Like the flowers on a grave bearing the mother of a sentimental hoodlum, Keith's bouquet leaned and loitered in its bowl on the round table. Nicola always beheld these flowers with disbelief. The colours spoke to her of custard, of blancmange — a leaden meat tea served on pastel plates, the desiccation of a proletarian wake for some tyrant grandad, or some pub parrot of a granny, mad these thirty years.

[S]he tried to beef me up with stuff like Parrish's Chemical Food, a fearful reddish liquid which was supposed to turn your teeth black unless you bypassed them by sucking it through a straw. More directly, she would sit opposite me at the dinner-table pushing forkful after forkful into my mouth, not an ideal way of encouraging the appetite -- for solids, that is. Here again I feel I can spot a contributory cause of later developments.