Sublime

sleek-haired, brown-skinned, quick and deft in all her movements; she reminded me of a wren.

perhaps the agony of losing Patroclus has swallowed every lesser grief.

Isn’t that love’s highest aim? Not the interchange of two free minds, but a single, fused identity? I remembered seeing them on the beach the night I’d followed Patroclus down to the sea. This was what I’d glimpsed then.

His idea of female beauty was a woman so fat if you slapped her backside in the morning she’d still be jiggling when you got back home for dinner.

Achilles lives in the present. He remembers the past, not without regret, but increasingly without resentment.

It seemed in those few moments as if time had been suspended, that the wave curling over us might never break. Pure delusion, of course. The future was hurtling towards us, Achilles’s life measured now in days not weeks.

She thought of him as a source of knowledge rather than experience; a good, though not contemporary mind, a person rather than a man.

Protective colouration, she called her outfits. She looked like a dependable mother from a respectable neighbourhood such as ours. As she worked at the kitchen counter, she might have been demonstrating a jiffy recipe in Good Housekeeping magazine—something with tomato aspic, this being the mid-1950s, when tomato aspic was a food group.