“comme ça”

“comme ça” is the phrase Julia uses when she cautiously asks whether Patrick Hazlewood is homosexual, and it becomes a turning point in Marion Burgess’s understanding of her marriage. Its significance lies in the contrast between Julia’s offhand manner and Marion’s alarm: what sounds to Julia like a casual description gives a name to the possibility Marion has tried to suppress. Repeated later to Tom Burgess, the phrase exposes how sharply that possibility threatens the couple’s carefully maintained silence.

A casual phrase, a difficult implication

The phrase enters a conversation in which Marion is trying to describe Patrick positively. She tells Julia that he is interesting, works as a museum curator, takes them to shows and concerts, and pays for everything. Julia says she liked him and asks whether he is “comme ça, isn’t he?” Marion does not understand what Julia means. She notices Julia’s hopeful expression and wants to grasp the implication, but cannot.

Julia then makes her meaning explicit, asking, “He’s homosexual, isn’t he?” The wording links the French phrase to a direct question about Patrick’s sexuality, but the two expressions do not land with equal force for Marion. Julia speaks as if she were asking about a star sign or shoe size; Marion, by contrast, is so shocked that the smoked salmon seems to turn rancid in her mouth. Julia qualifies her question by saying she had suspected it when she first met him, though she might be wrong. Her uncertainty does not undo the impact of having voiced the possibility.

The scene therefore gives the phrase a double function. It is a tentative way of indicating what Julia thinks about Patrick, but it also opens a conversation Marion has spent considerable effort avoiding. Its casualness is part of its force: the matter is no longer confined to Marion’s unspoken suspicions once another person can name it aloud.

Castle Hill as a turning point

Marion ends the conversation rather than pursuing it. She stands, says they should get going before the afternoon is lost, claps her hands, and tells the children to stand. Julia leads them down the hill, pointing out and naming birds and plants. Marion cannot look at Julia or the landscape; she focuses on her feet moving through the grass. The ordinary business of leaving carries her away from the question, but does not settle it.

In her later account to Patrick, Marion distinguishes between having privately considered the possibility and hearing it spoken. Before the moment on Castle Hill, nobody had used the word to her. She had tried to press the thought down where it could not be fully examined, and at the time she regarded the subject as inadmissible. She says she had little knowledge of gay life as she would describe it later; what she knew came largely from newspaper headlines.

Among those headlines, she recalls the Montagu case and shorter reports in the Argus, often on page ten among divorce news and traffic-law violations. The stories’ regularity had made them seem almost ordinary, but that familiarity had not given her a language for understanding her own marriage. Looking back, she recognizes that she had known something on some level: Sylvie had told her Tom was not like that, and Marion had seen Tom and Patrick standing together outside Osborne House. Yet she cannot identify a precise instant when she accepted the full picture. The incident on Castle Hill is the clear threshold: afterward, she could no longer avoid thinking about Patrick, and therefore Tom, in this new way.

Repeating the phrase to Tom

When Tom asks what Julia said, Marion reports that Julia had said Patrick was “comme ça.” She is still looking out of the window and raises her voice slightly. The phrase that had first reached her through Julia now passes into the marriage itself, carrying the question Marion had tried to leave behind on the hill.

Tom responds with a snort of derision that Marion has never heard from him before. She compares it to the sort of sound Patrick might make at an especially foolish comment. But Tom’s face unsettles her: he is pale, his mouth skewed, and his eyes fixed on hers. For a moment he looks so weak that she wishes she had said nothing and wants to reassure him that it was only a silly joke or mistake. He then pulls his expression back into line, stands, and demands to know what the phrase is supposed to mean. Marion answers, “You know.”

The exchange does not produce an open admission. Instead, Tom asks for the meaning while Marion treats that meaning as already shared between them. His visible reaction briefly breaks through the composure he restores, while her short reply refuses to explain away the implication. The phrase thus becomes a test of whether the subject can be spoken between them, even as neither proceeds to a full account of it.

Naming, silence, and retrospective meaning

Marion’s later narration gives the words a consequence beyond the immediate conversation. She says that Julia’s naming of Tom’s disposition brought his relationship with Patrick into sharp, terrifying focus. The phrase itself seemed dreadful to her because it carried an offhand knowingness that excluded her. That sense of exclusion matters: the wording does not merely suggest a fact about Patrick; it makes Marion feel that a knowledge shared by others has left her outside the understanding of her own marriage.

Tom closes the wardrobe doors, pushes the bedside drawer shut, straightens the rug, and proposes that they say no more, have dinner, and forget the matter. Marion cannot answer. She describes herself as trying to continue the days normally and not look too closely at the vision of Tom and Patrick that remains before her. Although she can no longer deny the truth to herself, she chooses silence rather than further confrontation, believing she lacks the dedication and backbone needed to face what the discovery means for her marriage.

The retrospective telling holds together what the phrase initially separates: Julia’s casual certainty, Marion’s shock, Tom’s controlled response, and Marion’s later recognition that she had been avoiding what she already partly knew. “comme ça” is therefore not simply a euphemistic label in the conversation. In the structure of Marion’s account, it marks the moment when suspicion becomes speakable—and when her effort to remain unaware becomes harder to sustain.