The Story

Anticipation is the greater part of pleasure, my little love.

And sometimes that face, in stillness when he listened to me playing, with the heavy eyelids folded over eyes that always disturbed me by their absolute absence of light, seemed to me like a mask, as if his real face, the face that truly reflected all the life he had led in the world before he met me, before, even, I was born, as though that face lay underneath this mask. Or else, elsewhere. As though he had laid by the face in which he had lived for so long in order to offer my youth a face unsigned by the years.

He had loved to surprise me in my abstracted solitude at the piano. He would tell them not to announce him, then soundlessly open the door and softly creep up behind me with his bouquet of hot-house flowers or his box of marrons glacés, lay his offering upon the keys and clasp his hands over my eyes as I was lost in a Debussy prelude.

It was about ten in the morning, an ordinary London day, neither hot nor cold nor clear nor clouded nor wet nor fine.

She stood smiling, accustomed to men running to wait on her, enjoying them enjoying her.

Oh, it’s so easy to be sweet to people before you love them.

I seem to have spent most of my time like a plant in a cupboard. Now and again, when the sun shone, a careless hand thrust me out on to the window-sill, and a careless hand whipped me in again – and that was all. But what happened in the darkness – I wonder?

Love is, of course, a central preoccupation of literature, but a love story is so often a story of loss, or indeed a story of life.

They sniffed the air, which was full of a warm mushroom smell, and a damp moss smell, and a sap smell, and a distant hint of dead ashes.

Some stories had such a strong effect on me that I had to put a collection down and do something different with the rest of my day