Quote:
Originally Posted by Catlady
You're being rather disingenuous, aren't you? Do you want me to repeat the whole scene that led up to the "touch" on the arm and the aftermath, since you seem to be viewing it in isolation? [...]
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I am quite serious. Somehow, I still haven't managed to convey how I felt about this coming into the scene. I seriously did not think that "laid a hand on Clare’s bare arm" was a savage act (there was no "grabbing" or "seizing" or anything else to denote anger in the touch), and I was not surprised that there wasn't, despite (or perhaps partly because of) the gentleness of "laid" in comparison to the words before it (it fit what I expected of Irene).
Nor was I surprised that moments later Clare was dead, nor that Irene held herself responsible when (under my interpretation) she was not. It seemed to me at the time that Larsen had presaged much of this (or maybe it's just that there weren't enough pages for anything else). I was not certain Clare was going to die, but it wasn't a surprise, and I didn't think Irene was responsible, in spite of her subsequent behaviour and thoughts (or partly because of it - since it left out any plain statement of fact, and this seemed to be a deliberate flag from Larsen saying "don't believe where this points!").
That was my reaction first time through. On reflection and re-read I saw that it may not read have to that way, so then I checked
Wikipedia and saw: "Whether she has fallen accidentally, was pushed by either Irene or Bellew, or committed suicide, is unclear." I checked one of their reference
pages and found "Clare mysteriously falls to her death through an open window". So I figured my interpretation was not totally unexpected. (If I had not found such confirmation of ambiguity I may not have had the confidence to promote my interpretation so strenuously here ... I'd have just slunk into the corner and pretended it was a temporary aberration
.)