Ostensibility

I was listening to writer David Constantine talking about his short story Tea at the Midland, which has just won the National Short Story Competition. It's about a couple having tea in a hotel overlooking the beach at Morecambe, and they start to argue about a freize painted by Eric Gill, which is decorating the room.  They begin by bickering, "She had been so intact and absent," Constantine says, while, "He desired very violently to force her to attend and continue further and further in the thing that was harming them." Though still apparently disagreeing about the painting, the argument becomes more personal, more edgy. "You turn everything wrongly," he said.  "No," she answered, "I'm trying to think the way you seem to want me to think."

In the interview I heard,  Constantine explained that the story was about what he called ostensibility, when characters (and people in real life, painfully and with difficulty) use one subject as a means of talking about something else that they find hard to address.  In terms of fiction writing, I think it helps to make a scene more interesting: the reader absorbs one level of the conversation, perhaps before even realising that a second more tricky one exists; they have to work a little bit harder - always a bonus!

Another beautiful line from the story sprang out at me. Here, the writer is describing the view from the hotel window, with "...a troubled golden light flung down at all angles."  I think this is what using ostensiblity in your work can help to achieve...

 Where to now...?