Marjorie, Grace and me. How foolishly we loved.
Grace loved her Christie, arch-villain of a decade, and after that herself (and she is, as they say, her own worst enemy).
Marjorie loved and still loves her mother, who frequently forgot not just her name but her very existence.
I, Chloe, loved Oliver.
We all, at one time or other, loved Patrick Bates, and Marjorie still does, much good may it do her.
These days I hardly know what the word love means. My mother, I remember, once told me it was the force which keeps people revolving round each other, in fixed orbit, and at a precise distance, as the planets revolve around the sun; and the moon, that cold creature, around the earth.
My mother, poor dead soul, loved her employer, in secret, for twenty years, and he never once made physical love to her, so such a vision of love came easily to her. And it is certainly true that with the force which attracts us to other people comes a force which similarly repels – keeps us forever dancing and juggling in our inner spaces, like motes in a sunbeam, never quite close enough, always too near, circling the object of our affection, yearning for incorporation and yet dreading it.
I remember love’s enchantments. Of course I do. Sometimes something happens, like the sun across the garden in the morning, or a song, or a smell, or the touch of a hand – and the body remembers what love was like, and the soul lifts itself up. certain once again in the knowledge of its Creator; and the whole self trembles again in the memory of that elation, which once so transfigured our poor obsessed bodies, our poor possessed minds.
It did us no good.