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She always carried a book with her. A proper one, not a Kindle or an audiobook.
lol it couldn’t be me
Iona knew that the best way to persuade someone to talk is to stay quiet. People, when confronted with silence, feel the overwhelming urge to fill it with something. So she sipped her tea and waited.
Piers hated feeling beholden. He liked the satisfying simplicity of knowing that everything he was, everything he owned, was down to him, and him alone.
He made, Iona noticed, no mention of her at all. One of the many things Ed had to learn is that you must never shit on people on your way up the greasy pole, as they will only shit on you on your way back down.
“Darling, what is the point of being alive if you go through life unnoticed, without standing out and making waves?
“Good God. Since when have you wanted to fit in?” said Iona. “I can’t think of anything worse. My wife, Bea, says the whole point of life is to stand out, not to fit in.”
It occurred to him that they were each individual spokes of a wheel, but Iona was the center, the axis, and without her, the group of them had no purpose at all and very little in common.
“They want us to be small, so we have to stand tall. They want us to be invisible, so we have to be seen. They want us to be quiet, so we have to be heard. They want us to surrender, so we have to fight.”
“I prefer spending time with adults, actually,” said Martha. “Conversation with adults is easy. I know the rules. Shake hands with a firm, confident grip. Introduce yourself. Maintain eye contact. Avoid controversial topics and don’t swear. Simple. And they tend to really like me. Talking to other teenagers is way more complicated. For a start, you can’t just go up and talk to anyone. You have to know where they sit in the pecking order compared to you—and I’m almost always near the bottom. Then, even if you can speak to them, you have to sort of sidle into a conversation without looking too
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“No woman is anyone’s ‘other half.’ We are all entire people. Completely whole, and totally unique. But sometimes when you put two very different whole people together, a kind of magic, an alchemy, occurs. Bea said I was like eggs and sugar, and she was flour and butter, and when you mixed us together, we were more than just the combination of our ingredients, we were the whole damn cake. And the problem is, when you’re used to being a magnificent, mouthwatering cake, it’s really, really hard to get used to being just eggs and sugar once more.”
You need to fit your own oxygen mask before you can help anyone else fit theirs?”
Iona and Bea had always loved this magical time, just before sleep. They’d lie there, in the dark, holding hands and touching toes, exchanging snippets of their separate days, using their stories of backstage gossip at the theater and the latest goings-on at the magazine to knit their worlds closer together. Bea, who was an excellent mimic, could bring the whole of her current cast to life in the quiet of their bedroom, arguing and flirting with each other. “Night night, Lulu,” she said.
Your past experiences, she’d explained, are the foundations on which you build your future. Build them on pride, not shame. Denying your history leaves your house standing on sand, always in danger of collapsing.
He found himself identifying silver linings and counting blessings like a modern-day Pollyanna.
Forming a great friendship, like Harry and Sally’s, based on kindness, mutual respect, similar values, and a shared sense of humor—which something tells me is exactly what he has—that is really hard. It takes time and effort on both sides. But when you combine that with sexual attraction, that’s when you become the whole damn cake.
“The only way to be guaranteed of failure, dear boy, is not to try,” said Iona. “Love is the greatest risk of all, but a life without it is meaningless.”
“I love you, Iona,” said Bea. Iona wasn’t sure if Bea was talking to her, or to the memory of her, but right now it didn’t really matter. Either way, those words belonged to her, just as they’d always done, just as they always would. “Not as much as I love you, darling Bea,” she replied. “We’re the whole damn cake,” said Bea. “The whole damn cake,” echoed Iona.
