Now ring that bloke of yours to tell him you’re staying out all night, then have another drink. In fact, have six. It would please me no end to see you get hammered on Alicia’s father’s bill.” And so I did.
There was only so much news you could digest in one day.
No, it was the livid red lines scoring Will’s wrists, the long, jagged scars that couldn’t be disguised, no matter how swiftly Nathan pulled down Will’s sleeves.
As logic went, it was pretty impressive. I could tell because Mum’s mouth was working like someone feeling a loose tooth, but she couldn’t come up with any reason why Lily was wrong.
I hadn’t thought that as well as the obvious fears about money, and your future, losing your job would make you feel inadequate, and a bit useless. That it would be harder to get up in the morning then when you were rudely shocked into consciousness by the alarm. That you might miss the people you worked with, no matter how little you had in common with them. Or even that you might find yourself searching for familiar faces as you walked the high street.
Do you think they vacuum every day, like we do?
Sometimes I felt as if we were all wading around in grief, reluctant to admit to others how far we were waving or drowning.
She is probably slightly too old to pout, but they’ve been going out a short enough time for it still to be cute.
MOVING ON means we have to protect ourseves.
I’ve had a very good life, Louisa. I loved my job and I worked with some wonderful people. I traveled to Paris, Milan, Berlin, London, far more than most women my age... I had my beautiful apartment and some excellent friends. You mustn’t worry about me. All this nonsense about women having it all. We never could and we never shall. Women always have to make difficult choices. But there is a great consolation in simply doing something you love.
Some mistakes have greater consequences then others. You don’t have to let one mistake define you.
None of us lasts forever, do we? If I’m honest, seeing her like that was an unwelcome reminder of my own mortality. Of what I had been. Of what we all must become.
He kissed her, and knew he was trying to tell her the depth of how he felt. Even as he lost himself in her, felt her hair sweep across his face, his chest, her lips meet his skin, her fingers, he understood that there were people for whom one other was their missing part.
He had blown in with the soft breezes of a wider world, and it was weirdly seductive.
He talked to her in the way that people tell lifelong secrets to fellow passengers in railway carriages: an unburdened intimacy, resting on the unspoken understanding that they were unlikely to meet again.
We see what we want to see, after all, especially when blinded by physical attraction.
They called each other “baby” so often that I occasionally wondered if they had forgotten each other’s names.
To be the recipient of such hate, without the prospect of a word of comfort from those who loved you. The way Margery had isolated herself made Alice want to weep. It was like an animal that deliberately takes itself off somewhere solitary before it dies.
And I kissed him until reason seeped out through my pores and I became a living pulse, conscious only of what I wanted to do to him.
And then Will got pneumonia.