More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
‘That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But, it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it and think how different its course would have been. Pause, you who read this, and think for a long moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on that memorable day.’
‘My mum and dad are having it turned into wallpaper.’ She rolled it tightly, tapping the ends. ‘Laminated place mats. My mum’s having it tattooed across her back.’
Living in her University town felt like staying on at a party that everyone else had left,
Emma composing long, intense letters crammed with jokes and underlining, forced banter and barely concealed longing; two-thousand-word acts of love on air-mail paper. Letters, like compilation tapes, were really vehicles for unexpressed emotions and she was clearly putting far too much time and energy into them.
She shuddered and gave a long groan, then laughed, shaking her head as she methodically scratched out each line, cross-hatching on top of this until each word was obliterated. Soon there was so much ink that it had soaked through the paper.
Dexter could sit quietly and watch Emma Morley laughing or telling a story and feel absolutely sure that she was the finest person he knew. Sometimes he almost wanted to say this out loud, interrupt her and just tell her.
‘You could never bore me. You’re one in a million, Em.’
‘You know what I can’t understand? You have all these people telling you all the time how great you are, smart and funny and talented and all that, I mean endlessly, I’ve been telling you for years. So why don’t you believe it?
‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘but aren’t you the Girl from Ipanema?’ ‘No, I’m her auntie.’
‘Scooped quite low, isn’t it?’ he said, aware of his fingers at the base of her spine. ‘Good job I didn’t put it on backwards!’
but I thought about you, think about you, you and me. I mean I fancy you.’
Blackbirds are singing on Coldharbour Lane and he has the sensation, so vivid that it is almost an hallucination, that he is entirely hollow; empty, like an easter egg.
Sometimes, when it’s going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationery. The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of a bus tickets, on the wall of a cell. Emma is lost on anything less than 120gsm.
‘My hero,’ she says, looking up at him, and they both smile.
Sometimes I worry that you’re not very nice.
The fact is, if I don’t touch another human being tonight I think I actually might die.’
‘Do you realise that you are saving my life?’
life was pretty good here, with the blinds down in the middle of the afternoon, in the middle of the year, in the middle of the decade, close to the centre of the most exciting city on earth.
‘You’ve got drool on your moleskin.’
And it was at moments like this that she had to remind herself that she was in love with him, or had once been in love with him, a long time ago.
she persevered and thought My God, I’m turning into Ian.
They sat in silence in the wreckage of the evening in front of two plates of unwanted food and she thought that she might cry.
‘Like you always want to be somewhere else, with someone else.’
‘Well off you go,’ she said. ‘Go to your party. You’re rid of me now. You’re free.’
‘Dexter, I love you so much. So, so much, and I probably always will.’ Her lips touched his cheek. ‘I just don’t like you anymore. I’m sorry.’
‘Sometimes you are aware when your great moments are happening, and sometimes they rise from the past. Perhaps it’s the same with people.’
when I didn’t see you, I thought about you every day, I mean every day in some way or another—’ ‘Same here—’
He could feel her laughter against his chest, and at that moment he thought that there was no better feeling than making Emma Morley laugh.
Did you ever doubt me?’ There was a moment’s pause.
‘She philosophically noted dates as they came past in the revolution of the year; … her own birthday; and every other day individualized by incidents in which she had taken some share. She suddenly thought one afternoon, when looking in the glass at her fairness, that there was yet another date, of greater importance to her than those; that of her own death, when all these charms would have disappeared; a day which lay sly and unseen among all the other days of the year, giving no sign or sound when she annually passed over it; but not the less surely there. When was it?’
‘What do you think I’ve been doing for the last ten years?’
He put one hand lightly on the back of her neck, and simultaneously she placed one hand lightly on his hip, and they kissed in the street as all around them people hurried home in the summer light, and it was the sweetest kiss that either of them would ever know. This is where it all begins. Everything starts here, today. And then it was over.
