Carol

by Claire Morgan

But Therese loved it, because she knew this was exactly what Carol would always do, be thinking of something else and let the milk boil.

I think friendships are the result of certain needs that can be completely hidden from both people, sometimes hidden forever.’

‘But you have to make allowances for people’s perversities, things that don’t make much sense.’

She remembered the detective’s face and the barely legible expression that she realized now was malice. It was malice she had seen in his smile, even as he said he was on no side, and she could feel in him a desire that was actually personal to separate them, because he knew they were together. She had seen just now what she had only sensed before, that the whole world was ready to be their enemy, and suddenly what she and Carol had together seemed no longer love or anything happy but a monster between them, with each of them caught in a fist.

Prior to this book, homosexuals male and female in American novels had had to pay for their deviation by cutting their wrists, drowning themselves in a swimming pool, or by switching to heterosexuality (so it was stated), or by collapsing – alone and miserable and shunned – into a depression equal to hell.