- [first lines]
- Alan: [at a rest stop cafe, approaching with hot drinks] It's out of a machine, I don't know what it'll taste like. You... Could you do with something to eat?
- Celia: [softly] No.
- Alan: He's a trouble-maker, that one. As I say, he'll have got hold of the wrong end o' stick. Or he's lashing out, saying first damned silly thing that's come into his head.
- Caroline: [enters her younger son's bedroom. He's lying in bed, crying] Lawrence? Are you awake?
- [pauses]
- Caroline: I love you.
- Lawrence: [sits up in bed as she sits down next to him. They embrace] I don't want people being mean to you.
- Caroline: Nobody's going to be mean to me. I won't let them. I'm big. Believe me, I can handle mean.
- Gillian: [over a pint with her dad] What's up with Caroline being a bit of a dyke, anyway?
- Alan: Well, I did raise that question. Not quite in so many words.
- Gillian: And what did she say?
- Celia: [in flashback] You'd not be saying that if it was your Gillian.
- Alan: I stopped worrying about who our Gillian slept with years ago. I had to. I'd have had a nervous breakdown if I hadn't!
- Celia: She...
- [pauses]
- Celia: When she was 18, she told me. Nineteen. End of her first year at Oxford. She came home. I hardly recognized her. Skinny as a rake. And she'd cut all her lovely long hair off.
- Alan: Told you what?
- Celia: I said, Well, for God's sake, don't tell your father. Or anyone else. Not 'round here. No, I didn't want folk pointing, saying things. Not for me, not for my sake. For hers. Some folks seemed to think she was enough of an oddity... Having a brain and getting in at Oxford.
- [last lines]
- Celia: I went 'round to Kate's house last night.
- Alan: Kate?
- Celia: [nodding] They're back together.
- Alan: [exhaling] Oh!
- Celia: And you'll never guess...
- Alan: What?
- Celia: [in a flashback, at Kate's house] You can play the organ?
- [Kate nods]
- Celia: What, like the full, big...
- Kate: Grade 8.
- Celia: [at Alan's bedside] So, I said to her, Oh, you'll know The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba, then. That'll be coming in handy!