, he saw that her self-effacing proposal was quite irrelevant. All she had needed was the certainty of his love, and his reassurance that there was no hurry when a lifetime lay ahead of them. Love and patience - if only he had had them both at once - would surely have seen them both through. And then what unborn children might have had their chances, what young girl with an Alice band might have become his loved familiar? This is how the entire course of a life can be changed - by doing nothing. On Chesil Beach he could have called out to Florence, he could have gone after her. He did not know, or would not have cared to know, that as she ran away from him, certain in her distress that she was about to lose him, she had never loved him more, or more hopelessly, and that the sound of his voice would have been a deliverance, and she would have turned back. Instead, he stood in cold and righteous silence in the summer's dusk, watching her hurry along the shore, the sound of her difficult progress lost to the breaking of small waves, until she was a blurred, receding point against the immense straight road of shingle gleaming in the pallid light.

[On Chesil Beach, McEwan, I.]

...of shame

She watched him coming along the strand, his form at first no more than an indigo stain against the darkening shingle, sometimes appearing motionless, flickering and dissolving at its outlines, and at others suddenly closer, as though moved like a chess piece a few squares toward her. The last glow of daylight lay along the shore, and behind her, away to the east, there were points of light on Portland, and the cloud base reflected dully a yellowish glow of street lamps from a distant town. She watched him, willing him to go slower, for she was guiltily afraid of him, and was desperate for more time to herself. Whatever conversation they were about to have, she dreaded it. As she understood it, there was no words to name what had happened, there existed no shared language ion which two sane adults could describe such events to each other. And to argue about it was even further beyond her imagining. There could be no discussion. She did not want to think about it, and she hoped he felt the same. But what else were they to talk about? Why else were they out here? The matter lay between them, as solid as a geographical feature, a mountain, a headland. Unnameable, unavoidable. And she was ashamed. The aftershock of her own behaviour reverberated through her, and even seemed to sound in her ears. That was why she had run so far along the beach, through the heavy shingle in her going-away shoes, to flee the room and all that had happened in it, and to escape herself. She had behaved abominably. Abominably, She let the clumsy, sociable word repeat itself in her thoughts several times. It was ultimately a forgiving term - she played tennis abominably, her sister played the piano abominably - and Florence knew that it masked rather than described her behaviour.
At the same time she was aware of his disgrace - when he rose above her, that clenched and bewildered look, the reptilian jerkiness along his spine. But she was trying not to think about it. Did she dare admit that she was a tiny bit relieved that it was not only her, that he too had something wrong with him? How terrible, but how comforting it would be if he suffered from some sort of congenital illness, a family curse, the sort of sickness to which only shame and silence attach, the way it did to enuresis, or to cancer, a word she superstitiously never spoke aloud for fear it would infect her mouth - silliness, for sure, which she would never confess to. Then they could feel sorry for each other, bound in love by their separate afflictions. And she did feel sorry for him, but she also felt a little cheated. If he had an unusual condition, why had he not told her, in confidence? But she understood perfectly why he could not. She too had not spoken up. How could he have begun to broach the matter of his own particular deformity, what could have been his opening words? They did not exist. Such a language had yet to be invented.

[On Chesil Beach, McEwan, I.]

