It's something about us English, that we don't really like to talk about anything. Or maybe it's just our generation: life, death, love, sex, that sort of thing, are all smothered over with deprecation. She and Charles never really discussed how they were coping with being the parents of someone who was in jail. Obviously they were coping very badly, Charles studying the cliffs endlessly, even the dog committing suicide, and the ghastly, tense visits she made, conspicuously unaccompanied by her husband, to those frightful prisons full of deranged, misshapen people .... The central question, which the vicar thinks they should address, is whether or not they are plagued by guilt. They have no reason to feel guilty, he says. But Charles won't discuss it.