The Eye in the Door

‘Tea?’

‘I wouldn’t mind a glass of milk.’

‘Milk?’

Rivers patted his midriff. ‘Keeps the ulcers quiet.’

‘Why, are they protesting?’

‘God, how I hate psychologists.’

Head laughed. ‘I’ll get you the milk.’

One began by finding mental illness mystifying, and ended by being still more mystified by health.

The poison plot fitted in very neatly with his preconceptions about the anti-war movement. Not much grasp of reality in all this, Prior thought, on either side. He was used to thinking of politics in terms of conflicting interests, but what seemed to have happened here was less a conflict of interests than a disastrous meshing together of fantasies.