Bokelskere.no

He was not his mother, nor was he his family, and one day he would leave, and would return only as a visitor.

His manner was careful, somewhat distant - this was a conversation he must have rehearsed in his thoughts.

Falling in love was revealing to her just how odd she was, how habitually sealed off in her everyday thoughts. Whenever Edward asked, How do you feel?, or, What are you thinking? she always made an awkward answer. Had it taken her this long to discover that she lacked some simple mental trick that everyone else had, a mechanism so ordinary that no one ever mentioned it, an immediate sensual connection to people and events, and to her own needs and desires? All these years she had lived in isolation within herself and, strangely, from herself, never wanting or daring to look back.

(...)she did not mind making her bed every morning - she had always done so - but she resented being asked at each breakfast whether she had.

The moment was rising to meet her, just as she was foolishly moving towards it. She was trapped in a game whose rules she could not question. She could not escape the logic that had her leading, or towing, Edward across the room towards the open door of the bedroom and the narrow four-poster bed and its smooth white cover.

How could he fail to love someone so strangely and warmly particular, so painfully honest and self-aware, whose every thought and emotion appeared naked to view, streaming like charged particles through her changing expressions and gestures?

She would trip over her feet if she thought she was being watched - she confided in Edward that she found it an ordeal to be in the street, walking towards a friend from a distance.

Edward laid his hand over Florence's and said, for the hundredth time that day, in a whisper, 'I love you,' and she said it straight back, and she truly meant it.

This was still the era - it would end later in that famous decade - when to be young was a social encumbrance, a mark of irrelevance, a faintly embarrassing condition for which marriage was the beginning of a cure.

"When I was younger everything seemed possible. Now nothing does."

She still didn't seem to know what to do with her hands or where to look, (...)

Emma had always envied those people who spoke their minds, who said what they felt without attention to social nicety. She had never been one of those people, but even so now felt an F-sound forming on her bottom lip.

She was having a wonderful time, she said, but she didn't like to laugh in company because she didn't like what laughter did to her face.

Then, without quite knowing how it happened, Dexter finds that he has fallen in love, and suddenly life is one long mini-break.

They sat in silence in the wreckage of the evening in front of two plates of unwanted food and she thought that she might cry.

Now there's a war in Europe and she has personally done absolutely nothing to stop it. Too busy shopping for furniture.

He is taken aback by this sudden rush of love he feels for Emma, and he decides to get in a cab to Earls Court and tell her how great she is, how he really, really loves her and how sexy she is if only she knew it and why not just do it, just see what happens, and if none of that works, even if they just sit up and talk, at least it will be better than being alone tonight. Whatever happens, he mustn't be alone...

These days the nights and mornings have a tendency to bleed into one another.

She suspects that she will never, ever dance in her bra in a room full of foam, and that's fine.

'I think you're amazing,' someone says to someone else, but it doesn't matter who, because they're all amazing really. People are amazing.