Sublime

Their talking was like a river, always flowing, delirious

The sight of her coming towards him roused a kind of animal alertness in his body, but he could never be certain whether that was the instinct of predator or prey.

For was that all, she thought bleakly, that love ever was? Something that saved one from loneliness? A sort of insurance policy against not counting?

Easily, he slept; and as he slept, the woman in the photograph took her arm from the pastor’s waist, and crossed the parched lawn towards the camera. Her black skirts, thickly beaded at the hem, obscured the view of Bethesda; then her fine and muddied boots came over the frame, and were first set squarely on the table, then one by one on the floor:

There we were, close, intimate, sharers of a secret … We had to have some sort of physical correlation for our respective moods. Need and opportunity – the ingredients of all betrayals.

dovetailed:

Abruptly, and with unwelcome compassion for a woman he’d despised so cheerfully and for so long, he understood what loneliness had compelled Lorna to Bethesda’s door, and to all the church doors after it – recognised, in fact, her capacity to modify herself to please her company. Wasn’t he a different man to different men? It was among the least of