In order to avoid the actual significance of a statement, people are taken to mean exactly what they say. Language is deployed to conceal or ignore the implications of what the characters have said. There is no hyperbole and no understatement. When Horace understands that his sons may have wanted him to fall into the chasm, there follows the sort of explicit confrontation that could be written by almost no one but Compton-Burnett. Your being different for a little while has not altered all that went before.
Nothing can alter it.
If it had not been for Mother, we would rather have been dead. It was feeling like that so often, that made us think dying an ordinary thing. If we can begin to express our feelings, we are taught, we can begin to master them. Perhaps in their endless conversations, Compton-Burnett's characters are striving for a measure of healing. But for Compton-Burnett herself, who believes this attempt to be doomed, words are chief among the instruments of torture available to the civilized, and few have explored their use with such bitter candor.