Nine Coaches Waiting

Perhaps loneliness had nothing to do with place or circumstance; perhaps it was in you; yourself. Perhaps, wherever you were, you took your little circle of loneliness with you...

I was thankful that nobody was there to meet me at the airport. We reached Paris just as the light was fading. It had been a soft, gray March day, with the smell of spring in the air. The wet tarmac glistened underfoot; over the airfield the sky looked very high, rinsed by the afternoon's rain to a pale clear blue. Little trails of soft cloud drifted in the wet wind, and a late sunbeam touched them with a fleeting underglow. Away beyond the airport buildings the telegraph wires swooped gleaming above the road where passing vehicles showed lights already.

I knew that I had turned my world back to cinders, sunk my lovely ship with my own stupid, wicked hands.

I'd live with loneliness a long time. That was something which was always there... one learns to keep it at bay, there are times when one even enjoys it - but there are also times when a desperate self-sufficiency doesn't quite suffice, and then the search for the anodyne begins... the radio, the dog, the shampoo, the stockings-to-wash, the tin soldier...

...kissing me with a violence that was terrifying and yet, somehow, the summit of all my tenderest dreams.

I'm very much to blame for not seeing it before, but who on earth goes about suspecting an impossible outlandish thing like murder? That's something that happens in books, not among people you know.

There was one thing that stood like stone among the music and moonfroth of the evening's gaieties. It was stupid, it was terrifying, it was wonderful, but it had happened and I could do nothing about it. For better or worse, I was head over ears in love...

I remember thinking with a queer detached portion of my mind that here was someone wringing her hands. One reads about it and one never sees it, and now here it was.

By the time that adorable steak and I had become one flesh I could have taken on the whole Valmy clan singlehanded.

The street lamps glowed like ripe oranges among the bare boughs. Below in the wet street their globes glimmered down and down, to drown in their own reflections.

The car whispered up the slope and nosed quietly out above the trees. He was driving like a careful insult.

Well, what was luck for if it was never to be tempted?

Damn it, the tiger played velvet paws with me, didn't he?

Funny, one somehow imagines her snuffing quietly out now, the way the moon would if the sun vanished.

I'd settle for what you had to give

One always got the same shock of recognition and delight when someone's words swam up to meet a thought or name a picture.

It was as if the past, till then so longed after, so lived over, had slipped off my shoulders like a burden. The future was still hidden, somewhere in the lights that made a yellow blur in the sky beyond the end of the dark street. Here between the two I waited, and for the first time saw both clearly.... I had made myself a stranger in England, not only bereaved, but miserably dépaysée, drifting with no clear aim, resenting the life I had been thrust into with such tragic brutality; I had refused to adapt myself to it and make myself a place there, behaving like the spoiled child who, because he cannot have the best cake, refuses to eat at all. I had waited for life to offer itself back to me on the old terms. Well, it wasn't going to.

The boredom and annoyance that shut down over it were humiliatingly plain to see. I could have slapped her for it.

His voice was quite flat, dull, almost. 'You were prepared to take chances - once.' 'Myself, yes. But this was Philippe. I had no right to take a chance on Philippe. I didn't dare. He was my charge - my duty.' The miserable words sounded priggish and unutterably absurd. 'I - I was all he had. Besides that, it couldn't be allowed to matter.' 'What couldn't.' 'That you were all I had.

to talk to Léon about it, I can see