Then Emma Mayhew dies, and everything that she thought or felt vanishes and is gone forever.
It’s in vain to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present. Charles Dickens, David Copperfield.
This, I thought, is why we have comfort zones, because they are comfortable. What can possibly be gained by leaving them?
While there was breath in my body, she would never lack sufficient AA batteries.
The truth is that my heart felt like a fist trying to punch its way though my rib-cage – not from the excitement of it all, though it was thrilling, but from a sense that finally, finally something good was about to happen to me. I felt the proximity of change, and I had wanted more than anything for something in my life to change. Is it still possible to feel like that, I wonder? Or does it only happen to us once?
He hadn’t been this nervous since the last disastrous night at the improv, and he firmly told himself to calm down as he blotted at the tablecloth, glancing upwards to see Emma wriggling out of her summer jacket, pushing her shoulders back and her chest forward in that way that women do without realising the ache they cause.
It had sometimes puzzled me why falling in love should be regarded as some wondrous event, accompanied by soaring strings, when it so often ended in humiliation, despair or acts of awful cruelty.
What about damp? What about flooding? Wouldn’t it make sense to have a little lawn or garden as a sort of buffer zone between the house and the water? But then it wouldn’t be Venice, said Connie’s voice in my head. Then it would be Staines.
Their lips touched now, mouths pursed tight, their eyes open, both of them stock still. The moment held, a kind of such glorious confusion.
Our biographies involve each other so intrinsically now that we’re both on nearly every page. We know the answers because we were there, and so curiosity becomes hard to maintain; replaced, I suppose, by nostalgia.
No.’ She took my hand. ‘Let’s make a French exit.’ ‘What’s a French exit?’ ‘It’s when you leave without saying goodbye.’ ‘I’ve never heard that before.’ A French exit; no thank you for having me, no I’ve had a lovely time. To just walk away, cool and aloof. I wondered if I could.
I considered the concept of “oversharing”, and what undersharing might be, and whether it was ever possible to settle on something in between.
The tourist’s paradox: how to find somewhere that’s free of people exactly like us.
Here people cycled with a reckless swagger, talking on the phone and eating breakfast.
What was the point of being successful in private?
Dads had favourite armchairs in which they sat like starship captains, issuing orders and receiving cups of tea and shouting at the news without fear of contradiction.
Maybe if you listen to Radio 4 enough from an early age, you just get educated subliminally.
But like my dad used to say, the crucial thing about an education is the opportunity that it brings, the doors it opens, because otherwise knowledge, in and of itself, is a blind alley, especially from where I’m sitting.
The problem with telling people that they can do anything they want to do is that it is objectively, factually inaccurate. Otherwise the whole world would just be ballet dancers and pop stars.’ ‘He doesn’t want to be a pop star, he wants to take photographs.’ ‘My point still stands. It is simply not true that you can achieve anything if you love it enough – it just isn’t. Life has limitations and the sooner he faces up to this fact then the better off he’ll be!
Perhaps all families have these fleeting moments when, without ever saying as much, they take each other in and think, we work and we fit together and we love each other, and if we can remain like this, all will be fine.
And there it was. She’d said it and now I could say it back, the most banal and brilliant exchange of dialogue, which we’d repeat, over and over, for just as long as we meant it.