Love and Summer

People run away to be alone,' he said. Some people had to be alone.

But you didn't lose touch with a place when it wasn't there any more, you didn't lose touch with yourself as you were when you were part of it, with your childhood, with your simplicity then.

The more he asked about her childhood at Cloonhill the more Ellie loved her interrogator. No matter how strange he still sometimes seemed, she felt as if all her life she had known him. The past he talked about himself became another part of her: The games he had played alone, the untidy rooms of the house he described, the parties given, the pictures painted. Being with him in the woods at Lyre, where the air was cold and the trees imposed a gloomy darkness, or walking among the monks' graves, or being with him anywhere, telling or listening, was for Ellie more than friendship, or living, had ever been before.

I'm sorry.' She whispered, not hearing herself, not knowing what she was apologizing for, then knowing it was for everything. For being a bother with her regrets that weren't regrets, for her longings and her tears, because she had no courage, because she had come today and made it all worse.

God was never not there for you, wherever you where, however you were. Every minute of your day, every minute of your life. There for your comfort, there to lift from you the awful burden of your sins. Only confess, only speak to God with contrition in your heart: God asked no more than that.

She would be ashamed confessing it because it was silly, because all she had to do was to think of something else when he came into her mind. But now, when she tried to, she couldn't. She kept seeing him, standing against packets of Bird's jelly in the Cash and Carry, tins of mustard, Saxa salt. As if they meant something, they were stuck in her mind, as if they were more than they could possibly be, and she wondered if they would ever be the same again, if what she'd bought herself would be, the Brown and Polson's cornflour, Rinso. She wondered if she would be the same herself; if she was no longer - and would not be again - the person she was when she had gone to Mrs Connulty's funeral and for all the time before that. When he asked whose funeral it was it had been the beginning but she hadn't known. When Miss Connulty had drawn her attention to him in the Square she had realized. When he'd smiled in the Cash and Carry she'd known it too. She had been different already when she stood with him in the sunshine, when he offered her the cigarette and she shook her head.

He couldn’t have burned the books; he couldn’t have so casually destroyed the pages on which he had first encountered Miss Havisham and Mr Verloc and Gabriel Conroy and Edward Ashburnham and Heathcliff; where first he’d glimpsed Netherfield Park and Barchester.

small bathroom she drew on her nightdress again in order