J.P. Delaney Quotes

There was a mountain of grief to be climbed, and no amount of talk would help me up it.

All these men who loved Emma, I think. For all her problems, men were fixated on her. Will anyone ever feel like that about me?

But it never really occurred to me to ask myself whether this was what I wanted too,

He was heartbroken, I say.

Heartbroken, he repeats. Of course. That's the great myth Edward Monkford's spun around himself, isn't it? The tormented genius who lost the love of his life and became an arch-minimalist as a result.

You don't think that's right?

I know it isn't.

I don't want anything from you, Edward. If you'd only told me you were still in love with Emma - '

'You don't understand,' he interrupts. 'It was like an illness. I hated myself every second I was with her.

It's the sketch Edward did of me before he went away, the one he said was fine but didn't want to keep. It's as if he's drawn me not once but twice. In the main drawing I have my head turned to the right. It's so detailed, you can see the tautness of my neck muscles and the arch of my clavicle. But underneath or over that there's a second drawing, barely more than a few jagged, suggestive lines, done with a surprising energy and violence: my head turned the other way, my mouth open in a kind of snarl. The two heads pointing in opposite directions give the drawing a disturbing sense of movement.

Which one's the pentimento, and which the finished thing? And why did Edward say there was nothing wrong with it? Did he not want me to see this double image for some reason?

The same goes for Edward Monkford. Yes, based on what you've told me, it seems Emma was the real narcissist, not him. But there's no doubting he's an extreme controller. What happens when a controller comes up against someone who's out of control? The combination could be explosive.

There's a kind of purity to a relationship unencumbered by convention, a sense of simplicity and freedom.

One of the strange things about grief is the way it ambushes you when you least expect it.

We're all connected now, I think as I send it off into cyberspace. Everyone and everything.

Who is the real Claire Wright? The one sitting here, with her precious green card permit in front of her, exchanging pleasantries with the man who provided it? Or the one who fell for the darkness she sensed deep inside the only man she couldn't seduce? Which is the performance: Who I was then? Or who I am now?

You are a crazy, evil woman," Patrick says, staring at me.

"You don't know how crazy," I promise him. "You haven't seen anything yet.

That was Emma - she'd have enjoyed knowing she had something like that, something that could blow her whole fucking life and mine apart if it came out. Her little bit of power.

But I see now that our future lies not in building beautiful havens from the ugliness in society, but in building a different kind of society. He

In my art history degree course, we did a module on palimpsests - medieval sheets of parchment so costly that, once the text was no longer needed, the sheets were simply scraped clean and reused, leaving the old writing faintly visible through the new. Later, Renaissance artists used the word pentimenti, repentances, to describe mistakes or alterations that were covered with new paint, only to be revealed years or even centuries later as the paint thinned with time, leaving both the original and the revision on view.

Sometimes I have a sense that this house - our relationship in it, with it, with each other - is like a palimpsest or pentimento, that however much we try to overpaint Emma Matthews, she keeps tiptoeing back: a faint image, an enigmatic smile, stealing its way into the corner of the frame.

How do we ever trust each other again, when we both know how good we are at lying?

Saul is as different from Simon Wakefield as it's possible to get, I find myself thinking. And Edward Monkford is utterly different from both of them. It seems incredible that Emma could have had relationships with all three men. Where Simon's eager to please, but also touchy and insecure, and Edward's calm and super-confident, Saul is pushy and brash and loud. He also has a habit of saying 'Yeah?' aggressively at the end of his sentences, as if trying to force me to agree with him.

And I smile at him, happy. Because it turns out the only thing better than sharing your own worst secrets is when the person you love shares his with you.

I will take what I can from Edward. And then I will let them fade into history, all the characters in this drama. Emma Matthews and the men who loved her, who became obsessed with her. They're not important to us now.

Never apologize for someone you love, he says quietly. It makes you look like a prick.

If I'd been asked to make a list of what I could do without, I'd never have managed it. But by putting the thought in my head that really none of it's important, I find myself wondering if I can't just shed all my things, my stuff, like an old skin. Maybe

I'll tell you something that was unusual, though. When most people are caught lying to the police, they cave in pretty quickly. Emma's response was to tell another lie. It might have been planted in her head by her brief, but even so that's not a common reaction.

And when I realized you had secrets too, I was glad. I thought we could be honest with each other. That we could finally rid ourselves of all the clutter from our past. Not our possessions, but the stuff we carry around inside our heads. Because that's what I've realized, living in One Folgate Street. You can make your surroundings as polished and empty as you like. But it doesn't really matter if you're still messed up inside. And that's all anyone's looking for really, isn't it? Someone to take care of the mess inside our heads?

Grief, I discovered, feels not so very different from defeat. And

One of the curious aspects of a traumatic experience like the one you've been through, she says at last, is how it sometimes results in a softening of your existing boundaries. Sometimes the changes are temporary. But sometimes the person finds they actually quite like this new aspect of their personality, and it becomes a part of them.

I think that for Claire Wright, reality is whatever she wants it to be.

Please make a list of every possession you consider essential to your life.

I take a deep breath and pick up my pen.