The Heat of the Day

Habit, of which passion must be wary, may all the same be the sweetest part of love.

She had one of those charming faces which, according to the angle from which you see them, look either melancholy or impertinent. Her eyes were grey; her trick of narrowing them made her seem to reflect, the greater part of the time, in the dusk of her second thoughts. With that mood, that touch of arriere pensee, went an uncertain, speaking set of lips.

His experiences and hers became harder and harder to tell apart; everything gathered behind them into a common memory - though singly each of them might, must, exist, decide, act; all things done alone came to be no more than a simulcra of behaviour: they waited to live again till they were together...Every love has a poetic relevance of its own...

That Sunday, from six o'clock in the evening, it was a Viennese orchestra that played.

They had met one another, at first not very often, throughout the heady autumn of the first London air raids. Never had a season been more felt; one bought the poetic sense of it with the sense of death. Out of mists of morning charred by the smoke from ruins each day rose to a height of unmisty glitter; between the last of sunset and first note of the siren the darkening glassy tenseness of evening was drawn fine. From the moment of waking you tasted the sweet autumn not less because of an acridity on the tongue and nostrils; and as the singed dust settled and smoke diluted you felt more and more called upon to observe daytime as a pure and curious holiday from fear. All through London the ropings-off of dangerous tracts of streets made islands of exalted if stricken silence, and people crowded against the ropes to admire the sunny emptiness on the other side. The diversion of traffic out of blocked main thoroughfares into byways, the unstopping phatasmagoric streaming of lorries, buses, vans, drays, taxis past modest windows and quiet doorways set up an overpowering sense of London’s organic power – somewhere there was a source from which heavy motion boiled, surged and, not to be damned up, force itself into new channels.

By the rules of fiction, with which life to be credible must comply, he was as a character "impossible" - each time they met, for instance, he showed no shred or trace of having been continuous since they last met.

Overhead, an enemy plane had been dragging, drumming slowly round in the pool of night, drawing up bursts of gunfire--nosing, pausing, turning, fascinated to the point for its intent. The barrage banged, coughed, retched; in here the lights in the mirrors rocked. Now down a shaft of anticipating silence the bomb swung whistling. With the shock of detonation, still to be heard, four walls of in here yawped in then bellied out; bottles danced on glass; a distortion ran through the view. The detonation dulled off into the cataracting roar of a split building: direct hit, somewhere else.

The restaurant was waning, indifferently relaxing its illusion: for the late-comers a private illusion took its place. Their table seemed to stand on their own carpet; they had a sensation of custom, sedateness, of being inside small walls, as though dining at home again after her journey. She told him about her Mount Morris solitary suppers, in the middle of the library, the rim of the tray just not touching the base of the lamp... the fire behind her back softly falling in on its own ash-no it had not been possible to feel lonely among those feeling things.

But for Roderick, on the bridge beside her, this moment had a quite different sense—some sort of assuagement or satisfaction at her having rested even so much of her as her hands, for however short a time, on even this bar of unknowing wood. His pity, speaking to her out of the stillness of his face, put her in awe of him, as of a greater sufferer than herself—no pity is ignorant, which is pity’s cost.

In you there may persist some spark of what's everywhere else gone out: who knows why else I've loved you? Through love you've lit me – don't quarrel now with which way the fire blows.

There can occur in lives a subsidence under the soil, so that, without the surface having been visibly broken, gradients alter, uprights cant a little out of the straight.

Everything ungirt, artless, ardent, urgent about Louie was to the fore: all over herself she gave the impression of twisted stockings.

Where they were concerned, the ban, the check, the caution as to all spending and most of all the expenditure of feeling restricted them. Wariness had driven away poetry: from hesitating to feel came the moment you no longer could.