I cannot live with someone who can't live without me. - Nadine Gordimer

It was my mother who had talked under interrogation. I know why she did. It was to be sure neither her husband nor I would be held responsible.

She would have drowned herself long ago if she had not met me. She doesn’t do that because, perhaps, I am more dreadful.

My work means that we have lived in different parts of the world and in each there has always been something to be afraid of. Gangsters, extremist political groups Right and Left tossing bombs into restaurants, hijacks, holdups, a city plumb on the line of an earthquake fault. We have long had a compact, with ourselves, with life; life is dangerous. We live with that; in the one certainty that fear is the real killer.