...of inexperience

To seal their reunion, he lowered his head and they kissed, his tongue barely grazing hers at the tip, and again she was grateful. Conscious of the silence from the downstairs bar - no radio, no conversation - they whispered their 'I Love you's. It soothed her to be invoking, however quietly, the unfading formula that bound them, and that surely proved their interests were identical. She wondered if perhaps she might even make it through, and be strong enough to pretend convincingly, and on later, successive occasions whittle her anxieties away through sheer familiarity, until she could honestly find and give pleasure. He need never know, at least not until she told it, from within the warmth of her new confidence, as a funny story - back then, when she was an ignorant girl, miserable in her foolish fears. Even now, she did not mind him touching her breasts, when once she would have recoiled. There was hope for her, and at the thought she moved closer against his chest. He had his shirt on, she assumed, because his contraceptives were in the top pocket, easily reached. His hand was travelling the length of her body, and was pulling back the hem of her skirt up to her waist. He had always been reticent about the girls he had made love to, but she did not doubt the wealth of his experience. She felt the summery air through the open window tickling her exposed pubic hair. She was already far gone into new territory, too far to come back.
It had never occurred to Florence that the preliminaries of love would take place in dumb show, in such intense and watchful silence. But beyond the obvious three words, what could she herself say that did not sound contrived or foolish? And since he was silent, she thought this must be the convention. She would have preferred it if they had murmured the silly endearments they used when they lay around in her bedroom in North Oxford, fully clothed, wasting the afternoons away. She needed to feel close to him to hold down the demon of panic she knew was ready to overwhelm her. She had to know he was with her, on her side, and was not going to use her, that he was her friend and was kindly and tender. Otherwise it could all go wrong, in a very lonely way. She was dependent on him for this assurance, beyond love, and finally could not help herself issuing the inane command, 'Tell me something.'

[On Chesil Beach, McEwan, I.]

...of disapprobation

At that time, on a weekday winter's evening, Soho was only just coming to life. The pubs were full, but the clubs were not yet open, and the pavements were uncrowded. It was easy to notice the couple coming towards them along Old Compton Street. They were rockers - he was a big fellow in his mid-twenties, with long sideburns, studded leather jacket, tight jeans and boots, and his plump girlfriend, holding on to his arm, was identically dressed. As they passed, and without breaking stride, the man swung his arm out to deliver a hard, flat-handed smack to the back of Mather's head which caused him to stagger, and sent his Buddy Holly glasses skidding across the road. It was an act of casual contempt for Mather's height and studious appearance, or for the fact that he looked, and was, Jewish. Perhaps it was intended to impress or amuse the girl. Edward did not stop to think about it. As he strode after the couple, he heard Harold call out something like a 'no' or a 'don't', but that was the kind of entreaty he was deaf to. He was back in that dream. He would have found it difficult to describe his state: his anger had lifted itself and spiralled into a kind of ecstasy. With his right hand he gripped the man's shoulder and spun him round, and with his left, took him by the throat and pushed him back against a wall. The man's head clunked satisfyingly against a cast iron drainpipe. Still clenching his throat, Edward hit him in the face, just once, but very hard, with a closed fist. Then he went back to help Mather find his glasses, one lens of which was cracked. They walked on, leaving the fellow sitting on the pavement, both hands covering his face, while his girlfriend fussed over him.
It took Edward some while into the evening to become aware of Harold Mather's lack of gratitude, and then of his silence, or silence towards him, and even longer, a day or two, to realise that his friend not only disapproved, but worse - he was embarrassed. In the pub neither man told their friends the story, and afterwards Mather's never spoke about the incident to Edward. Rebuke would have been a relief. Without making any great show of it, Mather withdrew from him. Though they saw each other in company, and he was never obviously distant towards Edward, the friendship was never the same. Edward was in agonies when he considered that Mather was actually repelled by his behaviour, but he did not have the courage to raise the subject. Besides, Mather made sure they were never alone together. At first Edward believed that his error was to have damaged Mather's pride by witnessing his humiliation, which Edward then compounded by acting as his champion, demonstrating that he was tough while Mather was a vulnerable weakling. Later on, Edward realised that what he had done was simply not cool, and his shame was the greater. Street fighting did not go with poetry and irony, bebop or history. He was guilty of a lapse of taste. He was not the person he had thought. What he believed was an interesting quirk, a rough virtue, turned out to be a vulgarity. He was a country boy, a provincial idiot who thought a bare-knuckle swipe could impress a friend. It was a mortifying reappraisal. He was making one of the advances typical of early adulthood: the discovery that there were new values by which he preferred to be judged. Since then, Edward had stayed out of fights.

[On Chesil Beach, McEwan, I.]