I didn’t think I could live through another war. I could see that it would have a point for Ana. I didn’t see that it had a point for me. For some weeks I was perplexed. I didn’t know what to do. I suppose I didn’t have the courage to tell Ana. It was the rainy season. I had cause to remember it. The heavy pollen from the shade tree in front of the estate house made the semi-circular marble steps slippery. I slipped and fell heavily. When I awoke, in the run-down military hospital in the barracks in the town, the physical pain of my damaged body was like no other pain that had been with me for months, and perhaps for years.

When Ana came to the hospital courage came to me, and I told her I wanted to divorce her.

When she came back later I said to her, ‘I am forty-one. I am tired of living your life.’

‘You wanted it, Willie. You asked. I had to think about it.’

‘I know. You did everything for me. You made it easy for me here. I couldn’t have lived here without you. When I asked you in London I was frightened. I had nowhere to go. They were going to throw me out of the college at the end of the term and I didn’t know what I could do to keep afloat. But now the best part of my life has gone, and I’ve done nothing.’

V.S. Naipaul, Half a Life

When she first walked into the restaurant she thought Sarah hadn’t arrived yet – all the tables were filled with strangers – but then she saw a plump little overdressed matron, sitting alone, was smiling at her.

‘Come sit down, dear,’ Sarah said. ‘You look wonderful.’           

‘So do you,’ Emily said, but it wasn’t true. In St Charles, wearing country clothes, Sarah might still look her age – which Emily quickly calculated was forty-one – but here she looked older. Her eyes were lined and shadowed and she had a double chin. She was slump-shouldered. She had evidently been undecided about which of several pieces of bright costume jewellery to wear with her cheap beige suit, and had solved the problem by wearing them all. In the past year her teeth had developed heavy brown stains.

 Richard Yates, The Easter Parade

I am a sick man…I am an angry man. I am an unattractive man. I think there is something wrong with my liver. But I don’t understand the least thing about my illness, and I don’t know for certain what part of me is affected. I am not having any treatment for it, and never have had, although I have a great respect for medicine and for doctors. I am besides extremely superstitious, if only in having such respect for medicine. (I am well educated enough not to be superstitious, but superstitious I am.) No, I refuse treatment out of spite. That is something you will probably not understand. Well, I understand it. I can’t of course explain who my spite is directed against in this matter; I know perfectly well that I can’t ‘score off’ the doctors in any way by not consulting them; I know better than anybody that I am harming nobody but myself. All the same, if I don’t have treatment, it is out of spite. Is my liver out of order? – let it get worse!

I have been living like this for a long time now – about twenty years. I am forty.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes From Underground

There was, however, one spark of consolation. It came from the fact that Rodney Bayham, of Bayham, followed her always with his eyes. It had been three years since she had tried her abortive love affair with him. Yet still, on the winter mornings, he would ride up to her shafts and just say: ‘Good day’, and look at her with eyes that were not imploring, but seemed to say: ‘You see, I am still, as the Germans say, A.D. – at disposition.’

It was a great consolation, not because she proposed ever to take him up again, but because it showed her that there was in the world one faithful soul in riding-breeches. And it showed her that she was not losing her looks.

And, indeed, she was not losing her looks. She was forty, but she was as clean run as on the day she had left the convent – as clear in outline, as clear coloured in the hair, as dark blue in the eyes. She thought that her looking-glass told her this; but there are always the doubts. … Rodney Bayham’s eyes took them away.

 Ford Maddox Ford, The Good Soldier

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.

The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at the present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up, and Winston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the lift-shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

She didn’t seem to have aged a year in the seven years since he had seen her. He was twenty-five, now, which meant that she was crowding thirty-nine. But she appeared to be in her very early thirties, say about thirty-one or –two. She looked like…Why, of course! She Moira Langtry! That was who she reminded him of. You couldn’t say that they actually looked like each other; they were both brunettes and about the same size, but there was absolutely no facial resemblance. It was more a type of similarity than a personal one. They were both members of the same flock; women who knew just what it took to preserve and enhance their natural attractiveness. Women who were either endowed with what it took, or spared no effort in getting it.

Jim Thompson, The Grifters

At first he thought nothing. She was young and magnetic, but so was Topsy. He guessed that she had had lovers and had loved them in the last four years. Well, you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people’s lives. Yet from this fog his affection emerged – the best contacts are when one knows the obstacles and still wants to preserve a relation. The past drifted back and he wanted to hold her eloquent giving-of-herself in its precious shell, till he enclosed it, till it no longer existed outside him. He tried to collect all that might attract her – it was less than it had been four years ago. Eighteen might look at thirty-four through a rising mist of adolescence; but twenty-two would see thirty-eight with discerning clarity. Moreover, Dick had been at an emotional peak at the time of the previous encounter; since then there had been a lesion of enthusiasm.

F.Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night

Soberly deliberating, Herzog decided it would be better not to accept Ramona’s offer. She was thirty-seven or thirty-eight years of age, he shrewdly reckoned, and this meant that she was looking for a husband. This, in itself, was not wicked, or even funny. Simple and general human conditions prevailed among the most seemingly sophisticated. Ramona had not learned those erotic monkeyshines in a manual, but in adventure, in confusion, and at times probably with a sinking heart, in brutal and often alien embraces. So now she must yearn for stability. She wanted to give her heart once and for all, and level with a good man, become Herzog’s wife and quit being an easy lay. She often had a sober look. Her eyes touched him deeply.

 Saul Bellow, Herzog

Our desires and our performance are conditioned by certain needs of our nervous systems which are very hard to define in words. What people called Thomas Buddenbrook’s ‘vanity’ – his care for his personal appearance, his extravagant dressing – was at bottom not vanity but something else entirely. It was, originally, no more than the effort of a man of action to be certain, from head to toe, of the adequacy and correctness of his bearing. But the demands made by himself and by others upon his talents and his capacities were constantly increased. He was overwhelmed by public and private affairs. When the Senate sat to appoint its committees, one of the main departments, the administration of the taxes, fell to his lot. But tolls, railways, and other administrative business claimed his time as well; and he presided at hundreds of committees that called into play all the capacities he possessed: he had to summon every ounce of his flexibility, his foresight, his power to charm, in order not to wound the sensibilities of his elders, to defer constantly to them, and yet to keep the reins in his own hands. If his so-called vanity notably increased at the same time, if he felt a greater and greater need to refresh himself bodily, to renew himself, to change his clothing several times a day, all this meant simply that Thomas Buddenbrook, though he was barely thirty-seven years old, was losing his elasticity, was wearing himself out fast.

 Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks

‘How’s Septimus Tuam?’ said James. ‘How’s he getting on these days?’

They were standing in the centre of the drawing room when James said that. The furniture, Eve thought, was uglier than she’d remembered it. She walked away from James. She spoke with her back to him, looking through the window at an ash tree.

‘He came one morning, the day after that dinner party, and he helped me in his peculiar way with the housework. He had damaged my stocking with the tip of his umbrella in the button department of Ely’s: he came to give me other stockings instead.’ Eve related these details because she had not spoken of them before. She told James all there was to tell, how Septimus Tuam had captivated her, causing her to imagine scenes in a country of the Middle East, and Arabs who danced in celebration.

‘I find it hard to visualize the chap,’ said James agreeably. ‘Well, well.’

‘I behaved like a schoolgirl of fourteen.’

‘I would have thought not. Do schoolgirls of fourteen take on lovers?’

‘I meant I was silly.’

‘You are thirty-seven. It’s an age of discretion, Eve.’

 William Trevor, The Love Department