Mother's Milk

Enjoying reading Mother's Milk by Edward St. Aubyn - the passage below is a four year old, Robert, considering his relationship with his mother, and that of his baby brother.

"Robert imagined his mother talking to him when he had been sealed up in her womb. Of course he wouldn't have known what her blunted syllables were meant to mean, but he was sure he would have felt a current flowing between them, the contraction of a fear, the stretch of an intention. Thomas was still close to those transfusions of feeling; Robert was getting explanations instead. Thomas still knew how to understand the silent language which Robert had almost lost as the wild margins of his mind fell under the sway of the verbal empire".