There are always sources of desolation that aren't taken into account because no one knows what they will be. - Nadine Gordimer

big, calm, clever son of Willem Van der Vyver

I’m beginning now even to see it in my own books which are written from many different points of view, very different personae, first person as a man, a child, a woman, a young person, an older person, there is the sense, looking back, that you are really writing one book all your life. Because there is this voyage of discovery of life.

That kind of act isn’t in the range of emotional control in which their son’s character was formed, or the contemporary ethic that men don’t own women. Therefore the act could not have been committed.