It had taken him years to realize that this had not been crazy malevolence, but something quite unintended, which nevertheless held a powerful and destructive resonance. Gordon Macleod, roused from his bed by the sound of his wife’s lover, had merely, in that moment, and probably with no ulterior motive, fallen back on the private language he had shared with Susan. Shared? More than that – created. And which Susan had then brought into her relationship with him. Unthinkingly. You say ‘darling’, you say ‘my love’, you say ‘kiss me hardly’, you say ‘whatski?’, you say ‘my fine and feathered friend’, because those are the words which come to you at that moment. With no ulterior motive on her part either. And now he wondered if any of her turns of phrase, which had so beguiled him, had been her own. Perhaps only ‘We’re a played-out generation’, because it seemed unlikely that Gordon Macleod, in all his self-importance, believed that he and men of his age were played out.
— The Only Story (Julian Barnes), Loc. 2786–93